Tag: Logic an Anti-Gunner’s Worst Nightmare

An Armed Society Is A Polite Society

Muslims are a minority in the United States. Anti-Muslim sentiments are also at a high. Those two points create the perfect conditions for anti-Muslim bigots to act brave and mighty. Heinlein wrote, “An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” From this one can infer that an unarmed society is an impolite society. Manners are bad when one faces no consequences for their actions.

A group of anti-Muslim bigots planned to hold a protest at a mosque in Dallas. I’m sure the participants had crusader-like visions of appearing brave and powerful compared to the infidels they planned to protest. Especially since they were brining weapons and likely assume their targets were going to be unarmed. But things didn’t turn out quite as they expected:

A few hundred South Dallas residents, mostly black, flooded Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to oppose a planned demonstration by a mostly white group that routinely protests outside mosques.

Both sides were armed.

Dallas police stood guard on a funeral home’s roof as black counterprotesters swarmed the parking lot of Eva’s House of Bar-B-Q, vowing to defend their streets and chanting “black power.”

“This is what they fear — the black man,” said activist Olinka Green. “This is what America fears.”

The anti-mosque group showed up in camouflage, carrying guns and an American flag, FOX 4 reported. They left soon after and the protests ended without incident.

Instead of protesting an unarmed group of Muslims the protesters found themselves up against armed counterprotesters. As is usual in case when two equally armed but disagreeing groups come into contact, the conflict ended peacefully. The protesters, seeing their perceived advantage vanish, decided to withdraw rather than risk a conflict with a group that could put up an effective resistance. In effect the protesters saw that they might actually have to back up their actions with their lives and decided it would be smarter to take the polite route than to continue their impolite actions.

Time and time again history has shown us what happens when one group enjoys overwhelming force over another: genocide. I advocate that everybody wanting to bear arms do so. But I especially encourage members of oppressed groups to bear arms. The biggest enabler of oppression is force disparity. This is why oppressors always try to disarm their intended victims. After the Civil War the State passed arms control laws specifically aimed at disarmed newly freed blacks. In the aftermath of the 1857 Indian rebellion Britain passed weapon control laws aimed at disarming Indians. When the Third Reich came to power it passed laws expressly forbid Jews from owning firearms. But without force disparity oppression is much more costly to perpetrate. With the risks of oppressing a target group increased most would-be oppressors tend to keep their actions to mere words whispered behind closed doors.

With Special Badges Comes Special Privileges

Becoming a police officer is a pretty sweet gig. You don’t need to be intelligent. In fact, being intelligent can prohibit you from becoming a police officer. It’s not an especially dangerous. And you get to enjoy special privileges:

This week, a Tarrant County judge sentenced cop watcher Kenny Lovett to 90 days in jail after a jury determined he interfered with a high-risk traffic stop in Arlington in 2015.

“It’s a safety issue first and foremost,” said Melinda Westmoreland, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted Lovett’s case.

On that day, Lovett and several other cop watchers pulled over to film Arlington police making a traffic stop.
Not long after they began filming, two officers approached them, concerned about the holsters some the cop watchers were also carrying. The exchange was caught on video.

“I need you to go back [to your vehicle] and put your weapons up if you’re armed,” the officer says in the recording. “Feel free to record after that.”

Two of cop watchers did what the officers told them to do. Lovett, who was carrying a black powder pistol, refused. He was then led away in handcuffs and charged with interfering with public duties and disorderly conduct.

When you interact with a police officer it’s OK for them to demand you to disarm but it’s not OK for you to demand they disarm. Considering the number of officers being killed is going down while the number of people being killed by cops is going up I think it would be fair to demand officers disarm when interacting with members of the public.

Power is easily abused by those who have it. By operating on a higher level than the general public law enforcement officers are in a position to abuse power. If we want to reduce power abuse by law enforcers they need to operate on the same level as the rest of us. That means they should fall under the same scrutiny when using force, being surveilled, and interacting with other individuals as every other person in society. If an officer can be armed while interacting with the general public then people keeping officers accountable by filming police interactions should be allowed to be armed as well.

We Interrupt Your Daily Grind To Bring You The Bloody Obvious

Gun control advocates have a laser like focus on guns, which causes them to lose sight of the actual issue of violence. This is most obvious when they declare victory because another weapon has started to be used common:

NEW YORK (FOX5NY) – New York mayor Bill de Blasio is trying to put a positive spin on a recent rash of stabbings and slashings across the city. He credits the NYPD taking guns off of the street.

