Gun Free Zone

Continued from Be Safe In A Hotel.

• If you have a gun for self-defense, keep it to yourself. Most hotel chains are anti-self defense. They do not like guns in their property and will not allow their employees to provide their means for self defense. They even forbid less-than-lethal articles such as pepper spray and stun guns. Pocket knives will send you to Human Resources to pick up your last check and a trip home although I am still amazed that they allow kitchen personnel to have those very long and sharp chef’s knives. As a guest legally carrying a weapon, your best bet is to shut the heck up and keep it from prying eyes. Also, try to keep anything gun related such as shooting accessories or even gun magazines from plain view of the housekeeping workers that come to clean your room. They will call security concerned that a gun nut ready to cause mayhem might be in the room and you will be bothered by managers trying gauge your intentions while one keystroke away from calling 911.

• Take the time to reconnoiter the all the hotel and surrounding areas. Learn from the very basic of knowing where your nearest fire exit is located to asking about the crime rate in the area. Not only check where your fire exit is located, but also you may want to take the stairs all the way down and make sure it gives you a good access to safety in case of evacuation. Check for well illuminated stairs, easy to open doors from floor to floor, make sure that there are no abandoned items that may slow down or interrupt an evacuation or wet surfaces that may cause a slip and fall. Same applies for common areas of the hotel such as bars, restaurants, business center, stores, etc. Look around, see where you would go in case fecal matter hits the cooling apparatus or at least where to get behind hard cover if some nutjob decides to replicate another Mumbai attack. Check for cell phone coverage and make sure to note where the dead spots are located and where you have to go in case you need to dial 911. Ask about crime in the area and be ready to be lied to. Hotels will say that their place and neighborhood and crime free which is absolute bull but you may find one or two employees that will rather see you alive and will inform you of the potential dangers around than seeing you hurt. Under no circumstance believe Concierges and Bell Staff about safe places to eat or visit outside the hotel since they all have deals where they get kickbacks from these establishments. Use online resources to check for crime in the area you will be visiting. Lots of local police & sheriff departments will have a zip code by zip code crime statistic breakdown in their websites. And even if everything checks as safe, you are the only one responsible for your safety so do not let your guard down.
• You are alone, trust your gut. Hotels, outside the lobby and a couple of common areas and during check in and checkout times are desolated places. You may see a hotel worker from time to time in the hallways and maybe another guest, but that will be rare. That means that when you walk from or to your room, the possibility of an ambush is there and you should be very aware of your surroundings. Most hotel rooms nowadays have peepholes in the doors so use them before you step out and make sure nobody suspicious is in the immediate vicinity of your door.  After you open the door, take a couple of seconds and scan the hallway for more any suspicious activity or individuals. Keep an eye on doors not properly closed, specially closets since they are perfect ambush lairs for criminals. It is not widely publicized but rapist and other criminals will look for places to hide and wait for an unsuspecting victim to walk by. If you see something that bothers you, retreat back to your room, call the Front Desk and have them send somebody to check for a suspicious individual. However, the most dangerous part of empty hallways is going back to the room. People are usually tired or distracted or even tipsy after a night of party and they just want to go in the room and lay down. Awareness is less than stellar and all of the sudden you have a gun pointed at your face commanding you to go inside the room where you will be stripped of your goods, your dignity and even your life. If something is amiss, get in a house phone and demand a security escort to your room in a loud and clear voice so anybody in earshot can hear you. Get away safely if you can or look for a fighting position that offers good cover and is defensible.  Again, trust your gut, if something looks dangerous, use your head and your training.

For the past five years I worked in the hospitality business as a security officer. By now I have ceased to be amazed at how people behave about their own personal security. For whatever reason, guests arriving at a hotel seem to think that whatever precautions they usually take at home, do not apply while on vacation or business trip. Nothing can be further from the truth. If anything, you should be even more aware of your surroundings and take extra care of yourself. I would like to share some ideas about being safe at a hotel with you now.

First: You are responsible for your own security! This should be damn obvious by now, but as I said before some people just switch off the basic survival procedures during a vacation. Just so you know. Hotel Security is not there to protect you but to protect the interest of the hotel. That is our mandate.

Sure, we are “trained” to look after you and try to see that nothing happens to you but the undercurrent in that is that Hotels are highly allergic to lawsuits brought by guest. If by some legal or legislative trick hotels were to become immune to lawsuits, the first department to disappear would be Security. We are just a legal excuse so in court the hotel can prove to the jury they took “reasonable measures’ to provide a modicum of safety to the guest.

Now, what can you do to be safe in a Hotel?

