Rick Ector, on the journey from callow victim to firearms instructor.

This makes me proud to be an American.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the story of a Hmong man on the East Side of Saint Paul who was beaten badly by a crowd of youths.   The attack ended when the man’s wife came out of the house with her gun (and her carry permit).

Kudos to WCCO for being the sole news outlet that didn’t bury the lede.

East-side Saint Paul man jumped by group of teen thugs stabbed in the eye with a stick, missing being blinded by mere millimeters.

The attack took place in an alley behind Geranium Avenue, near Payne Avenue. “When I got hit, I got dazed a little and fell to my knees, but I got up and continued to fight off my attackers,” Chang said.

Chang shouted to his sister-in-law, who had been in the vehicle with him and locked herself inside, to phone his wife and ask her to come out of the home with a gun.

Both Chang and his wife have permits to carry, and she came outside with a gun, Chang said. The attackers ran off.

I read these stories – gangs of youths roaming the neighborhoods, beating people to within an inch of their lives, like Ray Widstrand a couple of years ago – and wonder when the left will start to apply their old warhorse, “if it saves one life…”.

There’s one, right here.

A law-abiding citizen with a carry permit killed a would-be robber in Brooklyn Park Monday evening.  The Brooklyn Park PD just confirmed that the shooter was a citizen with a carry permit, and the decedent was attempting to rob the citizen.

The person targeted for robbery has “a valid permit to carry a handgun” and was not arrested, said Deputy Police Chief Mark Bruley.

Officers recovered both guns at the scene as they continue to investigate the shooting.

Police have yet to disclose the identities of those involved in the confrontation.

And I’m going to speculate that the law-abiding citizen who did the shooting won’t get his name released, because of the danger he’d face from the rest of the community.  It’s been true with several of the justifiable homicides we’ve seen – the Evanovich shooting and the Broadbent incident last summer among them.

Bruley said the man who died “goes back and forth between Brooklyn Park and Minneapolis. He’s an individual we’ve known from previous contact. He certainly hangs out around here.” Bruley declined to say more about that contact entailed.

I’m going to guess it involved the fact that he was just in the middle of getting his life turned around.   It’s a theme in this sorts of episodes.

State Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, said the outcome of this shooting validates a 2003 law in Minnesota that allows people to carry a firearm in public.

“A loss of life is a tragedy,” Garofalo wrote. “But when a criminal pulls a gun, they risk ending their life. Concealed carry works.”

As of early this year, there were more than 221,000 active permit holders in Minnesota, according to the latest data report from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

The total has grown by more than 20,000 in the past six months. Now, about one in 19 eligible Minnesota adults has a permit to carry, according to Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.

The number is up over 5% of eligible adults – which, in some parts of the state, likely means there’s a better than one in ten chance that someone you might want to try to rob can end you.

The odds are better in the Metro, if you’re a robber; most don’t grow up in a (law-abiding) gun culture; there are fewer ambient, social chances to get into shooting, much less self-defense.  Less than 2% of eligible adults have carry permits in the Metro, where the crime rate shows they are the most needed (and, I’d argue, also shows their lack).

Condolences to the victim’s family; he may have run off the rails, but he was someone’s kid, brother or parent.

And best of luck to the shooter, whoever you are.  And thanks.

 UPDATE:  Is this predictable or what – the Strib always shuts down story comments when a good guy uses a gun against a bad actor.

Wonder why that is?

UPDATE 2:  By my count, since 2005, that makes five human lives saved via the ability to resist violence with a legally-carried handgun:

1. A bouncer shot a knife-wielding drunk outside a Minneapolis bar.
2. Another bouncer shot another knife-wielding drunk outside Grumpy’s in Northeast Minneapolis
3. An unidentified man shot Darren Evanovich behind the Cub Foods on East Lake street in 2011, after Evanovich and his sister pistolwhipped a fifty-something Latina cleaning lady and stole her just-cashed paycheck.
4. Another unidentified man shot Lauventai Broadbent last August, one of a small gang of teenagers who tried to rob the citizen using guns they’d stolen earlier that day on the East Side.
5. Yesterday’s episode.

