Good man with a gun

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http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/13/us/arizon ... g-witness/

There is no better way to stop an armed attacker than a gun.
In this case, a private citizen with a gun and a private citizen with EMT training stepped in and saved the life of a trooper who had been ambushed and shot. It's just one of many cases in which a gun turned out to be the appropriate tool to achieve a good result in a bad situation.

Gun control activists should be aware of the reality of this situation and others like it. Particularly for citizens in rural areas, when any help from police may be a long time in coming, a gun may sometimes be the best and only practical defense against an armed attacker.

Bernie Sanders was right on gun control.

As the saying goes: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

Gun control activists in a nutshell are SJW's and will refuse to be aware of anything that goes against their narrative. Better to try and reach the true fence sitters, and for a good part that has already been done during the soon-to-be past administration.


Even in the suburbs and bigger cities police response time can be slow.


I thought he had a D- rating from the NRA.

I think there are a lot of people who are strongly for gun control who are not accustomed to guns and who don't understand that others live in different ways. Many of them find it hard to imagine that there are ever situations that call for the use of a gun. They can make better choices about gun control if they have more information about those situations when guns are not just useful but necessary.


True. The invasion of the Petit home in Cheshire, CT was just such a case. The mother and daughters were raped and murdered while the police assessed the situation and established a perimeter. Were I ever to face such a situation with my family I would certainly want to have a more active plan to defend the family than just waiting for the police.


There are ideologues on all sides. Vermont has pretty sensible gun laws. Sanders recognized the need for different laws for different states. That he got a D- from the NRA and was accused of being a gun nut and friend of mass killers by some Hillary supporters suggests that he was finding some reasonable middle ground.

The word "activist" tells me they are more than just people who think guns are icky. They may have started out that way but have had their beliefs bolstered other misinformation and very likely their politics.


It was sure that way with the Virginia Tech shooting, too. Wait and assess the situation from a safe distance until the shooter runs out of ammo, victims, or shoots himself.


I don’t think he people of Vermont wouldn’t have tolerated much in the way of gun rights infringement from him. I don’t see why gun laws would need to be different from state to state. Is it okay for some states to recognize gay marriage but not others?
When I hear “reasonable middle ground” when applied to gun legislation I also hear compromise that will only lead to further compromise.

Now we know what you look like.

/\Yup that's me,one foxy old grannie

I think O'Malley was tougher for gun control than Clinton or Sanders. Not sure about Webb or Chaffee.

I think there's also an element of tribalism to it; guns are a very powerful totem of the red tribe, so members of the blue tribe are hostile to them on general principle, beyond what you'd expect from simple inexperience. I think there's a similar dynamic with some of our non-American members, guns are so strongly identified with "American redneck gun nuts" that they simply can't imagine another side to the issue, a product of the culture in many countries, particularly some of the commonwealth ones.



I once got into an altercation with a neighbor where I drew a firearm after he threatened me, and he called the cops; took them 20 minutes to get there, and this was in the middle of the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, damn near the city center. That turned out okay, once the cops heard the whole story they had some strong words for my neighbor and nothing ever came of it, but if I'd wanted to do him harm, or vise versa, the cops would still have been getting their boots on by the time everything was over.



IIRC, Bernie's major "sin" in the eyes of gun control Democrats was voting for the PLCIAA, a law that protects gun manufacturers from lawsuits due to the misuse of their products by third parties, lawsuits that the Clinton administration had attempted to use to bankrupt the firearms industry and force them to accept onerous conditions to stay in business. I like to think that coming out so strongly against such a sensible law cost HRC enough votes to matter, it certainly left no doubts in the minds of gun owners of who not to vote for last year.

Clinton swung pretty far left trying to flank Bernie, but I think you may be right, O'Malley has been terrible on guns for years. Of course, he's been terrible on a lot of things, it should tell you everything you need to know about Martin O'Malley that the thinly fictionalized version him that appeared in The Wire was played by Littlefinger from Game of Thrones.

Unfortunately with some people fire-arms are a fetish rather than an appropriate tool for self defense and defense of family. Why, for example, would anyone need hundreds of fire arms? Or even dozens?

You could ask the same question about any hobby that involves collecting.

Guns are interesting though in that if you get into the sporting side, there are a surprisingly large number of specialized ones. Deer hunting is one rifle, small game is another, sporting clays is usually done with a double-barrel shotgun, ducks are a 12 gauge pump, smaller birds are a 20 gauge, rabbits a .410, geese a 10 gauge, a .22 pistol and rifle for plinking, a magnum revolver for bear country, two single action revolvers, a lever carbine, and a break-open shotgun if you're going to shoot cowboy action, a semi-auto pistol, rifle, and shotgun if you're going to do three gun events, a long range precision rifle for that sport... Get the idea?

Personally, I own a lot of guns that I just think are interesting, odd calibers or strange mechanisms, stuff like that, just cause I like them.

Good on the trooper and the men that saved them.

I don't understand why many liberals are so gung-ho on gun control, which has cost us time and again when we could have been talking about how we were going to fix our health care system or infrastructure. We've had the cede the stage over and over again due to this issue.

Last edited by beneficii on 17 Jan 2017, 1:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm telling you, it's a tribal thing. Look at some of the battles I've had in PPR with liberals who claim not to care about the issue, but insist on making uninformed comments and lobbing insults like "gun fetishist" every time it comes up; if they don't actually care about the guns, the only reason for the behavior seems to be spiting conservatives.

Honestly, this is a big part of the reason I tend to "caucus" with the conservatives here, I've found it easier over the years to teach conservatives to leave social issues up to individuals than to teach liberals to leave the guns alone, though I'm not quite sure why that is. As I've said before, my time in Denver at the gunsmithing school was really informative in that the very conservative crowd there thought that my liberalism was funny, if misguided, something to joke about over beers, while the liberals in my hometown have been far less accepting of my conservative positions. My gut feeling is that liberals have a tendency to feel more sure of their beliefs and so get righteous about them, but I don't really have anything beyond personal experience to back it up.

This is a very interesting observation. In my mind there is a connection with some of the information in the video techstepgener8tion posted here:
viewtopic.php?t=335761
Also discussed here:
http://heterodoxacademy.org/2016/10/21/ ... l-justice/

A key thought that connects with your perception of tribalism at work:


I took a mental note while watching the video that this problem of sacrificing the truth and justice for the sake of social justice is described as a problem of the liberal arts and soft sciences but does not afflict engineering or the hard sciences. I think this suggests that these tribal passions, blasphemy laws, shunning and the rest are expressions of a desperate anxiety born of the vagueness of their disciplines. The things they study are hard to quantify and their contentions and theories are often hard to prove. I think this produces insecurity and that powers the drive to impose conformity, silence dissent, demand unearned respect and deference, demonize the opposition and all the rest of the excesses of the social justice extremists.

That part of the left that is dedicated to truth as well as real justice, like the universities, needs to separate itself from the social justice ideologues and tribalists.