I’m not a big gun owner and I’m not part of the gun culture. So why, then, do I frequently post about the issue of gun control?
Mostly because I believe in freedom and the Constitution.
But I also appreciate facts and analysis and I know that law-abiding citizens are safer and criminals face greater obstacles when good people have the right of self defense.
Last but not least, I think there’s a non-trivial possibility that the United States will suffer some sort of social chaos and/or breakdown of law and order because of the damage caused by reckless fiscal and monetary policies. As I explain in this interview on NRA-TV, that’s when firearms ownership can mean the difference between life an death.
But now it’s time to get some analysis from Larry Correia, a real expert. Here’s some of his background, which may help explain why his article has been viewed more than 1,000,000 times and attracted about 2,500 comments.
I owned a gun store. …that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. …When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face. I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws… I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.
Here’s what he has to say about stopping massacres. In this section, he’s specifically talking about the value of armed teachers, but the message obviously applies more broadly.
The single best way to respond to a mass shooter is with an immediate, violent response. The vast majority of the time, as soon as a mass shooter meets serious resistance, it bursts their fantasy world bubble. Then they kill themselves or surrender. This has happened over and over again. Police are awesome. I love working with cops. However any honest cop will tell you that when seconds count they are only minutes away. …cops can’t be everywhere. There are at best only a couple hundred thousand on duty at any given time patrolling the entire country. Excellent response time is in the three-five minute range. We’ve seen what bad guys can do in three minutes, but sometimes it is far worse. …So in some cases that means the bad guys can have ten, fifteen, even twenty minutes to do horrible things with nobody effectively fighting back. So if we can’t have cops there, what can we do? The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by law enforcement: 14. The average number of people shot in a mass shooting event when the shooter is stopped by civilians: 2.5. The reason is simple. The armed civilians are there when it started.
In this passage, you can see that he’s not overly impressed by “gun-free zones.”
Gun Free Zones are hunting preserves for innocent people. Period. Think about it. You are a violent, homicidal madman, looking to make a statement and hoping to go from disaffected loser to most famous person in the world. The best way to accomplish your goals is to kill a whole bunch of people. So where’s the best place to go shoot all these people? Obviously, it is someplace where nobody can shoot back.
Sort of the same message as this humorous video.
In all honesty, I have no respect for anybody who believes Gun Free Zones actually work. You are going to commit several hundred felonies, up to and including mass murder, and you are going to refrain because there is a sign? That No Guns Allowed sign is not a cross that wards off vampires. It is wishful thinking, and really pathetic wishful thinking at that.
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the Aurora theatre was a gun-free zone.
The man that attacked the midnight showing of Batman didn’t attack just any theater. There were like ten to choose from. He didn’t attack the closest. It wasn’t about biggest or smallest. He attacked the one that was posted NO GUNS ALLOWED. …Over the last fifty years, with only one single exception (Gabby Giffords), every single mass shooting event with more than four casualties has taken place in a place where guns were supposedly not allowed.
He then deals with the issue of “semi-automatic” weapons. He first explains that these weapons are not machine guns, notwithstanding the inane/biased commentary in the press.
Semi-automatic means that each time you pull the trigger the action cycles and loads another round. This is the single most common type of gun, not just in America, but in the whole world. Almost all handguns are semi-automatic. The vast majority of weapons used for self-defense are semi-automatic, as are almost all the weapons used by police officers. It is the most common because it is normally the most effective.
Anti-gun zealots often use “assault rifle” as a pejorative, and they probably are similarly clueless in thinking that such weapons are machine guns. Correia addresses some of the specific issues of these weapons.
…real assault rifles in the US have been heavily regulated since before they were invented. The thing that the media and politicians like to refer to as assault rifles is basically a catch all term for any gun which looks scary. …The US banned assault rifles once before for a decade and the law did absolutely nothing. I mean, it was totally, literally pointless. …And the reason was that since assault weapon is a nonsense term, they just came up with a list of arbitrary features which made a gun into an assault weapon. Problem was, none of these features actually made the gun functionally any different or somehow more lethal or better from any other run of the mill firearm. Most of the criteria were so silly that they became a huge joke to gun owners, except of course, for that part where many law abiding citizens accidentally became instant felons because one of their guns had some cosmetic feature which was now illegal.