Jesse Hughes – lead singer of the band “Eagles of Death Metal”, the band that was playing at the Bataclan in Paris the night of the Paris Massacre – says what every gun rights activist already knows; the only response to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns:

“Did your French gun control stop a single [expletive] person from dying at the Bataclan?” Hughes said. “And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging head-first into the face of death with their firearms.”

The left’s answer, inevitably, is a series of academic postulates that wither as fast as the crowd at Bataclan under reasoned scrutiny, to say nothing of real-life events.

Dear MOA: With all due respect: QQQQ.

The only reasoned response?  You, and you alone, are responsible for your and your family’s protection.  And while the world is demonstrably safer than it was, 20 and 70 and 200 years ago, human nature means that evil, some time, some place, will be waiting for someone, somewhere – whether in the form of a lone mugger, a couple of rapists,  a gang of terrorists, or a government full of gangsters.

By the way – there’s been four terror-related mass shootings, and ten terror attacks altogether, since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a total death toll of 152, and 388 injured.

In Zürich, where handgun carry permits are relatively plentiful?  Holding steady at zero and zero.  While correlation doesn’t equal causation, it fits a pattern that we see here in the US, and that they saw in Israel in the seventies; terrorists (like delusional mass-shooters in general) avoid places where there might be resistance.

Yet another guy with a gun ends yet another violent felony.

Here’s hoping the investigation ends with a finding of “Justifiable Homicide”.

A couple of wannabe thugs apparently tried to turn a craigslist transaction into a heist in Shakopee yesterday.

And while the article doesn’t say so explicitly, reading between the lines, it would appear the Fugs picked the wrong guy:

Police radio reports indicated that the apparent victim of the attempted robbery had a handgun and fired at the would-be robber. Shakopee police and other law officers were looking for a silver-gray Chevrolet Venture van with at least two people inside, with at least one armed with a revolver.

Radio reports indicated that the robber ran from the scene toward the White Castle restaurant near Walmart and then got into a vehicle, which reportedly got on Highway 169. The State Patrol was looking for the vehicle.

The apparent victim was waiting near the Walmart garden center entrance for police. He apparently was not injured.

Police were planning to look at store video.

The article doesn’t say so explicitly – but waiting for the cops at the store after an incident is the behavior you’d expect from someone who took carry permit training.

Kim Norton and Heather Martens, obviously, would have preferred that the victim submit meekly, and maybe die.

UPDATE:  The Strib is being veeeeeeery slow to release the facts of this case, including who shot first and who shot who.

Anyone with a living soul was nauseated by the display in Cologne on New Years Eve, where thousands of men of “North African” descent roamed the street in gangs, sexually assaulting women and impeding the police’s attempts to respond.

Here in the US – where this sort of thing is thankfully very rare – the responses depended on the responder’s politics.

People on the left strenuously denied there was a problem, or blamed it on fraternities affiliated with the NRA.

People on the right bought another box of ammo.

Either would be more productive, I suspect, than this group of…er, males in the Netherlands:

The sign says “If you’re not wearing pants, you make less of a mess when they attack you”. No, that’s not true. It says “Don’t make women dress chaste / keep your hands to yourself”. That’ll show ’em.

I’m sure the women of Cologne are thankful for the “solidarity”.

A more productive statement?  Germans are doing their best to arm themselves, as best they can given Germany’s patriarchal gun laws.

And where real people try to arm themselves, you can count on the media to get the Victorian vapours.

The caption says “The Weapons industry profits from the Refugee crisis”. Naturally. Blame Big Gun.

Or in this case, I suppose, the Hohenzollern vapours.

Which group do you suppose will actually benefit the women of Germany – the shooters or the Dutch guys in dresses?

Guy with a carry permit saves the day. 

A civilian gun saves the day – again:

Claxton said she was in the vehicle with her four young children while her husband was pumping the gas.

Claxton said she reached over to try to lock the doors as the man approached, but she accidentally rolled down the window. Claxton said the man opened the door, leaned into the car and brandished a long knife.

Claxton said she yelled for her husband, Matt, to get his gun, and the man then began to leave.

