All posts by correia45

On College Students with guns – A blog response

33 Comments

I just received this comment on my post about how Utah’s college students are smarter than Oklahoma’s and I believe I need to devote an entire post to this issue. 

I am a student at the University of Oklahoma and if anyone was allowed
to carry a concealed weapon, I would go somewhere else. I feel very
safe here and if it went into effect that anyone could have a gun, I would
feel like I could get shot at any time. Why not instead of letting
more people carry around guns we make STRICTER gun laws that dont LET
people like Seung-Hui Cho able to BUY the gun in the first place. AND he
wasnt even supposed to be able to buy a gun!

This came in from somebody named Elizibeth. 

Elizibeth, please allow me to respond to this in depth.  I’m going to try and be polite, and I’m going to try to explain my reasoning to you.

I am a student at the University of Oklahoma and if anyone was allowed
to carry a concealed weapon, I would go somewhere else. 

As should be your right to choose who you wish to associate with.  However, people like me are not who you need to be worried about.  I believe that if you knew how many of your fellow Oklahomans around you, every single day of your life, were armed, your head would pop.  My average student looks nothing at all like a stereotypical redneck/hick/hillbilly/gun nut.  My average student looks like your mom, your dad, your teachers, your friends, your accountant, your lawyer, your dentist, your flight-attendant, your dish-washer, your plumber, your librarian, and the guy that mows your lawn. 

We’re not nuts.  We’re not crazy, nor evil.  What are we?  Normal, everyday people who’ve made the decision that we won’t be victims, and we’re not going to depend on others to protect us, when we’re perfectly capable to taking care of ourselves.  We’re average Americans who don’t feel like getting murdered for political convenience or the sheer logistical fact that the authorities can’t be everywhere, all the time, nor do we want them to be. 

I feel very safe here and if it went into effect that anyone could have a gun, I would
feel like I could get shot at any time.

Then you would be sadly mistaken.  Having permit holders around you doesn’t make you anymore likely to get shot.  In fact, your odds of getting randomly shot go way the heck up in states that have the very strictist of all gun laws. 

Let me break this down for you.  My people aren’t the problem. 

Normal, sane, background-check-passing regular folks don’t normally whip out their concealed firearms and start blasting for no good reason.  There are literally MILLIONS of us around the US that legally carry guns every day.  Yet how many news stories can you find where a legal permit holder did something really stupid.  If you search, really, really, really hard you can come up with a couple, (believe me, I teach this stuff for a living, I get to hear about all of the morons) but even then the rate of permit holders getting in trouble with the law is way lower than the average population.

Well here’s your problem right here.  I FEEL SAFE.  The sad fact is, you can get shot at any time.  If I was a bonafide psychopath, dedicated to getting my 15 minutes of fame by shooting up a college, I would do it.  A real bad guy could walk right into your classroom, and shoot you, and there’s just about nothing you could do about it…

Unless maybe you, or somebody else in that room somehow had the ability to fight back.  Now isn’t that one heck of a neat concept?

Why not instead of letting more people carry around guns we make STRICTER gun laws that dont LET
people like Seung-Hui Cho able to BUY the gun in the first place. AND he wasnt even supposed to be able to buy a gun!

Let me give you a hypothetical scenario.  I’m a total loser, scum-bag, whackadoo.  My goal in life is to make other’s miserable.  I’m a Class A Violent Criminal Actor.  My plan is to end my miserable life and a bunch of others by going to a place where innocent people are packed in like unnarmed herd animals, and shoot as many of them as possible, so I can be famous, and then either kill myself or get shot by the cops.

We don’t LET bad guys do anything.  Do you think for even a fraction of a second that the above bad guy is daunted at all because you’ve got a sign in front of your college that says “No Guns Allowed?”  He’s about to commit 60+ capital crimes, and then blow his brains out.  Damn, that extra felony stuck on there posthumeously sure is going dissuade the likes of him!

Negative. Laws mean nothing to the lawless.  That’s why they’re criminals.  It is already illegal to murder, rape, rob, or assault.  But they do.  Because that is what they are.  That is what they do.  Wishful thinking and signs mean nothing to evil. 

So, make it harder to get a gun?  Good luck with that.  The places in America that are the toughest to legally get guns in are flooded with illegal guns.  Out here in flyover country, we’re lousy with guns, but have low crime, and people are relatively polite.  I bet you I could buy an illegal gun in about fifteen minutes of touching down at La Guardia. 

