Yesterday during an appearance on MSNBC's Hardball, MAIG Director Mark Glaze suggested fighting back against someone wielding an axe with an intent on serious doing harm....with your fists. His larger argument was that unless an attacker has a gun, a victim doesn't have right to shoot that attacker with a gun of their own in self-defense. Thanks to the Washington Free Beacon for the transcript:
MARK GLAZE: Very often somebody will come at you. They might want to have a fistfight. They might come at you with an axe handle.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Would you consider the guy with the axe handle armed or not?
MARK GLAZE: Not with a gun.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I would consider him armed [laughter].
MARK GLAZE: I have a word for him. I grew up in Colorado where my dad was a gun dealer, and a guy who shoots somebody who has anything other than a gun when they could have done something else like talk or fight with their fists –
CHRIS MATTHEWS: How do you talk to a guy with an axe handle?
MARK GLAZE: Well, you fight him. You run away. You deescalate the situation.
I'd like to remind Glaze that hammers, clubs, hands and feet are used as deadly weapons in a number of homicide cases each year. Why is this signficant? Because it proves criminals don't need a gun to kill or severely injure someone. It is important to also point out FBI uniform crime reports show violent crime has been cut in half since 1992. The murder rate has decreased by 54 percent since 1992. Why? More law abiding citizens are carrying guns.
To address the point made by the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart, who asks "how do you define" when someone feels they are in imminent danger of bodily harm or death, that is an individaul's choice to make at the time of an incident. After an incident occurs, the justice system takes over. Who is Capehart or any bureaucrat to decide just how serious a situation really is? His statement reminds me of when Colorado Democratic Rep. Joe Salazar said that women "don't really know" when they're going to be raped.
It's irresponsible "advice" like this from Glaze that has caused mayors around the country to leave Bloomberg's anti-gun group in droves.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group Mayors Against Illegal Guns is finding it hard to keep its membership up, thanks to dozens of resignations and lost elections over the last few months.
Worse for Bloomberg, who has become one of the faces of the gun control movement: the people replacing his lost comrades aren’t particularly eager to sign up with the organization, a rare group battling in the trenches against the well-organized and deep-pocketed National Rifle Association. Some appear not quite to have signed on for that level of political heat.