“I’m not a criminologist but I can safely say that guns are being taken off the street in an unprecedented way. Some people, unfortunately, are turning to a different weapon,” de Blasio says.

[…]

The mayor claims that since there are so many fewer guns on the street, officers can now focus on criminals using knives and razors.

To be entirely honest I would much rather be shot than attacked with a knife. Assuming you survive, being shot tends to be more easily remedied than being slashed and stabbed.

Several things are worth noting with this story though. First, there is no evidence that New York’s gun control laws are the cause for the uptick in stabbings. Bill de Blasio is just declaring it so but offers no evidence to support his claim. Second, he doesn’t mention if shootings have gone down in addition to stabbings increasing. This is important to determine because it could be that shootings have remained the same and stabbings have simply increased. Third, even if we assume shooting are down the actual problem of violent crime obviously remains. Whether people are shot or stabbed doesn’t make a difference. Either way people are still being injured or killed. Four, and this is one that is usually overlooked, are the efforts of law enforcers to stop out violent crime creating more violent crime? It’s pretty hard to claim violence crime is down in law enforcers are injuring and killing people are a higher rate to enforce weapon prohibitions.

Here is something we do know though. Acquiring a carry permit in New York City is very difficult, which means the people operating within the letter of the law are at a severe disadvantage. If somebody attacks them with either a gun or a knife they are handicapped as far as self-defense goes.

ATF Says Certain Medical Patients Prohibited From Owing Firearms

Should people who require certain medications lose the right to self-defense? According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) they should:

What has forged this quirky convergence of advocacy — tokers, meet shooters — is a September letter from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives saying it is illegal for medical-marijuana patients to own firearms.

Everybody who buys a gun must fill out ATF Form 4473, which asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

Answer yes, and you don’t get the gun. Falsely answer no, and you’ve just committed a crime.

The ATF’s letter, sent out Sept. 21, clarifies that the bureau includes medical-marijuana patients in that group of prohibited buyers because their marijuana use is inherently illegal federally.

The absurdity, of course, is that the 4473 form asks if you are an unlawful user. People who have a medical exemption card are lawfully using cannabis and therefore should not be prohibited by law.

More importantly though, the fact that somebody can lose the right to defend themselves because they need cannabis is ridiculous. Cannabis is far safer than most other drugs including alcohol (which you can use and still legally own a firearm), which is responsible for a great deal of poor life choices.

There’s no valid reason to prohibit somebody from owning firearms just because they use certain drugs. So long as people don’t use their firearms while under the influence of drugs there is no real danger. And many drugs have no side effects that make firearm usage dangerous to the users or bystanders.

This is yet another example of a policy put forth by the ATF that demonstrates the agency is interested in restricting firearm ownership.

Getting Off The No-Fly List

With the rekindled excitement for prohibition people on the government’s terrorist watch lists from purchasing firearms it’s a good time to review how terrible of an idea the lists themselves are. The lists and the criteria for appearing on them are secret so there is no due process involved. We know approximately 40 percent of the names on the lists aren’t affiliated with any known terrorist organization. To make matters even worse there’s no way to know whether you’re on the lists until you try to fly and end up being detained and interrogated for hours. And once you’re on the lists getting off of them is no simple matter:

Kadura, an American citizen, was placed on the federal government’s no-fly list in 2012. Since then, in addition to being prevented from boarding flights, he has been detained, interrogated, and harassed at border crossings and pressured by authorities to become a government informant.

yaseen Yaseen Kadura Photo: Courtesy of Yaseen KaduraThe 25-year-old American medical student, who was raised in Indiana, has spent the last three years trying to coax information out of the government and clear his name. Last year, he sued in federal court over his watchlisting, joining four other Muslim Americans represented by lawyers from the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. That case was still ongoing, when, this past September, Kadura suddenly received a brief, terse letter from the government indicating that he was no longer on the list and could board a plane without impediment.

Since 2012 Kadura hasn’t been able to fly. He finally found his ability to fly restored but there is no indication of why. There was no known process for him to file an appeal. He initiated a lawsuit, which hadn’t concluded when his ability to fly was restored so no information of how one might restore their privileges was drawn out during the hearing. Like getting on the list, getting off of the list is a black box.