“He said ‘You’re lucky he has a gun,'” Claxton said. “And then he shut the door and started to back away.”

Claxton said her husband pointed his Beretta handgun at the man and called 911 as the man slowly walked away.

The couple followed the man as he attempted several carjackings to try to escape, before the police finally caught him.

So – if you’re one of those people who believe one has a “right not to be killed”, then the parents did a good job of exercising that right.  Correct?

A week ago this past Monday, we wrote about the tear-squirting in Kansas, as Kansas’ state-run post-secondary schools get ready for the legal mandate to allow concealed carry on campus to take effect.

And today comes the story of a student and victim from the mass-stabbing a few weeks ago at University of California at Merced, who, after a terrible experience that included being stabbed (and waiting 20 minutes for police to arrive)(…:

…After that horrifying experience of being stabbed, Price was able to drive himself a couple of miles from the university, to Mercy Medical Center, to be treated.

Amazingly, within a couple of hours, he was able to drive himself home.

“I’m not going to get upset over one loose cannon,” said Price.

Infact, he plans to head back to the university, to get back to work.

The contractor is just thankful, he’s able to go home to his family, still puzzled over why.

“To become a university student and throw it all away like that, I don’t know why he’d want to do that,” said Price.

…undertook the sensible conclusion:

Price says he now thinks differently about having a concealed weapon.

He wishes he had one when this all unfolded.

Police chiefs and politicians may hem and haw at the idea – but the people who actually live where this crap happens know better.  A guy with a gun saves lives.  Even if it’s just their own.

ISIS – or someone claiming to speak for them, anyway –  released a list of American cities they plan to attack.  The ostensible “list” has, in some cases, the parents of something that was compiled by throwing darts at a map.

And when I saw the list, I couldn’t help but remember this scene, from Casablanca:

Which led me to this bit, from a piece Kevin Williamson has out today on NRO:

he Sunday after the shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, I attended Mass at a Catholic church in a very conservative suburb in a Western state where gun rights are in the main unquestioned. As he spoke about the massacre in Charleston, the priest, who showed no sign of indulging himself in ecclesiastical theatrics, grew genuinely angry — that such a thing had been done at all, and that it had been done in a sanctuary among Christians at prayer. Later I asked him what he would have done if it had been his church. “This congregation?” he asked with a little smile that was meaner than you want a priest’s to be. “Probably administer his last rites.”

I thought about that good pastor as reports of the horrors in Paris came in. There was the usual sentimental outpouring on social media…All of that is useless, of course, but one feels the need to do something. But the only thing one can really do is the one thing that Parisians cannot do: shoot back.

With that in mind, I noticed one of the cities on the “target list”;  Minot, North Dakota.

I had to laugh.

Go ahead, Abu.  Go to North Dakota. On any eight random months, your thin, low octane Levantine blood will freeze as solid as the coolant in the 74 Fiat Spyder.

Casing your targets?  North Dakota isn’t quite as overwhelmingly caucasian as it was when I grew up there – but if you wanna case your targets in Minot, you’re gonna stand out from the crowd in a way that you don’t in Chicago or Minneapolis.  It’s not that big of a place.

And North Dakotans are strapped, Abu. #8 in the country in terms of guns per capita.   The oil workers will rip you into long thin strips; run afoul of the wrong farmers, and they will be picking pieces of you out of cattle stools for months.

Perhaps you think all Americans are like University of Missouri students, or Yale university social justice warriors, or espresso guzzling Manhattan lumbersexuals.  Go ahead.  Come to NoDak.  Not only would you die a lonely, painful death – from freezing, if not from crushing return fire – but the media would never know your attack, and demise, happened.  Your deaths would be lonely, and utterly unheralded – even within the state.

Just saying, Abu – f**k with North Dakota, and you might want to go back home and take a chance with the French Air Force.

———-

More seriously?

I had the pleasure of talking with Peter Johnson of Archway Defense over the weekend, on the show; I’ll urge you to listen to the whole hour; it’s pretty good.

