Category: Protecting Yourself and Others

An Ironic Turn of Events

A scumbag broke into somebody’s home then called 911 because he feared the homeowner had a gun:

Chapek locked himself in the bathroom and made an emergency call, police said. He said he had broken into the house, the owner had come home, and that he was concerned the owner might have a gun.

That just puts a smile on my face. One benefit of an armed society as we have in America is the fact you can’t know whether or not somebody has a gun. If the thug in this story knew for sure the homeowner was unarmed he may have decided to attack him instead of barricading himself in a bathroom and calling 911. I’m also impressed with the following fact:

Police with dogs took Chapek, 24, into custody “without incident,” they said. He was booked for criminal trespass.

They did not say if the homeowner did in fact have a gun.

The police didn’t report if the homeowner had a gun. The problem with reporting if the homeowner had a gun is the fact that, if identified, the homeowner could become a target for thiefs wanting to steal guns.

Why I Carry

I carry a gun to give myself a better chance of survival in a self-defense situation. The thing most people fail to realize is self-defense situations can occur anywhere and any time. Take for instance the recent shooting at a Bloomington IHOP:

Three men from Minneapolis were shot in the parking lot of a Bloomington restaurant early Monday morning and authorities are seeking suspects.

I’m not saying those three people would be fine if they had firearms but this is certainly a situation where having a firearm would be a good option. The thing is you never know when bad people will intersect with your life. Even if you are unwilling or unable to carry a firearm you should have a plan of some sort.

The world isn’t all sunshine and lollipops and it’s ignorant to believe it is. Be prepared and have an idea of what you will do if you find yourself in a bad situation.

A Fair Fight

One thing that is sometimes heard are complains that using a weapon greater than your opponent isn’t fair. For instance if somebody comes at you with a baseball bat and you end up shooting them some people will call you a pussy because you didn’t “fight fair.” To me the concept of a fair fight is alright amongst gentlemen but has no purpose in a self-defense situation.

A self-defense situation implies you’re defending yourself from an aggressor who means to cause you harm. The amount of harm they mean to cause you becomes irrelevant right away because you have no way of guaranteeing your aggressor will stop at a defined point. For instance if somebody says they’re going to beat you until you’re bloody and leave you can’t guarantee your aggressor is actually going to stop when you’re bleeding. Thus self-defense situations much be treated with the assumption that your attacker means to kill you.

By this definition self-defense situations are life or death situations. When your life is on the line you should do everything you can to preserve it and this means fighting dirty. Your goal should first be avoidance of conflict. Anytime there is conflict there is no way to know you’ll walk away so if at all possible you should avoid getting into a self-defense situation. Of course there are times when such a situation is not avoidable as fighting isn’t started over heated words but by somebody threatening your life outright. Your goal, if avoidance is impossible, should be to have greater force available to you than your attacker.

This is the reason many people in the United States legally carry firearms and have firearms at home for defense. In this day and age firearms are the best weapons available for most civilians. It’s unlikely you’ll be facing off against an aggressor who has more than a firearm at their disposal but it is likely your attacker will have less. The saying “don’t bring a knife to a gun fight” rings true. If your attacker has greater force available to them it tips the scales in their favor. If your attacker has a gun and all you have are your bare hands then the scale is tipped heavily against you. You want that scale tipped to your favor as much as possible.

When carried a firearm gives its owner an increase in the amount of force available to them ensuring the scale is never tipped completely in the direction of the criminal. It gives the owner an option in a life or death situation. The beauty of carrying a firearm is the fact you don’t have to employ it if the situation doesn’t call for it. Firearms are not magical items that jump out of their holster and shoot your aggressor regardless of what the anti-gunners want you to believe. If somebody attacks you and you don’t believe the situation warrants the use of deadly force then you do not need to draw your firearm. If you find yourself in a situation that warrants deadly force the firearm is available to you. Thus the firearm becomes an option, nothing more or less.

