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My last attempt to comment on Bryan Miller’s dancing in the blood of an eight year old boy while making fun of his small penis did not make it through moderation.

Here’s another try:

Freedom is not safe.

That said, accidents like this are extremely rare. Fewer than a hundred children a year die from accidents involving guns. (And, yes, this was an “accident”, although negligence was certainly a huge factor.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2004 seventy-two children between the ages of 1 and 15 died in “Unintentional Firearm” incidents, ranked at number 14.

What really kills kids? Top three causes in 2004 were: 2479 deaths due to “Unintentional MV traffic”; 739 due to “Unintentional drowning”; and 502 due to “Unintentional Fire/burn”. Next comes 350 “Homicide Firearm”. Note that those last three together are not even two thirds of the total due to cars.

The right of the people to keep and bear arms has already been very substantially infringed by some 20,000 federal, state, and local laws and regulations. Your state, New Jersey, and the state in which this shooting occurred, Massachusetts, heavily regulate gun ownership, yet are not known for their low crime rates.

If, Mr. Miller, you want to further infringe that right, I believe we can reasonably insist that you make a strong case that your infringements will a) substantially reduce gun deaths among children even further, and b) not increase child death (or even adult death) through increased violent crime or increased tyranny.

[I reused part of my last reply, which I will not reproduce here. CDC stats copied from this earlier post.]

[update: Thanks to David Hardy of Arms and the Law for the link.]

Keep in mind, as you read what follows, that I am not a lawyer, just a citizen trying his best to understand the rules I’m expected to live under.

Mark Bennett, a criminal defense lawyer here in Houston, on his blog Defending People, forwards “notes from the portion of DEA training dealing with the use of deadly force. [My source] tells me that the students would be given certain fact patterns and told to stand up in class and respond with the exact phrases described in the notes to justify a shooting.”

This is life-and-death crucial, but very long, so I’m reproducing the whole thing, with my comments, below the fold: (more…)

Billy Beck demonstrates how it’s supposed to work:

That kid was frightened when I yelled “Hello!” up the road at him.

For years now, people have been hiking and biking up and down Daisy Hollow. It’s really funny: they roll out here from Ithaca or wherever in all their gear. Hikers walking with ski-poles in the summer. You name it, etc. People who live out here think they’re cute. When I go walking, I go up on the hill with a rifle.

The very first time I laid eyes on him, he looked like he was walking out the end of a neighbor’s driveway. He’d made about seventy-five yards up the road by the time I had my boots on and was out the door.

Walking up to him, I could see that he was apprehensive. I said from about fifteen yards away, “I hope you will understand why this is necessary.” I had all his attention, now. I’d say he was in his early twenties.

“You know,” I told him, “We’ve been watching people hike up & down this valley for a long time, but that is the very first time I ever saw what looked like someone coming out of that driveway.”

Read the rest to see how it comes out.

That’s all an armed citizenry is about, folks: people looking out for each other.

[Edit: In comments, Beck clarifies he was not armed for this encounter. I believe the overall point stands.]

As always, Robert Peel’s Policing Principle Seven holds: “…the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

Beck takes a lot of heat for things like not paying taxes, not enlisting, not shouldering his share of the social responsibility.

That right there is Beck doing his share, directly, not subcontracting it to someone in a uniform. He exposed himself to risk, he accepted the potential responsibility of putting someone to death on the spot.

I can’t point to the last time I did that. Can you?

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Moreover, he accepts that burden without setting himself as an Only One who can act with Officially-backed impunity. Like, oh,  Grady County Oklahoma Deputy Sean Knight [Link via Beck, here.]

The most important thing I’ve posted for the women and girls in my audience ever:

The National Firearms Association, the Canadian equivalent of the NRA, puts out this amazing pamphlet [PDF] on some very simple self-defense moves allowing you to disable and escape from a would-be rapist.

No gun needed.

The Lioness correctly notes that the most important element of self-defense is not any particular weapon or skill, but simply the spring-loaded decision to meet violence with violence:

When a rape begins, there is no one there but you and the rapist. When it ends, there is still no one there but you and the rapist. When it ends, you will be dead, or alive but physically and emotionally shattered, probably permanently. You may also be pregnant, or under sentence of death from the AIDS infection he just gave you. Rapists don’t use condoms.

The police don’t come during a rape; they come afterward. It is vanishingly rare to find an instance where a rape has been interrupted or prevented by anyone but the intended victim.

When that realization hits you, you have ten seconds. Within ten seconds, your attacker should be incapacitated, unconscious, or running for his life; or you’ve probably lost. A good fight is short, sharp, and decisive, not a movie-style brawl. Would you like to learn how to end your rapist’s career?