The bad news:  the terrorists are learning yet again to use our strengths against us.  Rather than flying would-be terrorists to Afghanistan or Somalia for training, and giving western intelligence another set of data points and drone targets, they’re distributing information on attack preparation, bomb-making, and close-quarters combat (against the unarmed) via the internet – and doing a great job of it.

The “good” news?  They look for undefended targets.  Whether lone-wolves attacking Fort Hood, or the Chattanooga military offices, or the Washington Navy Yard, or bigger, better-financed, paramilitary operations like the various Paris attacks or the Nairobi Mall attack or Mumbai, the terrorists seek out the helpless to slaughter.  They avoid places where anyone could trip things up.

Yet another reason to flout, en masse, the Mall of America’s idiotic and dubiously legal gun ban.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another school, another shooting, more people dead, this time in Sweden where a young man wearing a Star Wars mask attacked a school.

No, the killer didn’t do the shooting.  The killer was stopped by a good guy with a gun.  Who shot him.  In a school.

And stopped him from killing more children.  By shooting him.  In a school.

So does that make this the Good Kind of School Shooting?

Joe Doakes

No.  It makes it the kind of shooting you never hear about in the American media – shootings like these – that interrupt the narrative that “gun violence” is out of control.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Attack a pastor during Sunday worship service and get shot . . . by the pastor?

Gives new meaning to the phrase “The way to stop a Bad Man with a gun is a Good Man with a gun.”

The police are trying to decide whether to charge the pastor for violating the Gun Free Zone (Michigan law doesn’t allow guns in church).

Save a pile of lives, go to jail?

Joe Doakes

It’s one of the ugly conundra of self defense; no matter how, er, righteous the shooting, you’re only as safe as the most zealous prosecutor is in the mood to let you be.

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is switching a regular cucumber label to an organic cuke when he sees Mitch BERG picking out a piece of ginger root.  LIBRELLE walks over to BERG.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG: Huh?  Oh, sh…hi, Avery.  What’s up?

LIBRELLE:  We won a huge victory over the NRA!

MITCH:  Oh yeah?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  Now, people won’t be able to kill people in schools!

MITCH:  Er, Avery?  Guns are already illegal on school grounds. It’s federal law.  Of course, the only people it affects are people with carry permits.   It’s already illegal for anyone who doesn’t have a California permit to carry a gun in public, much less on school grounds.

LIBRELLE:  Right!  So they can’t go nuts and shoot up schools!

MITCH:  And your example of a person with a carry permit shooting up a school is…who?

LIBRELLE:  Hundreds!

MITCH:  Name one.

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled science.

MITCH:  OK.  One example?

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled.  That means the information has been sealed.  Anyway – this is a huge win.

MITCH:  Because now, people who carried guns legally, but not on school grounds, and who never have caused any problems at schools much less killed anyone, are double-barred from carrying guns…

LIBRELLE: Yep!

MITCH:  While the criminals continue to do as they please.

LIBRELLE:  Hey! Trigger warning!

MITCH:  Huh?

LIBRELLE:  “Criminal” is racist!

(And SCENE).

Watch Mitch Berg ANNIHILATE More Liberal Hamsters!  Mind Blown!

UPDATE:  A key “source” in the piece I fisk has turned out to be fraud.  See the Update at the bottom of the story.. 

One of my long-time stalkers – who’s been tweenting about me at least ten times a day for the past six years, which may be as perfect a definition of “a wasted life” as I can imagine – has been spamming the Northern Alliance’s hashtag on Twitter and Facebook with…well, random collections of factoids gathered from Googling, apparently.

And in so doing, he introduced me to yet another article in Raw Story – aka “liberal-friendly news even dumber than The Awl.”

This time, it’s entitled (with that usual online news biz subtlety) “‘It’s insane’: Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’”

Now, we’ve pretty well  shredded Raw Story – whom I suspect just sold a ton of ads to “Everytown” or “MoveOn”or some other group that’s trying to run a PR war against the NRA, given the enthusiasm with which they’re reporting gun issues generating half-informed anti-gun content.

But even by Raw Story’s dubious standards, this is a dumb piece.  So dumb, in fact, that I’m not going to fisk the whole thing (as I did earlier this week).  Because while it’s a deeply stupid piece, it does touch on a key theme you need to know when you try to engage gun-grabbers.