This is why owning a firearm for defensive purposes is a good idea it increase your options and allows you to tip the scale back towards your favor. Self-defense situations are about survival. When your life is on the line the idea of a fair fight should be the first thing to go. Remember that your life is more valuable than the life of that thug who is trying to use violence to force you into complying with their demands.

Facebook Turns on HTTPS

Just to let everybody know it seems Facebook has finally activated the option of turning on HTTPS. HTTPS encrypts the traffic between your computer and Facebook making it more difficult to eavesdrop on your traffic (useful for example if you actually use open Wi-Fi access points). You should go to your settings and enable this right away.

Of course if you’re using HTTPS Everywhere you don’t have to worry about manually enabling this Facebook feature. Or you could add Facebook to NoScript’s force HTTPS section.

Another Demonstration of Why You Can’t Rely on the Police

Jay over at MArooned posted yet another example of why you can’t rely on the police to protect your life. A woman had to resort to defending herself with a vacuum while she waited 35 minutes for the police to arrive:

A Williamson County woman fought off an intruder with a vacuum cleaner. She was desperate for help, waiting for almost 35 minutes for law enforcement to arrive.

The single mom described that 35 minutes like the scene of a horror movie as she watched a man walk from windows to doors doing anything to break in to her home.

Yes it took 35 minutes for the police to finally arrive at her home. This is why you should always have a plan for defending yourself. Obviously I recommend using the best tool for the job which is a firearm but that’s not the only means of defense at your disposal.

Your life is far more valuable than the life of some scumbag who is willing to bring harm against your person. People out there clamoring for laws restricting firearms are only trying to make it more difficult for you to obtain the best tool to defend the most important thing you have, your life. When these same people claim you should just call the police remember that the police are not legally obligated to protect you and can’t instantly teleport to your location. There will always be travel time required for the police to get to your location and an officer must be available to send to your aid. You need to have a plan to fend for yourself until the police arrive (if they arrive).

And the Award for Biggest Bad Ass of the Year Goes To

Imagine you’re a rancher in Mexico who’s land is coveted by the local drug lords. Now imagine those very thugs came do your ranch and gave you 24 hours to vacate. What would you do? If you answered by saying you’d leave the property then you’re not nearly awesome enough to even continue reading this post. If you answered that you’d setup weapons at your windows and take down as many of those fucks as you could then you’ be Alejo Garza Tamez, a complete and total bad ass:

He defended his home like it was the Alamo.

A 77-year-old rancher gave drug-cartel thugs the fight of their lives when they tried to take possession of his sprawling property in northern Mexico, becoming a folk hero in a region ravaged by violence.

Alejo Garza Tamez turned his humble farmhouse into a fortress for his last stand — lining up his numerous hunting rifles in windows and doorways — after receiving an ultimatum on Nov. 13 from the drug-gang guerrillas to vacate within 24 hours or die.

The lionhearted rancher was ready when two truckloads of heavily armed gang members returned the next morning.

Obviously this was a man not to be fucked with. Hell the only way those thugs were able to finally end the firefight was to lob grenades into his home:

He shot so fast and furiously that the confused cartel assumed there were several people inside. Dropping their assault rifles, the thugs lobbed hand grenades into the ranch house until the shooting stopped.

When the Mexican army finally showed up after the gunfight, they found four dead and two injured gang members piled in a heap outside the shelled, bullet-pocked farmhouse.

Inside, amid a pile of rubble, was the lifeless, bullet-riddled Garza, two weapons at his side.

It’s also nice to see that the Mexican army will eventually show up… after all the shooting has concluded of course. It’s sad to see a man as bad ass as Mr. Tamez go but by God he went down in a blaze of glory. Do not give into evil would be the best phrase here.

Firesheep

Do you log into services such as Facebook from public Wi-Fi hot spots? Are you logging into these services without forcing them to use HTTPS? Well I’ve got bad news for you, there is a Firefox plugin called Firesheep.