Proponents of barring people on the terrorist watch lists from purchasing firearms like to say, “If you can’t fly, you shouldn’t be able to own a gun.” It’s idiocy that ignored the fact that nobody on the terrorist watch lists should be prohibited from flying since there is no due process involved in appearing on the lists nor is there a known way of getting remove.

Always Fight Back

There’s a lot of bad self-defense advice out there but very little of it is as harmful as telling women they shouldn’t defend themselves. I can only imagine this advice was started by some misogynist piece of shit who viewed women as such lesser creatures that they couldn’t possibly defend themselves against a big, strong man such as himself. It’s likely this asshole also had fantasies about teaching any woman who resisted him a lesson so believed it would be safer for women being attacked to just lie back and think of England.

However this crap started it has cumulated in to terrible, harmful advice such as telling women to “be realistic” about their ability to protect themselves, which is a euphemism for telling women they’re incapable of defending themselves against big, strong men so they can only resort to pissing themselves to dissuade rapists.

The fact is women who defend themselves generally fare better than those who don’t:

As a matter of fact, research conducted since the 70ies has consistently shown that fighting back is actually the most effective strategy to thwart sexual assaults.

Studies such as Kleck & Tark (2005) or Reekie & Wilson (1993) or Ullman & Knight (1992), indeed show that women who respond with physical and verbal resistance to the offender’s violent attack significantly reduce the probability that a rape would be completed.

In the 1990’s, German commissioner Susanne Paul examined 522 cases of rapes and attempted rapes to see whether fighting back was a good strategy. Result: fighting back had a 85% success rate.

Irène Zeilinger, director of the NGO Garance, says that data they collect indicate a 90% success rate (“Ladies, against assaults nothing match fighting“).

Fighting back may not work 100% of the time (nothing does) but it works most of the time.

Criminals, by and large, are opportunists. They seek to fulfill their wants with the least amount of effort possible. Like any predatory animal they try to identify the weakest prey. That means they seek the unaware, the physically unimposing, and the ones unwilling to fight back. When a criminal discovers their prey is very much willing to fight back they often disengage.

If you’re attacked always fight back and give yourself as much advantages as you can. Take some self-defense courses or better yet dedicate yourself to the study of a martial art. And if at all possible carry a weapon. I highly advise carrying a firearm since they are the most effective tools for self-defense but if you’re unwilling or unable to do that there are alternatives.

A Smaller Taser

It’s hard to argue against handguns being the most effective self-defense tool for the average person but there are many people, either through personal conviction (which is perfectly acceptable) or legal restraints (which is entirely unacceptable), that cannot carry one. I appreciate the market providing in-between solutions that improve an individual’s ability to defend themselves but don’t go as far as a firearm. Taser, which primarily targets law enforcement agencies, has announced a new Taser that is aimed at the civilian market. Overall I think it’s a pretty decent idea:

Additionally, the Pulse comes with rechargeable batteries, two live Taser cartridges, laser-assisted targeting and a 15-foot range. Most importantly, Taser says that if you end up using it for self-defense and leave it at the scene, the device will be replaced for free.

While the $399.00 price tag seems a bit steep for me since it’s approaching real handgun territory the free replacement program makes it a bit more palatable. In fact the free replacement program may be the best feature of this weapon. It gives a person who was just subjected to a self-defense situation one less thing to worry about. As far as size goes it’s in the compact handgun territory, which I believe is an excellent size for something aimed at regular people.

I hope we begin seeing more in-between self-defense tools aimed at regular individuals. They gives people who cannot or will not carry a firearm an option other than dying. And that increases the overall cost of committing violence.

The Great American Outdoor Show Will Be Safer This Year

There has been some disagreement between the City of Harrisburg and the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA is hosting its Great American Outdoor Show in the city. In addition to brining a good deal of money to local businesses the NRA is also making a donation to the Civil War Museum. However, the mayor of Harrisburg wants to shutdown the museum so he’s a bit peeved that the cash is going there instead of his gang in blue. Now the mayor wants to exact revenge:

Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse says Harrisburg City Police will not staff the upcoming gun show, which is sponsored by the NRA.

In the past, the city staffed officers and the NRA made a donation to Harrisburg City Police in return. In 2015, that donation was $50,000.

