Posted on 01/27/2011 7:30:05 AM PST by DCBryan1
Cultists now in charge
Gene Lyons
Some years ago, I reported on a self-defense/gun-safety class mainly for women at Rice University.
There had been several forcible rapes on the Houston, Texas, campus. Students had armed themselves. The instructor was an Army ROTC officer. A Vietnam combat veteran, he found the prospect of undergraduates packing heat unsettling, but reasoned that if they were arming themselves anyway, some training was better than none. Unlike many entrepreneurs teaching concealed-carry classes from sea to shining sea, he urged students to leave their guns at home. He stressed that he couldn’t turn them into infantry soldiers with a few sessions in a gym basement. Even most armed assailants, he explained, aren’t hell-bent upon murder. They use weapons to control their victims.
Anybody pulling a gun must shoot to kill without hesitation. The soldier reasoned that most Rice students simply weren’t prepared to do that; hence, the likeliest outcome was that criminals would end up murdering them with their own guns. Heightened awareness, avoiding lonely places at night and pepper spray or Mace would afford more safety than the illusion of power conveyed by a 9 mm semi-automatic.
Our instructor further advised that shotguns are the weapon of choice for home defense. Unlike a heavycaliber handgun, a shotgun will put an intruder out of business without a bullet passing through a wall and killing a sleeping child.
He emphasized that anybody suspecting a nighttime home invasion should first perform a thorough bed check—a procedure that saved me from potential catastrophe one night after my teen-age son and a friend sneaked out to howl at the moon under a maiden’s window at 2 a.m., leaving an open back door and a halfdozen beagles running through the house.
Creeping back home, the lads overheard me shucking shells from my 20-gauge pump, an unmistakably chilling sound. Fearing that burglars had taken us hostage, they were subsequently apprehended in headlong flight up the street. They’d been running for help, they explained.
Would I have shot an unknown intruder? I believe so. I’m also glad I’ve never had to face the choice. Killing a human being, almost regardless of provocation, is nothing like hunting game. Never mind legal peril. Contrary to action/adventure films, psychological fallout can be severe.
Anyway, we students next proceeded to the firing range for lessons in loading, unloading and blasting paper targets.
“If you can point your finger,” I wrote, “you can learn to kill,” an observation that annoyed almost as many gun fanciers as this column will. Maybe I should have said that I was already fairly good with a shotgun and had spent half my life aiming balls at things.
Anyway, here’s the thing: In the wake of the Tucson tragedy, handgun advocates argue that a well-armed private citizen could have saved lives by putting a decisive end to a gunman’s mad act. Never mind that Arizona has the most permissive gun laws in the country. Indeed, no laws had been broken until U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head at pointblank range.
Ah, but there was an armed bystander. His name is Joe Zamudio, and he bravely helped subdue Jared Loughner without firing a shot. But Zamudio has admitted how close he came to shooting the heroic retired Army colonel who reportedly wrested the pistol from the alleged shooter’s hands when he paused to reload. Thanks to a 30-round ammo clip, he had gotten off 31 shots in 15 seconds. Fifteen seconds! Everything was chaos and terror.
In Hollywood films, shoot-outs are carefully choreographed. Villains can’t shoot; heroes rarely miss. Nobody panics. Melodramatic violence metes out justice and redeems the world.
In reality, as Americans seem fated to experience again and again without learning anything:
A gunman walks into a Detroit police station and shoots four cops before himself being killed.
Two cops serving a warrant in St. Petersburg, Fla., are killed and a U.S. marshal wounded by a suspect who escapes.
Two sheriff’s deputies are shot at a Wal-Mart near Seattle before a third officer kills their assailant, whose motives remain unknown.
A policeman in Waldport, Ore., is shot by an unknown assailant during a routine traffic stop. He remains in critical condition.
At another routine stop, an Indianapolis cop is shot four times, twice in the face. He’s in critical condition, too.
All of these events occurred within 24 hours between Jan. 23 and 24.
It’s worth emphasizing that the 11 victims were trained, experienced law enforcement officers. But their assailants, who’d found semi-automatic weapons easier to acquire than whiskey, gave them no chance.
Meanwhile, National Rifle Association fundamentalists pretend that America will be a freer, safer place if more poorly trained, inexperienced, unfit, would-be Bruce Willis heroes were waddling around shopping malls carrying pistols.
There’s a word for people who cling to absurd beliefs against massive evidence. They’re called cultists, and they’re currently in charge.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.
“A guy with a .22 got a bunch of people and had them line up and wait for their bullet to the back of the head. “
Va Tech shooter. Nobody stood up to him, they just lined up like sheep (this is what the firearms instructor recommends). The only guy that tried to do anything was a 70-year old holocaust survivor and he saved a bunch of lives.
I’m not the toughest guy in the world but I’ll be danged if I’m gonna stand there and wait my turn to take a bullet.
Like I said, waiting for it in the back of the head is about the only way you will get a guaranteed kill shot.
Whoever recommends compliance with a gunman is an absolute idiot and should NEVER be involved in instructing the public on safety.
You are safer running towards or away from the gun than in compliance with the gunman.
I mean when he is going down the line and kills the first three people, and you are the fourth.......
The psychology of the situation is just amazing to me.
“The psychology of the situation is just amazing to me.”
Me, too.
I will say, though, that many people freeze in a situation like that. Their mind turns off.
I believe the reason is that they have not thought through in their mind what they would do in that situation, which is what most self-defense courses (with or without guns) teach.
I had Karate classes from 12-14. I never knew just how much it was ingrained in me until years later I was blocking punching and putting a guy in an arm lock without even thinking about it.
That is why “training” someone to comply with a gunman is so idiotic. Train them to run away, or run towards; never comply.
Thanks! I signed up in 2000, “Lurkedalot” before that but the greeting is still appreciated.
It was both a leap of faith and a dream fulfilled to get out that pit (and even worse I was in SANTA CRUZ!!!) but one I won’t regret. It’s beautiful out here, people have manners and mean it...I could go on and on. LOL I almost felt like a felon walking out of Academy Sporting Goods w/13ers for my G21SF.
I feel like I live in America again
I actually do believe this guy was a former military/cop man.
Many start to see the world as a “Us vs Them” type thing. The idea of a civilian armed is shocking and a threat.
> Cultists now in charge (Guns cost more lives than they save)
Your bodyguards disarm first, ok?
Crickets from the hyper-hypocritical Left.
Unreasonably high bar.
"Better than a cop" should be achievable.
Yea he is. I do not read his articles. Full of bull.
Dissect one or two for us dullards? This Lyons item, is,
BTW a classic of the genre.
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