If you believe that you cannot injure another human being, this training is not for you.

If you believe that it is proper to stop a violent criminal to save yourself and others, it is.

None of what you have just learned will do you any good whatever, if you wait until the realization hits you to decide what to do. You’ll take too much time to make the decision.

The Lioness may be printed and distributed freely, as long as it unchanged from the original. There are high-quality PDFs of each page suitable for sending to your local printer.

Along the same lines, read Lawdog’s “Appropriate Countermeasures to the Front Chokehold”, which cannot be safely excerpted, and by that I don’t mean “Not Safe For Work”, I mean “might result in accidental injury or death”. You must read the whole thing.

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For a very long time, official sources have promulgated the myth that if you are being raped, the best thing to do is to cooperate. Fighting back, it’s been alleged, just makes the guy mad, and results in greater injuries. Purse snatching, mugging, rape, home invasion, doesn’t matter: just give the guy what he wants.

That turns out not to be the case.

Fighting a potential rapist might anger him, but likely he’s acting out of rage anyway, says the psychologist.

Fighting an intended attacker might provoke him, but he’s already trying to force his body into yours, says the criminologist.

Fighting off a man who’s trying to have sex with you against your will might hurt you, but nothing matches the pain of a completed sexual assault, says the rape advocate. ["Rape advocate"? Was the editor on this article on coffee break? -- djm]

Fighting a man hand-to-hand transfers his hair or skin cells onto you, helping police track him down, says the self-defense coach.

And fighting back increases your odds of escaping unraped because most rapists are looking for an easy target, said a prominent criminal justice professor who studies how women avoid rape.

“The odds of getting away are increased when you fight back,” said Sarah E. Ullman, who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who tracks how women manage to escape sexual assault.

“(Rapists) don’t expect a forceful response. If they get that, they may be quickly deterred and that may be all it takes to stop the assault.”

…
Once a woman has decided to put up a fight, the strategy is clear: Be active, confident and forceful. Attack the rapist’s vulnerabilities: his groin, his eyes. [And ankles and knees and Adam's Apple -- djm] Playing victim won’t work, Ullman said. Neither will begging, pleading, crying or negotiating. Talking to stall when confronted in a public place or business may allow passersby or customers to interrupt the attack, but assertive commands can also buy time and give the woman a chance to run away. And a woman wielding a weapon to a stranger is less likely to have the rape completed.

…
“Women are socialized to not make a scene, to take care of other people’s feelings, to not assume the worst,” Ullman said. “Trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t right.

“Don’t worry about making a scene.”

Over at the Bitch Girls:

A hunter who was checking into a Denver hotel yesterday before his trip to Africa was arrested for “unlawfully” carrying a gun - in rifle cases safely.  Unfortunately, Democrats are staying in the hotel.  So the cops hauled him off and only released him after he posted $10,000.

He is being investigated to see if his rifles have dangerous features - like a scope.

I started to respond in comments there, but it grew, so I’m making a full post of it here.

There was that big Mike Vanderboegh brouhaha a couple of weeks ago, about how citizens standing their ground for their right to keep and bear made us all look like crazed loons. (The big thread was over at Snowflakes in Hell, but that site’s down at the moment. I’ll put the link in when I can confirm it.)

This proves Vanderboegh was bang on: Those who want to take our rights away from us already think we’re dangerous lunatics.

Is it time to march on statehouses, courthouses, and Congress? Time to man the barricades? Time to openly revolt?

No, of course not quite yet.

It is, however, time for individuals to simply stand for themselves and say “No”. to make “cold dead hands” more than a slogan.

Now, I pray I will not be faced with this choice any time soon, but I pray that if I am, I will be able to take one or two jackboots with me.

I probably won’t, of course, because I doubt I’ll be given the opportunity to so much as flick off the safety. And if I am, I seriously doubt I’ll be able to bring myself to actually shoot another human being, as much as my freedom might depend on it.

That’s one of the problems here: on the battle field, a new recruit can depend on the veterans to fight for a volley or two while he gets his wits and his courage together, and overcomes his natural reluctance to kill. In a hotel lobby surrounded by non-combatants, with your guns all in cases, or during what seems to be a routine traffic stop, or in your bedroom at three a.m., you simply do not have the luxury of even a second’s hesitation, or the example of more experienced soldiers around you. And you know, absolutely, that you will die in the encounter, that you will never have the chance to argue in defense of your actions.

