Gun Free Zone

Twitter discussion with a lady regarding the mythical Gun Show Loop and the applicable laws:

She is either over by two or short by five 😀

A suspected shoplifter was reportedly shot and killed by an off-duty deputy in a Texas Walmart parking lot on Thursday.

via Walmart Shoplifting Suspect Allegedly Shot, Killed By Off-Duty Deputy At Houston Store (VIDEO).

“ZOMG! That animal! He just shot somebody for stealing a pair of SpongeBob socks!” That is the impression that the Huffpo wants to convey. Of course later in the article we find out a  bit more of what happened:

“At that point, the deputy opened the door and commanded the driver to stop,” Deputy Thomas Gilliland told the news agency. “She put it in drive, revving forward, dragging the deputy. The deputy discharged his weapon. The vehicle then fled,” he continued.

If you attack anybody with a car, it is assault with a deadly weapon. One has to wonder why the title is slanted that way.

I believe that we have a crop of less than desirable firearms instructors out there. Some are famous/notorious either teaching stuff that has no application in the real world or will get you in trouble. Even for most decent and some good instructors, their teachings stop when you achieve a certain proficiency in grouping shots on demand. This is not bad at all, but also represents incomplete training for civilians unless emphasis has been made on  continuing their education on the parts they do not cover such as the legality of a deadly force situation. It does not absolve the student either: you took the responsibility to carry a gun and you should understand by now that a problem started by somebody else (the criminal) does not end when you use your firearm but that is only the end of Act 1 with Act 2 (police investigation) and Act 3 (Legal process) to follow.

Also gone are the typical Gunnie crowd. We now deep into what is called Gun Culture 2.0, urban and suburban dwellers that have no experience or interest in attending some sort of boot camp for overgrown boys and do not have the time or money to waste in such. Include in that culture people coming into years whose health and body stamina is not what it used to be and recoil at the pictures of some training facility website offering to take you on their weekend version of Hell Week. A smart instructor will recognize that these potato couch gun owners (me being one) or Moms with a mini van do not need to be excellent at vehicle counter ambush techniques against multiple AK-toting terrorists and will tailor the class to a more realistic carjacking scenario as they might find themselves involved during a trip to the mall.

So basically, if you as an instructor go for the whole Super Warrior Bushido Ninja Hooah thing for Average Urban Joe, two things may happen: you will lose customer and those who take your class and might end up having to explain to a jury why they felt they needed to attend a “Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out” class.

I want to talk about the last part in particular. If you have been somewhat serious about training for a while now, the name James Yeager is not a surprise for you. He has a story running about his past that I do not know if it happened or not and I’ll let you find out on your own. But what I can attest to is what he is doing right now and it is what many people call his douchebag behavior up and including dueling him.

Now imagine if you took classes with Yeager and by unfortunate coincidence you get in a use of deadly force encounter that, for whatever reason, the district attorney decides it should be taken for full trial. If the DA has any active brain cells, a deep check on your background will be made and it will include what kind of firearms training do you have. I am not saying that having taking classes with Yeager will be the final nail in your legal coffin, but it surely cannot help your cause that the jury should see the Youtube rants of your former instructor trying to pick a fight with half the Internet and maybe think some of his aggression might have absorbed by you.

If you are an instructor, be professional, understand what it may happen to a student if he is forced to use your training and adapt your class accordingly. If you are a student, do your due diligence and find those instructors that will either cover what may happen after the shooting is done or encourage you to seek further training and advice on the legal aspects of self-defense.

Don’t be a douche bag or train with them.

UPDATE: A Reader was kind enough to send me this little and very illustrative booklet in PDF file.

From the booklet

Initially, Nicolini grilled Hickey about the concepts and principles Yeager taught him, using notes and handouts from classes, and later he went over the same material with the instructor himself, discussing avoidance, de-escalation, gunfight tactics and many of Yeager’s similes, acronyms and catchy phrases – tools that the instructor used to help students remember important principles.
Alarmingly, out of context advice from instructors to “always cheat; always win,” and the axiom that one should treat every one else in a polite manner while simultaneously having a plan to kill them painted an inaccurate picture about Hickey’s outlook on life. Nicolini harvested these quotes from the training notes and handouts, and made much hay with them, especially during his closing arguments in which he described Hickey in highly inflammatory terms.