Well, maybe if we just banned all guns!  Hey that’s an awesome idea.  Just like we banned drugs, and we can’t get those anymore.  Because you know, they’ve dug 5,000 foot long tunnels under the border, and bring across coke in units measured in the HUNDREDS OF TONS.  Smuggling weapons into this country would surely be impossible!

(not to mention that anybody with a tiny bit of chemical and mechanical knowledge can build a working gun in about 30 minutes, if you’re a student of history check out some of the things that various under-siege nations during WWII came up with in their basements)

Plus, if we did ban all guns, that works even better for criminal scum.  Man has visited violence upon man since the dawn of recorded history.  I’m 6’6″, weigh just shy of 300 pounds, and am pretty handy at visiting physical harm on others.  Ban guns, and criminals that look like me are going to have a friggin’ holiday.  See, because the ONLY thing that makes you even with some criminal that’s been lifting weights in prison for the last eight years is a gun. 

Guns are the equilizer.  I know it sounds cheesy, but if somebody wants to rape you to death, that equilizer is a mighty fine thing to have on hand.  Pepper spray, tasers, hand-to-hand skills, all valuable, but nothing in the world stops a threat like putting a bullet in it.  And trust me on this one, when you’re fighting for your life, all of time and the universe dialates down into one tiny thought – and that is that you will do ANYTHING to make the bad guy stop.  All you want in that horrible moment of truth is to live. 

This is what it comes down to.  Bad guys hurt people.  That’s what they do.  You can either prepare to face them, or you can delegate that to somebody else, i.e. the police.  But cops can’t be everywhere.  It’s impossible.   I love cops.  I train with them, work with them, and supply them with gear to protect themselves and others.  Ask an actual street-cop (not a political hack bureacrat) and I’m pretty sure he would much rather respond to a crime scene where a CCW holder shot a badguy, than the badguy got to go about his business raping and murdering until he popped himself in the brain.  Unless you got one of those powertripping idiot cops that think the sun rises and sets on their awesomeness, and nobody else in the room is professional enough to handle his Glock Fo’tay.

So, the question you’ve got to ask yourself is this… if a bad guy did walk into your classroom, would you A. rather have somebody like one of my people there, able to fight back,  OR  B. hide under your desk and pray to God that you’re not the next one to die?  Option B does allow you to have wishful thoughts about how the police will be here in any second, as you hear your friends and classmates choking to death on their own blood.

If you answer A.  Good for you.  If you answer B.  Sorry, you fail Darwinian Evolution 101.  The correct answer is C.  Get your own damn gun, and quit waiting around for somebody else to come save your ass.

But then you may say something about how violence never solves anything.  All I can say to that is I’ll have to check with all of recorded human history and get back to you.  WRONG. Violence solves everything.  It might not be the best answer, or the answer you want, but if you aren’t willing to step up to the plate, then somebody else will.  Then you lose, you die, he wins, and takes your stuff.   Cry me a river. 

You personally might not have the will to look another human being in the eyes, and take their life.  You might think it is somehow morally superior to die rather than take a life.  Well boo friggin’ hoo.  I don’t feel that way.  Nor do millions like me.  I don’t care what the bad guy’s problem is.  I don’t care if he’s got fetal alchohol syndrome, or his mother didn’t love him enough.  All I know is that I’m more important than some murderous scumbag, and I’m going to do whatever I have to do to come home alive to my wife and kids at the end of the night.  I can’t afford college pseudo-intellectual self-righteousness and philosophy classes that stink of hemp and patchooli oil, style discussions about the morality of violence.  I’m a father, and I’m going to protect myself and my family. 

We’ve tried your method of protecting ourselves, surrounding ourselves in a fence of laws, and then asking brave strangers to man up to defend us.  Your way has failed.  It has failed over and over and over again.  Yet every single time we have one of these mass shootings, your side says the same thing.  “If only we had this law!  If only we had another law!” 

Too bad.  The forces of evil spit on your laws. 

You cite Virginia Tech, yet VT was a prime example of why your idea is so deeply flawed.  Guns were not allowed there.  Hence the only man that was armed was the bad guy.  Your stance requires things like this to happen, because when your fence of pathetic laws gets inevitably trampled on, there is no last line of defense. 