1. Make sure your door is closed and that all the security devices attached to it are operational. Not a day goes by that during my rounds I find occupied room with doors open, occupants gone and expensive items in plain view. Laptops, Ipods, expensive watches, wallets and purses just ready to be plucked by an enterprising petty thief just because the guest left the room without making certain the door was firmly closed behind them.  And do the same before you go to sleep: check the damn door. I have found doors unsecured and female occupants deeply into the arms of morpheus ready to be sodomized or worse due to their carelessness. Use all latches and privacy dohickies that come with the lock and if you are still unsure, get one of those wedge rubber door stoppers which will provide one more layer of resistance in case somebody tries to kick in your door. You’d be surprised how weak a hotel door can be around the lock.
2. Use the room safe, it is there for a darn reason. Most hotels only allow Security or a Manager the master codes or equipment to bypass a locked safe and having a small pool of suspects in case of an item missing from a safe makes almost everybody be very honest. And let’s face it folks, we (Hotel personnel) know all the goodie spots where you can “hide” your stuff in a room. And you will forget where you hid your extra cash of expensive jewelry, will not remember until you are back home and will have to call the hotel to retrieve it and send it. That is if you are lucky enough and the room has not been rented to another guest that found your stuff and decided that “finders keepers” apply to your possessions.
3. Be smart about room keys.  Yes you heard all the Internet tales of magnetic card keys encoded with all your personal information included your DNA and the name of your first sweetheart, but the the real problem is being careless with your card as in losing it or damaging it. If you misplace your card, immediately go to the front desk and demand a new one and make sure you specify you do not want a duplicate. This is very important because a totally new card will eliminate the security encoding of the old one thus preventing anybody who might have found your card and want to use it to gain access to the room. Again, demand a New Card, not a Duplicate. Never write down your room number in your card or have it with anything that may indicate which room or even what floor you are staying in. There is no reason why you should make life easy for critters. And please keep the card away from cell phones and any electronic devices or anything with a magnetic field that will damage the card. The last thing you want to do is being alone in a hallway at the wee hours of the night with an bad key possibly becoming a target of a marauding criminal.  Request at least one extra card and have it as back up to avoid unnecessary trips to the Front Desk and have them send a New Key. This will also help you know if the key sent to you is really a new one or a duplicate: once you insert the new key, the old one will not work anymore. If after inserting the new key, the old one still work, call the Front Desk, raise merry hell demand a new one and then call the Corporate Office and let them know of the flagrant breach of security.

Next: Part 2 of How to be Safe In a Hotel

Let us Never Forget that Christ is the reason for the Season.

To our corageous men and women in uniform, we pray for you and wish you be safe.

To all my readers ( the three of you) may The Lord Bless You and Your Family.

Merry Christmas to all!

Question: You are home with your children and someone breaks in and threatens harm. You should:

1. Retrieve your firearm and defend your family.
2. Call 911 and wait for instructions while analyzing the situation, see if you may actually be in danger and comply with the attacker’s desires.

If you choose number 2, you are doing the right thing according to “expert” Kathy Olevsky. And I would recommend that you should have your local mortuary & insurance agent in your phone’s speed dial while you are at it because you will probably will need one of them in a hurry. Ms. Olevsky then continues her advice with the use of “you could use to assist yourself in your defense. An ordinary household object gives women more power. If you can pick up a lamp, a broom, a baseball bat, or a fireplace utensil, any of these items can be used to help you out.” Can you spot the obvious missing item? Yep, no guns in the list.

Ms. Olevsky is a  is a sixth-degree black belt in Karate and God Bless her for her achievement and dedication, but traditional Martial Arts are tough to learn, even tougher to master and, unfortunately no match for somebody with a gun with an intent to cause harm. In my younger years I was one of those kids who never missed an episode of Kung Fu, and watched in amazement Bruce Lee on the Green Hornet making mincemeat out of the Bad Guys. I was small in stature in those days and easy pickings for bullies at school who thought that it was fun to beat me once a day between Math class and Geography class. So, like many kids of my generation I begged, pleaded and cajoled to my parents about allowing me to join some dojo. My mother did not want his baby to be battered and bruised so she refused time and time again but I knew  I was making headway so I kept at it. And when I knew I was close to success, something happened that changed my young mind about martial arts and dumped the idea altogether. Back then in Venezuela, the top martial arts school was run by two brothers: The Plancharts. They were on TV weekly in sport shows demonstrating their abilities (and they were good) and people were lining around the block to register in a class. One weekend one of the Planchart brothers got accosted by a couple of miscreants and, unlike a Hollywood Happy Ending, Mr. Planchart tried to defend himself with his arts obtaining as result a bullet in his thigh and a very fast trip to the closest hospital.That was the end of my desire to learn Martial Arts.

