Countering The Myths of Gun Violence

As I was preparing this article, I realized that a lot of what I wanted to say had already been written…after the Sandy Hook murders, San Bernardino, Southerland Springs, Pulse Nightclub, Charleston, Parkland and others.  They are absolutely horrible, but the only reason why they’re unusual and shocking is because we choose to close our eyes to the reality of life around the globe and throughout history.  And as long as we continue to think that we’re special and that this kind of thing only happens here, we’re going to be ill-prepared to deal with the issues that surround mass murders.

And this lack of perspective makes the general public as well as legislators easy prey for bills like HR8, passed by the house this week, that creates a defacto gun registry, prevents loaning guns to friends or relatives, prevents safe storage of guns with friends/relatives while traveling, prevents 18-20 year olds from acquiring handguns (even if it’s a 20 year old single woman on her own with a valid threat) and it prevents people from sharing guns while out plinking or hunting on public lands that aren’t specifically designated as a shooting range.

This exposes the true intent of the House majority and should clarify the importance of the 2020 elections.

They try to make mass murder seem like something that’s unique to the US, but here’s a little perspective.

In the last 30 days, if we JUST look at mass killings where between 11 and 50 people were killed by Jihadists, there have been 15 separate incidents around the globe.  Add in 5 mass graves where 10 or more bodies (or heads) were found who were killed by ISIS and the number goes to 19 incidents.  This is a relatively “normal” month.

The tools of these mass murders varies…knives, vehicles, improvised explosives, conventional explosives, pistols, rifles…it doesn’t really matter.  Dead is dead.

It’s sad, but people in our country keep refusing to learn lessons when bad events happen to other people and insist on waiting until bad events happen to them to accept the fact that they might need to prepare.

Ironically, the reason why MOST people don’t think that there’s a need to prepare for incidents like Southerland Springs, Parkland, and the recent “workplace violence” incident in Aurora, IL is because of how incredibly rare they are in the US.

That’s also why police response times are as long as they are. Violent crime is RARE in the US. Most cities operate with 1 patrol officer for every 4,000-10,000 people on duty at any given time. As a society, we have decided that this is enough and that the additional cost of more officers and a faster response time is not justified.

Whether right or wrong, we have collectively deemed that a handfull of active shooters in schools per year don’t warrant armed and trained security personnel at each of the 98,000 public schools and 33,000 private schools in the US.  (In case you’re wondering…the cost to put one armed security guard in every one of those schools with a total compensation package of $50,000 per year would be $6.5 BILLION dollars)

The net effect of this is that it shifts the responsibility of first responder from law enforcement to individuals. People just have to accept that they’re probably going to be on their own.

“Gunfights,” muggings, and a lot of other violent crimes are over in seconds. Mass shootings are normally over in a couple of minutes. The Parkland shooting lasted 3 minutes.  A great and admirable response time by law enforcement is 8-10 minutes…after someone at the scene has the presence of mind to call 911 and communicate what’s going on clearly and calmly enough for the dispatcher to send appropriate help—assuming they’re not in the middle of another situation when the call comes in.

In my opinion, the model of passing first responder responsibility to the individual is a healthy model to follow.

We use this model with medical and trauma emergencies. That’s why people learn the Heimlich maneuver, CPR, and basic first aid. We take responsibility for helping ourselves and those around us until professionals arrive in an attempt to save lives. Sometimes mistakes are made, like breaking ribs with the Heimlich or with chest compressions, but overall, minimally trained lay first responders save lives.

We use this model with fire emergencies. That’s why we have smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, ladders to escape the 2^nd story of houses, fire drills, sprinklers, and fire escapes in public buildings. Again, we take responsibility for helping ourselves and those around us until professionals arrive. Sometimes people throw water on a grease fire or break their leg jumping out a window, but overall, minimally trained lay first responders save lives.