You can either choose to protect your self with force, or with wishful thinking.  Even if you’re only plan is to call the cops, you’re just delegating your force to somebody else.  You’re begging somebody else, braver, and stronger, and more prepared that you to come protect you, because you don’t have the will to do it yourself. 

I call that hypocritical. 

Here, let me dismiss your other arguments in advance.  See, I’ve heard them all before.  “But a permit holder with a gun will just make it worse!” 

You cite VT.  What in the HELL could a permit holder do to make it worse?  The situation looks pretty f’d up to me already.  You can make up all sorts of far-fetched scenarios where permit holders will screw it up, but guess what?  They don’t exist.  You can make up any sort of horrid no-win situation you want.  That’s what your idiot boy-loving school president was doing before your state legislature of quislings and cowards. 

No.  We tried your way.  Your way sucks. 

It’s time to do it my way.    

I’m still training every Utah college student for free.  Every school employee, for free.  Come and see me.  I’m going to keep putting guns in school until every decent human being with the spine to defend themselves is ready. 

We don’t want to be heros.  We don’t want to use our guns.  Killing people sucks.  If I go the rest of my life and never have to pull my gun in fear ever again, I’ll be a happy man.  But in the meantime, I’m going to carry a gun to defend myself, and I’m going to help others to do so as well, because the stakes are too high, and our lives are more important than people like Cho or the other blighted souls like him. 

Sorry, Elizibeth, your way is done.

TALES OF THE GUNSTORE! Darwin Awards in the making.

18 Comments

 So yesterday we’re working at the gunshop when a couple of gentlemen come into the shop, wanting to buy some blackpowder.  I tell them that we don’t sell reloading supplies (yet).  I then start telling them where they can get some locally, or the best places to buy it online.

They say that they’re going to need hundreds of pounds of it, and they need it today.  I tell them that most places don’t stock that much on hand, and I then asked what they were doing. 

Well… it turns out that they just built a cannon.  It had a 2″ bore.  They told me that they were going to go shoot it today, and that since they needed 1/2 pound of blackpowder, PER SHOT, that it would add up pretty quick.

You know that sound that a record makes when it skips.  Yeah, I heard that noise in my brain.

“1/2 pound, per shot?”

“Yeah, that’s what somebody told us.” 

“Are you sure you’re not mixing up pounds and ounces?  Or maybe some other unit of measurement?”

“Nope.  This guy we saw at the range told us that’s what he loads his with.”

Okay, let me break this down for the non-physicists in the audience.  That’s enough powder to blow their cannon, and whoever’s setting it off, into smoking fragments of steel and meat.  I suggest that their measurement might be mistaken.  But nope, that’s what some guy at the range told them, so that’s what they were going to do.  Today.  As soon as they found some powder.

By the way, they ask, since they just built this thing, is it legal to have?  See, they weren’t really sure.

Well, I don’t know.  It’s a blackpowder cannon, so I knew they were different than modern Destructive Devices. So I get PvtPyle, because he’s the NFA expert.  They say that they’re not worried about it, because though they have it, they haven’t shot it yet, so just like a homemade machine gun, you can have it, just don’t shoot it.  (which by the way, isn’t how it works, at all, in fact mere possession of an unregistered machine gun or destructive device = a mandatory 10 years in prison). 

So not only had these guys home constructed a weapon that they weren’t even sure was legal, and they were about to load it with enough powder to kill them all, one of my regular customers started asking them about their design.  This regular customer actually knows about cannons. 

Apparently their design was backwards, and dangerous too.  The point that was susceptible to the highest pressures was made of the weakest materials. The Regular then pointed out that they would need to clear the barrel of residue after each shot, and they were like “Really?  We didn’t know that.”  Because you know, not blowing yourself up while you’re trying to load volitile explosives down a hot sparky bore is not really worthy of any forethought.

So PvtPyle gave them a breakdown of how destructive device laws work, and also pointed out what some of the grain weights were for various cannons.  I’m not really sure if any of this sank in at all. Partially because I’m pretty sure they had all been drinking.   Because nothing mixes with homemade, overloaded, ill-designed, questionably legal cannons, better than some Thunderbird.

They left, promising that they would actually do a little bit of research before shooting it. 

Wow.  Just… wow.