Because like pretty much all aggressive, inflammatory anti-gun “journalism” cribbing fromn other left-leaning news sources today, it’s made up of:

• Appeals to ridicule
• Non-sequiturs
• Strawmen

Har De Har Har:  Officialdom – cops, soldiers, paramedics, bureaucrats – always, always believe that nobody could do their jobs.  Sort of like union teachers believe homeschoolers can’t possibly, y’know, teach kids:

The NRA’s chief spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, infamously claimed following the Sandy Hook child massacre that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” — but Rivera and other combat vets say that’s ridiculous.

“I think they would absolutely panic,” [Sgt. Rafael Noboa y Rivera] told The Nation. [Editor’s note: Rivera served as Raw Story’s associate publisher in 2013.]…“I think there’s this fantasy world of gunplay in the movies, but it doesn’t really happen that way,”…

Well, thanks, Sergeant Obvious.

To be fair (something Raw Story will not), it’s entirely possible there are law-abiding shooters out there who do think it’s like the movies.

But you don’t go through any sort of concealed-carry training with any such illusions – any more than any cop or soldier.

But while we’re on the topic of cops and soldiers…:

“When I heard gunfire [in Iraq], I didn’t immediately pick up my rifle and react. I first tried to ascertain where the shooting was coming from, where I was in relation to the gunfire and how far away it was. I think most untrained people are either going to freeze up, or just whip out their gun and start firing in that circumstance.”

Right.  In combat, where the situation is fluid and confusing and the adrenaline and stress are overwhelming, lots of training is required to survive, much less make sure you don’t kill the wrong person.   And for police work, where there generally isn’t an “enemy” and situations can be incredibly ambiguous (ambiguous enough that police departments grant cops a lot of qualified immunity for the inevitable, inadvertent, accidental shootings of the wrong people in the line of duty), lots of training is a legal, moral and tactical imperative.

However…

Complete The Thought, Now…:  …self-defense is not combat, and it’s not police work.

As we pointed out in Monday’s piece, there are 3-4 criteria that a civilian – not a soldier in combat, or a cop on duty – must follow for a shooting to be considered legal self-defense [1].  And “hearing a shooting, and running to engage the shooter”, depending on your state and the zeal of the prosecutor, might very well violate two of them (“The Threat Must Be Immediate” and “Duty to Retreat”).

There’s a flip side to that; while hearing gunfire in the distance is chock full of nasty, lethal ambiguities, there are certain situations that are not ambiguous at all:

• Having a car pull up next to you (let’s say, for sake of argument, you’re a 120 pound woman), and a man climbs out and says “get in the car, bitch”
• The sound of someone trying to kick your back door in
• The sight of someone with a knife, approaching you and demanding money
• Someone right year you, walking through the mall or your church or your workplace, calmly shooting people, one after the other.

None of these situations are remotely ambiguous.  You don’t need military training, or police experience, or even to have an IQ above 75, to know exactly what is going on.  You need nothing special in terms of knowledge to know that each of these situations is an immediate threat to your life.  Right now.  

And you don’t need any special training (although practice and drilling and, yes, training certainly help) to respond.

Which brings us to the next non-sequitur:

Stephen Benson first learned during Navy SEAL training that carrying a gun would be more likely to expose him to gun violence.

That lesson directly contradicts the message promoted by the National Rifle Association and increasingly cited by gun owners as their motivation for buying a firearm, reported The Nation [There’s a freaking shock].

“It’s insane,” Benson said, recalling how his military training exposed the lie behind the most persistent pro-gun argument.

“We put on our issue .45s, and our instructor said, ‘Gentlemen, the first and most important thing you’ve done by putting on that weapon is you’ve increased your chances of being in a gunfight by 100 percent,’” he said.

[By the way – this last couple of paragraphs tripped my BS detector.  And as Joe Doakes showed in the comments, my BS detector is better than Raw Story’s, or my stalker’s.  See the UPDATE below]

After which the SEALS (who are not, to the best of my knowledge, “issued” .45s, although it’s entirely possible Mr. Benson went through “SEAL training” before 1985) did what?  Learned de-escalation techniques and put the guns away?