What is Firesheep? Well it’s a Firefox plugin that listens to Wi-Fi traffic and looks for authentication cookies for known services. When you log into Facebook an object called a cookie is sent from Facebook’s server to your computer. The Facebook server knows this cookie was sent to you and hence it is used by your computer to authenticate yourself to Facebook when you’re interacting with the website. Here’s the problem, that cookie isn’t sent through a secure tunnel (HTTPS) unless you using something like HTTPS Everywhere or NoScript to force it.

Without the cookie being sent through a secure tunnel anybody listening to your network traffic can grab that cookie. With that cookie they can log onto your account as Facebook only asks for the cookie as proof that you are you. Open Wi-Fi hot spots (such as those at Starbucks) use no encryption meaning everything you sent and receive that isn’t in a secure tunnel can be seen by anybody with a Wi-Fi card.

Scenario time! Let’s say you go to Starbucks and log onto your Facebook account on their free and open Wi-Fi hot spot. The guy sitting across from you has his laptop open and is running Firesheep. When you log in he obtains your cookie and then logs onto your Facebook account, changes your e-mail and password, and starts doing all sorts of malicious shit to your friends. This is what happens ladies and gentlemen when you use unsecured Wi-Fi access points. Don’t do it! If you’re going to be in a situation where you know you’ll be required to use an unsecured Wi-Fi hot spot (such as a hotel) use a VPN service (quite a while ago I reviewed HotSpotVPN which is one of those services).

Firesheep was created to raise awareness of this problem. If you head over to this link you can download a slide show used by the creator of Firesheep for a presentation at Toorcon.

A Case for Carry in National Parks

OK this title is misleading. I really should have titled it a case of why you should use our new law to carry a firearm in national parks. A man hiking in Olympic National Park was killed by a mountain goat recently:

Mr Boardman tried to shoo the animal away but it instead attacked him. After goring the hiker the goat stood over him, and had to be pelted with rocks by a ranger before finally moving away.

We have to remember humans are frail being compare to most wild animals; in a fair fight we rarely win. When hiking in the mountains, trudging through the jungle, or walking through the woods we are at the mercy of the animals who live there. As a race our dominating feature has never been our brute strength but our ability to construct and utilize tools. Although anti-gunners will try to convince you otherwise, a gun is a tool and it would have been the best object to have in this situation.

If you are able to legally carry a gun while out and about you should. Even in a nice neighborhood where you are 100% there is never ever crime (we in the gun community call this ignorance) a gun will give you means to protect yourself against four legged predators as much as two legged ones. You never know when a violence dog will make it’s way into your fine gated community.

And for those critics who claim there is absolutely no reason to carry a gun in national parks I urge you to read this linked article and tell me that after.

I Thought 1984 was 26 Years Ago

A student found a rather interesting thing attached to his car a short while back, an FBI GPS tracking device. Of course being a smart guy he posted photos of it online. Well it seems the FBI wants their stuff back:

It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

You know the second I found it I would have destroyed it and claimed I didn’t know it was federal property. “What? It was an FBI tracking device? Oh, I’m sorry I destroyed it as it was attached to my vehicle and I had no idea what it was. Maybe you should leave a phone number to contact on them or something.” I also love how the FBI confirmed everything by not saying anything

An FBI spokesman wouldn’t acknowledge that the device belonged to the agency or that agents appeared at Afifi’s house.

“I can’t really tell you much about it, because it’s still an ongoing investigation,” said spokesman Pete Lee, who works in the agency’s San Francisco headquarters.

So it’s an ongoing investigation meaning… there’s an investigation into this guy.

If you find anything attached to your vehicle that you didn’t specifically put there I recommend that item’s destruction.

Being Stupid Costs You

Engadget has a story about Best Buy charging customers $30.00 to apply firmware updates to PS3s. Of course if you read the comments people are claiming this is extorting customers’ ignorance. That may be true but honestly I think it’s just further proof that being stupid will cost you money.

Applying a firmware update to a PS3 is dead simple, but some people are ignorant of that. That ignorance just cost them $30.00 and hopefully they’ll learn a lesson and figure out how to update their own firmware.

Being stupid is costly so do yourself a favor and learn everything you can.