That’s hard, and when that starts happening, it’s going to be up to us to pile on in defense of our fallen comrades, and not spurn their corpses because they failed to follow the enemy’s rules of engagement to the letter.

In this case, Calanchini threatened NO ONE. He just wanted a room, a shower, a meal and a bed. His greatest crime was that he didn’t care enough about politics to know that a Big Important For His Own Damn Good Democratic Convention was in town, or that the particular hotel he choose had been taken over by by people who hate him and think he’s the crazy one.

I mean, Christ, he had GUNS! Plural, guns! Including handguns! Of course he’s dangerous bad crazy! Think of all the children he could have killed! Or Democrats, same thing!

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This stands as a warning to all the Fudds and Zumbos out there. Just because you’re a hunter, doesn’t mean you can afford to think you’re above the fray. The grabbers absolutely want your guns too, and you with them. To them, you are as crazy and as dangerous as we are.

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Meanwhile, Muslim terrorists, real crazies who, so far beyond standing their ground and fighting back, deliberately kill innocents, are deferred and kowtowed to at every opportunity.

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Uncle points out, “This isn’t going to help Democrats appeal to the gun owner demographic.”

No, but then, they never really wanted to. This simply confirms which demographic they are appealing to.

Slashdot links to this article about the Army funding a gun that can fire a variable speed bullet:

The new weapon, called the Variable Velocity Weapon System or VWS, lets the soldier use the same rifle for crowd control and combat, by altering the muzzle velocity. It could be loaded with ‘rubber bullets’ designed only to deliver blunt impacts on a person, full-speed lethal rounds, or projectiles somewhere between the two.

Yeah, you know, that sounds really cool, but in fact, it’s a terrible idea, as I point out in my comment at Slashdot:

I’m going to assume that the military is looking into this simply because they look into everything, not because they actually plan to deploy it. It’s a terrible idea, because it deliberately trains users to break two of the most important rules of gun safety:

1. All guns are always loaded.
2. Never point the muzzle at anything you aren’t willing to destroy.

The whole point of training with a firearm, or any weapon, is to program a robot into your nervous system that will react automatically, even in situations of severe stress. You decide beforehand, after long hard thought, under what circumstances you are willing to shoot at someone. When one of those situations arises, your internal gunbot takes over. I know it sounds odd, but experience shows that whenever you have to interrupt the gunbot to make a decision, you increase the chance of an accident. (You train a similar sort of ‘bot to drive for you. This is why it is crucial to do things like come to a full stop at every stop sign, without fail. Cars go much faster than your nervous system was evolved to handle; things must happen automatically and predictably. If you start trying to make ad hoc decisions, sooner or later you will fail, and BAM!)

This gun teaches you that you can sometimes point it at people you do not want to kill, only to stun:

1. See the incident [google.com] a few weeks ago where a French soldier was firing machine gun blanks into a crowd during a demonstration. He swapped mags–but unfortunately, the fresh mag was not filled with blanks.

2. A tactical shooting instructor I once had, a cop, told us about the bean-bag shotgun he kept in his patrol car. The barrel was wrapped with blue tape, and there was a strict policy, as in “administrative leave without pay and a reprimand in your file”, against ever loading it with anything other than beanbag rounds. In a crisis, if you grabbed the blue barrel, you had to be certain you would be firing beanbags, not lead.

3. When you point your gun at a person and pull the trigger, you must be very certain about what the gun will do. This adds a whole ‘nother level of mechanical complexity to what should be a simple, reliable design. Not only will soldiers and cops inadvertently fire this thing on “kill” not “stun”, but there’s also a question of whether or not it will fire at all–just as bad if the cop needs to make a bad guy stop now.

4. When a bad guy sees a gun pointed at him, he needs to be certain that if he doesn’t do as he is told, he will die. I don’t want bad guys to see this gun, and decide to take a gamble that it’s only set to stun.

5. Americans have, and as free citizens damn well should have, a deep suspicion towards inappropriate force being exercised under color of law. The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution. If you can’t trust your military or police, the answer isn’t to give them weak weapons–the answer is to disband them, by force if necessary, and organize trustworthy forces.

[I've made a couple of minor tweaks to this comment.]

The movement to give the police and the military “non-lethal” or “less-lethal” weapons is very dangerous. Not only does it add mechanical complexity where it is not needed, not only does it break the gun-safety robot, it also encourages the casual use of force against us, not just foreign enemies and domestic criminals.

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[1] NB: Technically, the police are civilians (see for example Robert Peel #7), but I hope this gets my point across. I wish I knew a word for “out of uniform, unbadged civilians”, but nothing comes to mind.