No – they learned how to win gunfights.  It’s their job.

For civilians, it is a non-sequitur; if you carry (concealed, usually – not openly, inviting a pre-emptive strike), it should decrease your chance of ever getting into a fight of any kind, since avoiding fights becomes an imperative.  It also decreases your chance of being defenseless against a lethal threat.  To zero?  No – sometimes it just doesn’t work, But the record is good: hundreds of justifiable homicides a year; tens of thousands of defensive gun uses, mostly with no shots fired; crime rates lowered with no gun use needed at all.

Said No Law Abiding Civilian Gun Owner, Ever:  The rest of the article is more of the same; this sort of thing:

“Unless it’s constantly drilled into you, it’s very hard to maintain discipline in those situations,” [former ATF agent and Vietnam veteran ]  told The Nation. “You’re immediately hit with a massive thump of adrenaline…conscious thought shuts down because you’ve been taken over by your nervous system, and your nervous system is saying, ‘Holy sh*t, things just got really bad.’”…“Someone can always say, ‘If your mother is being raped by 5 people, wouldn’t you want her to have a gun?’ Well, okay, if you put it that way, I’d say yes — but that’s not a likely scenario.”

Well, duh.  It’s not likely to happen to anyone’s given mom on any given day.  But if it’s any given mom, and that mom doesn’t wanna get raped, is Mr. Benson saying that there’s any ambiguity in the situation requiring any special training ?

Any at all?

 “The question is: If you see someone running out of a gas station with a gun in their hand, do you want an untrained person jumping out and opening fire?” the former ATF agent said. “For me, the answer is clearly ‘no.’”

Far be it from me to question the qualifications of an ATF agent – an elite, utterly-qualified federal agency that gave guns to narcotraficantes  but the “answer is clearly no” to any citizen with a carry permit and no badge, too.   Jumping out and firing at people who aren’t a direct threat to you can get you in trouble with the wrong prosecutor – and even, sometimes justifiably, the right ones.

Look – we get it.  If you have a heart attack as you’re walking down the aisle at Target, you’d like the first person to come along to be a cardiologist, not a receptionist with a cell phone and a six-months-old Red Cross first aid card.  If you’re is stranded in a blizzard, you’d like it to happen as you pull up to a Embassy Suites with a trunkful of “Free Evening With Champagne” coupons rather than in the middle of the prairie with a candle, a bag of Snickers bars and a space blanket.  And if you’re stuck in a room at your church when a pasty-faced forty-something loser in a “Minnesota Progressive Project” t-shirt barges in with a .25 automatic, you’d like there to just happen to be an off-duty cop with a service  Glock in the room with you rather than some random guy with a carry permit.

But if the only thing standing between you and personal extinction is that secretary, that candle and those snickers, or tha pudgy projectile-sweating middle-aged guy holding a pistol in his shaky hands, are you going to say “No! I choose death on priciple, you mere pretenders!”

I’m gonna guess not.

Especially since – all the derision from Raw Story The Nation notwithstanding – the regular schlemiel’s record is pretty good, all in all.

UPDATE:  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, who gave the spiel about the “Instructor” in “SEAL Training” that “warned him” about the risk of “gunfights” if he”carried a gun” like “SEALs” do, tripped my BS detector even as I quoted him.  I thought Mr. Benson sounded more like Heather Martens than Marcus Luttrell.

And as Joe Doakes pointed out in the comments– my BS detector is pretty darn good after all .  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, is a fraud.  He duped The Nation:

The original story identified a source as a combat veteran and former Navy SEAL. A records search has since revealed that he significantly exaggerated his military record. His comments have been removed from the article, and the headline has been changed. We apologize to our readers.

Of course, Raw Story doesn’t favor us with that factoid in their copy and paste job.  And my not-very-smart stalker is probably gonna find it a surprise as well.

(more…)

I’m going to introduce you to one new feature on this blog, and throw in a mention of one that’s been around for years.