Here are a couple of examples he discusses.
Does this make a gun more dangerous?
For example, flash hiders sound dangerous. …Problem is flash hiders don’t do much. They screw onto the end of your muzzle and divert the flash off to the side instead of straight up so it isn’t as annoying when you shoot. It doesn’t actually hide the flash from anybody else. …Barrel shrouds were listed.Barrel shrouds are basically useless, cosmetic pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch it and burn your hand. But they became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. …Now are you starting to see why “assault weapons” is a pointless term? They aren’t functionally any more powerful or deadly than any normal gun. In fact the cartridges they normally fire are far less powerful than your average deer hunting rifle.
One of the big issues in the gun-control debate is whether there should be limits on the number of rounds in a magazines.
…why do gun owners want magazines that hold more rounds? Because sometimes you miss. Because usually—contrary to the movies—you have to hit an opponent multiple times in order to make them stop. Because sometimes you may have multiple assailants. We don’t have more rounds in the magazine so we can shoot more, we have more rounds in the magazine so we are forced to manipulate our gun less if we have to shoot more. …ten rounds sucks when you take a wound ballistics class like I have and go over case after case after case after case of enraged, drug addled, prison hardened, perpetrators who soaked up five, seven, nine, even fifteen bullets and still walked under their own power to the ambulance. That isn’t uncommon at all. …Also, you’re going to miss. It is going to happen. If you can shoot pretty little groups at the range, those groups are going to expand dramatically under the stress and adrenalin. …or the bad guy may end up hiding behind something which your bullets don’t penetrate. Nobody has ever survived a gunfight and then said afterwards, “Darn, I wish I hadn’t brought all that extra ammo.” So having more rounds in the gun is a good thing for self-defense use.
He then responds to the assertion that magazine limits will make life more difficult for bad guys.
…he’s not going to walk up right next to you while he reloads anyway. Unlike the CCW holder who gets attacked and has to defend himself in whatever crappy situation he finds himself in, the mass shooter is the aggressor. He’s picked the engagement range. They are cowards who are murdering running and hiding children, but don’t for a second make the mistake of thinking they are dumb. Many of these scumbags are actually very intelligent. They’re just broken and evil. In the cases that I’m aware of where the shooter had guns that held fewer rounds they just positioned themselves back a bit while firing or they brought more guns, and simply switched guns and kept on shooting, and then reloaded before they moved to the next planned firing position. Unless you are a fumble fingered idiot, anybody who practices in front of a mirror a few dozen times can get to where they can insert a new magazine into a gun in a few seconds.
So what will happen if the government imposes a new magazine restriction?
Magazines are cheap and basic. Most of them are pieces of sheet metal with some wire. That’s it. Magazines are considered disposable so most gun people accumulate a ton of them. All [the 10-round limit] did was make magazines more expensive, ticked off law abiding citizens, and didn’t so much as inconvenience a single criminal. …So you can ban this stuff, but it won’t actually do anything to the crimes you want to stop.
Correia closes with some remarks on the importance of self defense.
…the vast majority of the time when a gun is produced in a legal self-defense situation no shots are fired. The mere presence of the gun is enough to cause the criminal to stop. Clint Smith once said if you look like food, you will be eaten. Criminals are looking for prey. They are looking for easy victims. If they wanted to work hard for a living they’d get a job. So when you pull a gun, you are no longer prey, you are work, so they are going to go find somebody else to pick on.
Which then brings us back to the key question: If gun control does nothing to stop bad guys, and it makes life more dangerous for good people, why do so many politicians want to undermine our constitutional rights?
I don’t think American politicians have the same evil motives as some of the world’s most reprehensible dictators, all of whom supported gun control as a way of controlling – and in many cases slaughtering – their people.
Indeed, I suspect some of them simply are unaware of the facts that Mr. Correia provides in the article.
Last month, I posted an article by a leftist who openly admitted that gun control was impractical. Our goal should be to help more people on the left reach this logical conclusion.
But since life shouldn’t be totally serious, here’s some gun control humor – including links to several additional jokes about the issue.