To quote Tom Clancy in his book Clear and Present Danger: “Armed combat beats unarmed combat every day.” Guns have always been the great equalizer when a less physical or less prepared individual is forced to fight against a superior opponent. And also the amount of training time required is much less than with unarmed combat plus the fact that while somebody with a handicap would be hard pressed to apply difficult katas for self-defense, firearms manipulation is a rather simple mechanical enterprise.

There is this stupid sense of superiority that somebody is morally better if he or she goes through life’s challenges completely unarmed and should solve the problem of a violent offender by placing some good karate chops on him like we see in the movies. Unfortunately life thrives on reality where the Bad Guy will cheat to win and you need every resource to beat him at his game. There is no moral victory in laying dead on a morgue table, just sadness.

So, get your gun, practice, take defensive classes which will train you not only to shoot but to develop the proper mental stance not only to survive an encounter but also how to avoid them altogether. Forget about kimonos and tatamis and bowing to your opponent as means for self preservation, you wanna live at the end of the fight.

In defense Ms. Olevsky I have to add that she did point out something important and I quote: “Do this today, don’t wait until you could be attacked. Be prepared, not scared.”

Got rid of the Cutline theme. I needed to take classes on whatever the hell is you need to learn to make the damned About Page work and I got tired of trying to figure it out.

I’ll clean this one and re arrange it a bit later.

Obama says that we do not need to stock up…suuuure bubba, we believe you. And the check is in the mail and I’ll respect you in the morning and call you tomorrow. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, we need not to worry because the Great and Powerful Ozmaba says:

“I believe in common-sense gun safety laws, and I believe in the second amendment,” Obama said at a news conference. “Lawful gun owners have nothing to fear. I said that throughout the campaign. I haven’t indicated anything different during the transition. I think people can take me at my word.”

Yep! Those pesky “common-sense” gun laws that have worked so magnificently in Chicago which now is the most crime free city in the United States, right? No murders at all in the Windy City, everybody is free and happy, while the birds are singing and the sun shines beautifully even at midnight during those basketball games in the inner city. I know, I know, enough with the sarcasm.

It irks me that Obama, disciples and minions thinks we are stupid. Peter Hamm, Propaganda Meister for the Brady Campaign against Gun Violence (also known as Brady Campaign to Save Jobs for Criminals and Guarantee Murderers get Fresh Victims Every Day) even displays his ignorance in a quote from the same article:

“Anyone who thinks they need to rush out and buy a firearm clearly has not been paying attention to how quickly we make progress on this issue. We don’t think these are first-time buyers. We think they are people who already have more than enough guns at their homes to protect themselves and are buying more.”

Peter, Oh buddy of mine. Civil Rights do not come with an “enough” clause. My right to defend myself against criminals do not have to be subjected to what a Washington or Chicago flunkie determines to be enough.  And dictating what is enough private property is the mark of the socialist worldwide, specially when they are ready to take such property from the hands of the Citizens under the excuse of the Common Good.

I guess we know where you guys are common from…. then again we knew that already and that is why we are stocking up.

Mumbai photographer: I wish I’d had a gun, not a camera. Armed police would not fire back

This a headline and pictures that are been published around the world. Terrorist attacking the  Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminal railway station in Mumbai, India, doing their deed completely unchallenged and the the sad lament of the photographer who realized he could do nothing more than being a good witness instead of stopping the massacre.

Although we hope an attack like this never happens in the US, the sad truth is that we cannot depend on hope and wishful thinking. And we cannot depend on government to save our lives. The terrorists in Mumbai initially targeted anything that was uniformed or visibly carried a weapon and then started on the civilians so the government sponsored “protection” was neutralized at the beginning of the attack. The rest was just a literal excursion into finding the most appropriate/desirable/random victim to be executed on the spot.

When I saw the first picture, my first reaction was of surprise at how nonchalant the terrorist were behaving. But it makes sense when you realize that they were unopposed in a target-rich environment. The second thought that went through my mind was: “Shooter, Do you understand the Course of Fire? Shooter ready, Stand By! (beep).”

For the benefits of those who got lost in the last sentence, that expression is the final questions & warnings that an IDPA shooters hears at competitions just before engaging targets.  And although we shoot paper targets that do not shoot back and these idiots were carrying & shooting AKs, they were easy prey for any IDPA, IPSC, ICORE, SASS or any competition shooter with barely six matches under his or her belt.  Somebody with a basic training in sidearms could have stopped two islamofacist in their unholy tracks.

Yet we hear that our leaders want to make all areas of mass transportation Gun Free Zones and not just those deemed sterile by federal law. In other words, they want to increase the tract of unprotected, target-rich environment for terrorists under the pretense on making us safer. If they have not figured out with Mumbai that those regulations beacons that attarct the criminal and the derranged, we will be facing many more of these government-sponosred massacres in the future.