The new one?  “A Guy With A Gun” – a list of episodes where a citizen with a firearm has interrupted a mass shooting.  This information has beens scattered about the blog for years (and it still is; the page is a work in progress); now, this blog has a one-stop page for episodes.  As episodes come to my attention, I’ll be adding them.  Feel free to leave new episodes in the comment section.

Another that’s been around a while, but that I’ll be updating more aggressively, is “Climate of Hate“.   I first started the page 5.5 years ago, as a response to the left’s conceit that there was an epidemic of right-wing violence in this country; it is, in fact, the left that resorts to violence first.

Got new episodes of either mass-shootings ended by citizens, or of lefty violence (or particularly ugly threats or transference)?  Leave a comment in either page (or here – but this post will soon crawl away to obscurity, while the Pages will be up top forever…)

Note:  Unlike everywhere else in this blog, off-topic or threadjacking comments on either of these pages will be deleted without any further ceremony or warnin – as will on-topic comments once I’ve decided if the subject matter merits inclusion or not.

Check Out Paragraph Nine.  Mind Blown.

The website “Raw Story” is, in general , almost as useless as Buzzfeed; at least Buzzfeed has some really cool recipes, which Raw Story utterly lacks.

Raw Story (henceforth RS) is as useless as “The Awl”.  There.  Got it.

Anyway, they ran a piece last week about the Oregon shooting that claimed that guns were useless for defending against mass shootings because…

…one shooter has a solid sense of physical and legal self-preservation.

But they sure think they’re onto something, as evidenced by their cool-handed, measured, sober headline:

Armed vet destroys gun nuts’ argument on mass shooters by explaining why he didn’t attack Oregon killer

So let’s look at the story and see what gets “destroyed”.

(more…)

Bank robber in Warren, Michigan – suburban Detroit – fought the law and pointed his gun at an innocent, law-abiding citizen.

And the citizen won – to the tune of three hits on the would-be robber, and an arrest:

“It’s not every day you see a bad guy get shot and get taken down,” said witness Gary Guyette.
The 43-year-old suspect turned his gun on the wrong customer, a 63-year-old CPL holder who was packing heat, himself.

“The 63-year-old responded in kind by defending himself,” said Mayor Jim Fouts. “It’s his Second Amendment right.”

“The one guy’s arm was full of blood,” said Guyette.

Guyette pulled up in front of the bank to see police apprehending a wounded and whimpering robber

“They cuffed him and then they surrounded him,” he said. “He was moaning and kind of screaming and paramedics pulled up and started working on him.”

FOX 2: “Is it surprising at all to hear about this?”

“To be honest with you, no,” said Stefan Bahry.

No charges are expected against the citizen.  I’m going to guess that bank’s gonna be safe for a while.

Speaking of which – I haven’t heard about a lot of street crime at Summit and East River Road lately…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

New York City cops fire 84 shots on city streets to hit a suspect once, Chief says they’ll investigate but expects it to be justified.
Man trapped in his own Minnesota apartment fires three shots to stop attacker, convicted of Reckless Discharge.  

Joe Doakes

Milwaukee County Sheriff Clark – whom I’ve praised in Thao space before, and no doubt will again – said “stop focusing on fixing the police.  Fix te ghetto”. 

I say there’s room for both. 

To: The Piece Of Garbage Throwing Chunks of Cement at Bikers in Minneapolis
From:  Just Plain Mitch Berg
Re:  Consequences

Big Guy With The White Bronco And The Cement Chunks,

Just a hint for you before you go throwing any more chunks of cement at bikers; it is – I’m speaking purely hypothetically, here – possible that not every Twin Cities biker is a sprout-eating, Whole-Foods-shopping, Betsy-Hodges-upsucking, NPR-listening, pacifism-endorsing (against everyone but people who shoot lions), Obama-voting, coffee-shop-folk-music-listening, Daily-Show-watching Peace Studies major.

Again, I’m speaking purely hypothetically, here.

Just saying.  Go back to pulling the wings off of moths and torturing cats.  They probably can’t fight back.  You’re clearly into that.

That is all .

There was an episode last Friday on Mississippi River Parkway.  Four youths – in masks, one of them waving a gun – jumped a couple of people out for a walk along the river.

