A Gun Free Zone is a bad contract issued between yourself and some other entity in which you agree to forgo any attempt to defend yourself while in the area defined by this “contract” while the other side will not provide you with a decent system to protect you in case of trouble. If you were to have the means to protect yourself while in a Gun Free Zone, you will be prosecuted and probably found guilty of breaching the original agreement. A Gun Free Zone could be a school, a post office, a county, a state or the whole country. It is an ever expanding concept which promises the moon over starry eyes.

Let’s make it simpler: You body has what it is called an immune system. This is an integrated body system of organs, tissues, cells, and cell products such as antibodies that differentiates self from nonself and neutralizes potentially pathogenic organisms or substances. Basically it is an armory dedicated to fight things that might kill you such as bacteria, microbes, virus, parasites, etc. Some people either by sickness (Like AIDS), by treatment (Radiation therapy) or by genetics (Primary immunodeficiencies, think The Boy in the Bubble) lack this defensive system which makes them prone to infections and death. Your body has an array of amazing weapons: White Cells, T-Cells, Lymphocytes, B-Lymphocytes and a whole slew of guns and ammo dedicated  to protect you. Any living organism that wants to hurt you, will face no mercy from these weapons. And of course, we have antibiotics and other medications which we take to help our body combat these invaders. Basically we pull no punches when our body is threatened with sicknesses.

Now, your family doctor or the Secretary of Health and Human Services comes to you and tells you must give up your immune system and that it would make us all safe by doing so. They would promise that the best doctors would be roaming the streets just one phone call away in case you develop an emergency such a a cold or a cut that might need to be treated. Or if you wish, you just could go to a local hospital and file a complain about the infection and wait to be treated for that ferocious tetanus that attacked you and let the wheels of Medical Gov take your case. And by the way, you will have no say on the issue of countering an infection because we will make it against the law for you to have immune system. Possession of White Cells or any other body component aimed to defeat dangerous microorganisms without the proper and state-given authorization will be harshly punished.  Oh! And by the way, I must inform you that the Supreme Court determined that We The Government have No Duty to Treat You so you cannot sue us or penalize us in any way in case of sickness or death.

Sounds absolutely stupid and downright absurd, right? Yet we are asked to give up our guns in order to be “safe” under the care of the Government but without any guarantee of security at all. We are told we must shed our means to fight against a criminal if we are in these areas just because a group of lawmakers decided we are better off following a law that no criminal or deranged individual must follow. And yet many people think this is a good and logical thing!

Armed robbery at a Starbucks located inside of the University of Miami. UM is a Gun Free Zone, but apparently nobody informed the Bad Guys of this decision.  I wonder if the robbery would have happened with a shop full of Open Carry people but at least we can tell Brady and Co. that a Gun Free Starbucks is not so safe & secure after all.

By the way, in the same news item I found something interesting. After Virginia Tech, Universities decided that the best way to deal with major crimes and specially incidents like an Active Murderous Shooter was to warn everybody via email & text messages. I am not shocked to see that the system is used for “very important stuff”:

“It’s a little bit shocking,because usually when we get crime alerts, it’s either a test or something minor like somebody snatching an iPod“

Cry wolf and all of that….

UPDATE: Perps caught! It was an inside job where an employee left the door open so the accomplices could come in and clean the till. Again the one thing that called my attention was the reaction of the students:

UM student Gemma Shields noted, “I think it’s really terrible. It’s really shocking that we’re on campus, and something like this is happening where we’re supposed to be secure.”

That what they said at Virginia Tech too.

This is what I found this morning going in my local hospital for the yearly blood work up.This particular hospital had signs up some 4 years ago but took them down. I was happy that they were not buying into the fake “feeling good & safe through signs” granola manure, but it seems there must be a new sheriff or moron in charge.

Oh well.

Daniel White writes an excellent piece about the futility of a military Gun Free Zone in Lessons from Fort Hood Shooting.

So I am on this new place after I and about a hundred plus other got sacked. The new place is very close to my house so I’ll be saving oodles in gas plus wear and tear on the vehicle (10 miles daily versus 50 at the old place) and I can use the saved traveling time for personal use. I am working 11 pm to 7 am in a HUGE empty place with less than stellar fellow Security Officers that fit the Hollywood profile of the Security Guard from a cheap movie. To be fair, almost everybody in all shifts look the part and it is kinda scary.

Bad news, this place has a great cash flow which is about to increase soon, it is located at the border of one of the worst Miami neighborhoods and it is a Gun Free Zone. So what else is new? During the interview I made a point in letting them know I was a firearms instructor and a competitive shooter so it wouldn’t be a surprise later. The interviewer was quick to point out that no guns were allowed on property for everybody’s safety to which I made the appropriate agreement noises and assured him I would follow the rules which I do. It was funny to see his face get tight at the announcement and then trying to be cool about it. You can always tell a Non-Gun person trying to appease you and sound professional when they are about to crap their pants at the thought of possibly having an armed redneck in front of them. The fact that I am a spic, I look like one and sound like one seems to disappear and I suddenly become whiter than Clorox and develop a heavy Southern twang after I mention guns.

Oh well. I am following Florida’s law to a tee. That is a consolation.

So I will soon be joining the millions out there without a job. Amazingly enough, rather than bad times almost everybody at my hotel is being sacked because the hotel is going into renovations. The sheer stupidity of shutting down right before the tourist season with at least three major conventions coming to the area during the same season and leaving over a hundred people without jobs has not ran well with the working bees. Hell, people are pissed off and they are vocal about it leaving me wondering if somebody may actually work out his/her anger into a full revenge mode.

Of course the same management that made the decision of sacrificing the goose of the golden eggs has prepared itself in the event of a really pissed-off worker deciding to use them as target practice with the poster pictured above which details how to respond to an active shooter. Also some cute card-sized instructions have been passed along so you can pull you bifocals and read them as soon as you hear the detonations. That and 911 is pretty much all the permitted defense we are entitled to in a Gun Free Zone because as sure a Christ made little apples, Security (Me and my fellow officers) is not going to risk becoming a receptacle of bullets for anybody at work. Callous? you betcha but I kinda value my life first and foremost and unarmed heroics make for a nice obituary and a widow but not much else.

Thankfully in Florida we are allowed to have our weapons secured in our vehicles at work. Not that it will make a whole lot difference if I happen to be one of the first unlucky ones that face an active shooter but if I am spared of the initial volley, I can always make a bee line for the parking lot, retrieve my sidearm and take a defensive posture (And you thought I was going for the heroic shit and save the day? Nope!) It was my custom to leave my vehicle keys in the locker so I would not lose them during the active shift, but after the announcement that we were out, I carry them with me all times. I also try to park as accessible as possible to the work area and my awareness of everything and everybody has grown  a hundered-fold. Still it is a incomplete solution to a serious compounded problem created by silly job and legal politics. Then again it will be over in 2 weeks. Till then, prayer is in the procedures instead of a gun.

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.