And to a certain degree, most of us have used those catch-phrases.

Oh the Horror! We Gun Owners are gagging Free Speech! That is pretty much the summary of Timothy Egan’s rant “The Great Gun Gag.”

I love that the first thing he does is to accuse republicans and Gun Owners of believing in evil conspiracies and then he goes on to rant about his version of gagging the conversation about gun control. But then he gets even better:

The most armed society in the world, ranked first among 179 nations in the rate of gun ownership, had 9,146 gun homicides in 2009. The same year, Canada had 173. But don’t bring that up.

How come you don’t bring Gun Free Zone Brazil with 40,974 homicides and one-third fewer people? Maybe because it would ruin your narrative? Make you look like a liar?

In Florida, it was against the law — until the law was blocked by a federal judge last summer — for hospital doctors to even ask about firearms ownership of victims, even though gunshot wounds account for 1 in 25 emergency room visits.

Even though the law never blocked a doctor to ask about guns in cases of dire emergency, it seems rather silly to include ER visits in the paragraph. If you are an ER doctor and you cannot figure out what a gun shot wound looks like, you better start a productive career in podiatry soonish.

Conservatives complain about anti-free-speech vigilantes who keep incendiary voices of the right from being heard on college campuses, and they have a valid point. But some of these same First Amendment defenders are the first to smother any talk about the American weapons culture. The gun gag rules.

We smother any talk about guns? How so? Or is it that your version of the First Amendment is that you get to say whatever you want and nobody can disagree with you or even think about voicing an opinion? Just because you write for a paper or are a famous broadcaster or are some sort of celebrity in the latest incarnation of Dancing Like a Fool means you cannot be challenged on what you say? I think you have been operating under the First Amendment Rules For Selected Few playbook which only exists in your mind.

Costas made his brief remarks at halftime of the Sunday night game. Within minutes, the censors went after him.

Censors went after Costas? Really? Is that a new specialty of Homeland Security that we haven’t heard? Was he arrested, thrown in the back of a patrol car and ended up in prison like Pussy Riot in Russia? Was he beaten up, tortured and killed like the journalists covering the Mexican Drug Wars? No, he got a backlash via Twitter and other social media. What kind of wuss chug antidepressants and think about applying for Workman’s Compensation because a post (or a thousand) in Facebook are negative to something he said? For the love of God, put on your Big Boy undies and Man Up! Real journalists are getting killed in the world covering real stories and this two whining idiots are complaining about their feeling being hurt because somebody told them to shut up.

So, to Bob Costas and Timothy Egan: Grow a pair. If you want to play with the big dogs, you cannot pee like a puppy. The era of saying what you wanted to say without having to hear back from your audience died long ago. You must face the fact that everything you write or say in your “official capacity” will be subjected to inspection by millions of editors and fact-checkers.

And the best part is that we won’t even touch a hair of Bob Costas’ toupee to do our jobs.

NFL players aren’t ready to give any ground on their belief that carrying guns is not only a right but, in their world, a necessity. Indeed, numerous players told USA TODAY Sports that in their estimation, roughly three-quarters of NFL players owned guns, compared with 40% to 45% of households in the general population, according to the National Rifle Association.

via NFL players: Three out of four own guns.

Bob is not having a good week, is he? I wonder what kind of spin CSGV will put on this little factoid. Probably that if there was not for the NRA allowing mass murderers to buy antiaircraft artillery, NFL players would not feel the need to protect themselves with guns.

Infographic – What’s Your Shooter Face? | Julie Golob.

Truth be told, except the Gamer face, I think I do all of them. More likely I switch between Happy Go Lucky and Panic with a dash of Dazed.