One of the citizens – a carry permit holder, and by all visible signs a good guy with a gun – returned fire, mortally wounding one of the attackers.   Then, according to the story, he did exactly what permit holders are told to do if they, heaven forbid, have to defend themselves; called the cops when he determined he and his companion were safe; then, he administered first aid until the cops arrived.

We don’t, of course, know all the details; if it turns out the shooting was so justified that the Ramco Attorney never tries to bring charges, it’s entirely likely we really won’t.   As of today, the police haven’t referred the shooter to the Ramco Attorney, which is a good sign.

But the interesitng part is the coverage the two local dailies gave it.

In the Pioneer Press?  Pretty much just the facts.

In the Strib – whose coverage of the last notable self-defense shooting, behind a Cub on East Lake in Minneapolis in 2010, was maudlin and disgraceful – there was a brief nod toward social-justice-warriorism in the early edition, focusing on the deceased robber’s mother’s reaction, as if some editor was hoping to latch onto another Trayvon Martin publicity bonanza.  However, by the beginning of this week the narrative had settled down to a sober look at teen gangs in Saint Paul – which may be one of the more unreported issues in the city.

The takeaway?  Some shooters are doing the end-zone happy dance.  I’m not; a family lost a son.  A self-defense shooting is the second worst possible outcome.

But never forget that the worst possible outcome is the intended victim dying.  The intended victim is alive today.  And the only useful outcome from this would be for every criminal – whether a wannabee gang thug or a creep looking for some unearned cash – to realize that there are 199,999 more of us as of last Thursday who can do exactly the same thing.

And especially for every kid playing at being a gangster, waving a gun around to intimidate people, to know that this state is crawling with people with the motivation and the ability to end them.  Cold.

And the odds are getting worse every day.  Criminals are mostly rarely bright people – but they have the same sense of self-preservation the rest of us do.

Let’s hope the message gets out.

A West Virginia sex worker shoots and kills a man who police believe may be a serial killer.

“When he strangled me he just wouldn’t let me get any air,” she said. ” I grabbed my rake and when he laid the gun down to get the rake out of my hands, I shot him. I just grabbed the gun and shot behind me.”

And how do the police figure he’s a serial killer, and not just another Democrat operative looking for something edgier than strip clubs?

He showed up with a “kill list,” multiple pairs of handcuffs and a Subaru full of weapons and tools, including a shovel, knives, a bulletproof vest, a machete, bleach, trash bags, sledgehammers and axes, according to Fox affiliate KPTV.

 

In Falls’s pocket, police said, was a list of names of potential future victims, all of whom are sex workers who advertised on Backpage, according to the Daily Dot.

The string of killings for which he’s suspected?  Pretty ugly.  Six women are missing in Chillicothe, Ohio – in a population of 21,000.

No word yet on whether Jane Kay or Rep. Heather Martens want to charge the woman for not taking a background check before taking the guy’s gun.

Remember, folks:  no need for a gun.  The police will take care of it.  They’re trained for this sort of thing.

The NY Daily News informs us that last week’s shooting in Chattanooga, claiming four Marines and a Navy petty officer, all unarmed – where a person whose motive can’t possibly be determined, but whose actions absolutely do not define his entire race the way Dylan Roof’s defined all white people – has “renewed the debate on gun free zones“.

That’s incorrect, of course.

There is no “debate” about “gun-free zones”.

There is a faction of society that clings to the notion that telling people to be nice will make everyone be nice.

And there’s a faction of society that notes, correctly, that nearly every mass-shooting in recent years – schools, post offices, the Crosswinds Mall in Nebraska, the Fort Hood massacre, the shootings at Virginia Tech, and even the Charleston shooting – either took place in a “gun free” zone, or in a state with restrictive gun laws.

That’s not a debate.

That’s the smart people being nagged by the ignorant.

Fact:  You are at much greater risk in a gun-free zone than elsewhere.

Do guns in the hands of the law abiding citizen reduce crime?

They certainly reduced three crimes, this past Monday, In different locations, within a few hours of each other.

Don’t tell Representative Martens.

Better yet – tell her.