This year, Papenfuse says the NRA is donating money and most of it is going to the Civil war Museum, which the mayor wants to close.

And in so doing he inadvertently made the event safer. Without the local gang in blue meddling with the event the attendees don’t have to worry about being extorted, assaulted, or kidnapped.

So the secret to hosting a safe event in Harrisburg is to make a donation to the local Civil War Museum instead of the gang in blue.

Centralized Failure

People have been using the attacks in Cologne to argue in favor of stronger border controls because, you know, the attacks must have been caused by immigrants and not the usual drunken debauchery that accompanies New Year’s Eve. Such arguments miss the point (well they miss several points but I’ll only address the biggest one here), which is the danger of centralization. It has been revealed that the police in Cologne were being overwhelmed with reports:

An internal police report reveals officers “could not cope” with the volume of attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, German media say.

Women were “forced to run the gauntlet” through gangs of drunken and aggressive men outside the station, it said.

Police say the number of reported crimes from the incident has risen to 121, about three-quarters of which involve sexual assault.

[…]

“The task forces could not cope with all the events, assaults, and crimes – there were just too many happening at the same time,” the senior officer concluded.

Cologne police chief Wolfgang Albers has rejected claims teams were understaffed, insisting “we were well prepared”.

But he described what happened as “a completely new dimension of crime”.

I’ve discussed the weaknesses inherent in centralized security before. In this case it appears the central point of failure, relying on the police for security, was a major factor in these attacks getting as out of hand as they did. As the number of attacks increased the inability of the police to effectively respond became more obvious so the perceived risk of perpetuating additional attacks decreased. Since the average German citizen is unable to carry a firearm the risk of attacking them is already lower than it is in most states here. Couple that with the inability of the police to respond and you have a feedback loop of more attacks reducing the perceived risk of committing attacks, which in turn increases the likelihood of more attacks.

Mental Illness And Guns

Mental illness has become a sort of panacea in the gun rights debate. If only we can address the mental illness factor all the violence will cease. It’s one of the few things that both the pro-gun and anti-gun sides can agree on. In fact I agree that mental illness needs to be looked at. Where I differ strongly from most people in this debate is that I don’t think the State should be involved in the matter. When the State gets involved it issues decrees and those decrees always lead to punishments. Obama’s latest executive order on firearms claims to address mental illness but the way it goes about it can only make things worse:

The Social Security Administration has indicated that it will begin the rulemaking process to include information in the background check system about beneficiaries who are prohibited from possessing a firearm for mental health reasons.

The Department of Health and Human Services is finalizing a rule to remove unnecessary legal barriers preventing States from reporting relevant information about people prohibited from possessing a gun for specific mental health reasons.

Both clauses create additional barriers between people suffering from mental illnesses and treatment. Although the common belief held by Americans is that all mental illnesses are permanent the reality is quite different. Many people suffer from temporary mental illnesses. Non-chronic depression is probably the most common example. Even people who suffer from chronic mental illnesses are often able to control them through therapy, medication, meditation, etc.

A lot of people fall into temporary periods of depression that can become bad enough where they’re deemed a danger to themselves and others. Unfortunately these temporary periods can lead to lifetime prohibitions. Let’s consider a gun owner who has fallen into a period of severe depression after the death of their spouse. This gun owner desperately needs to seek help but doesn’t want to risk losing his gun ownership privileges. With every additional barrier that is erected the likelihood that this gun owners will seek help goes down.

Controlled chronic mental illness isn’t treated any better. Let’s consider another gun owner. This one suffers from bipolar disorder and their lows get severe enough where they can become a danger to themselves. It’s possible that this gun owner could live a much healthier and safer life with proper medication. Obtaining such medication requires them to get help from a mental health professional but they don’t want to see one because they are afraid they will become a prohibited person for the rest of their life. Again, we have a person suffering from a mental illness who has been dissuaded from seeking help because of fear of punishment. Instead of taking steps that could lead to a better, healthier life they continue suffering alone and therefore remain a continuing risk to themselves.

Addressing the mental illness factor should start with eliminating punishments for having a mental illness. I know that sounds backwards to a lot of people. But seeking help should be a pain-free as possible. In fact seeking help should be encouraged. Our hypothetical gun owners mentioned above shouldn’t have to fear becoming prohibited persons for the rest of their lives because they sought help.