In the case of school, church, and workplace shootings, if one or more of the adults would have had a gun, knife, Taser, pepper spray, or solid empty hands combatives training, it’s very possible that the killer could have been stopped and lives saved.

It means that someone who intends on racking up a body count may be stopped early or before they even take their first shot.

Donald Rumsfeld said that you go to war with the army you have and not the army you wish you had.

It’s the same if you find yourself in the middle of a mass murder situation.  You can’t manufacture the skills to stop the threat in the heat of the moment if you don’t already have them.

We can’t do anything about what has happened in past mass shootings, but we can each make a decision to make forward progress at being prepared if we find ourselves in a similar situation.

Part of that is individual preparation, and part of that is helping as many people as possible realize the need to prepare themselves to confront evil. With that in mind, I want to share a few things with you—arrows in your quiver—for when the topic of the Parkland shootings in particular or gun violence in general comes up.

First off, it’s important to realize that there is no such thing as “gun violence.” Guns are inanimate objects. There is only violence and violence is a product of the mind and the mind will use whatever tools it has available at the time.

The term “gun violence”
makes about as much sense
as “fork overeating.”

• Do you remember the Charleston shootings?  Did you know that there was a mass killing in Austria 2 days after Charleston where the killer drove his car into a crowd. When the car stopped, he got out and started stabbing people. The driver is a radicalized Muslim who appears to have been following the directives given by the Islamic State in October 2014 on how to treat infidels, “…slaughter him with a knife or run over him with your car…”Are their deaths any less horrible because the killer didn’t use a gun? Is the killer any less evil? This incident in particular highlights the fact that the mind of the killer was the true problem and the tool didn’t matter. When the car stopped working, he transitioned to a knife and continued his evil behavior.
• Did you know that the day before the Sandy Hook murders in 2012, a mentally unstable man stabbed an elderly woman and then went to a nearby school where he stabbed 22 children before being subdued. There were 6 knife attacks like this in a 7 month period in 2010 that killed nearly 20 and wounded more than 50. They went mostly unreported.Where did this happen? China. Why didn’t you hear about any of these mass killings? Why are “Newtown”, “Columbine”, and “Charleston” top of mind, but not the mass stabbings that happened in Brooklyn, Japan, St. Paul, Houston, Osaka, Calgary, Murrysville PA, China, Halamish, Hamburg, Turku, London Bridge, and more?
• Did you know that while there is 1 child (under 10) death per year per 1 MILLION guns, there is 1 drowning death per year per 11,000 residential pools? That means that an individual backyard swimming pool is roughly 100 times more likely to kill a child than a given gun.
• Did you know that almost 2x as many people died in 2017 from drug overdoses (59% of which were prescriptions) than from gunshot wounds?

Evil has been around since Cain killed his brother Abel. Evil is with us now, and evil will be a constant, although hopefully infrequent, companion to one extent or another throughout each of our lives.

Denying evil doesn’t make it go away…

it only causes paralysis due to disbelief
when it crashes into your life.

In every group of people, you’re going to have sheepdogs who are willing to stand up to evil and those who take it one step further and are willing to take the fight to the bad guy and protect the innocent.

But the will and the grit to stare evil in the face and decide to take it on doesn’t do a darn bit of good if they have the willingness to fight but don’t have the tools and/or the skills to fight effectively.

What’s the answer then? Good people need to have the tools and skills necessary to provide tactical “first aid” for the time between when evil shows itself and when law enforcement arrives. And not the sad excuse for a plan that says to “lock your doors, pull the shades on your windows, hide in a closet or under a desk, or play dead.”

Don’t be naive and think that taking the fight to the murderer is a “clean” option. With a firearm, you may miss the shooter and hit an innocent. You may hit the brain, but not the mid-brain and cause a shooter to fire one last round into an innocent bystander.   Heck, the NYPD had a shootout with 1 guy in front of the Empire State Building and shot 8 other people in the process. Stopping evil gets messy, and the decision to do so is sometimes a hero’s last.

So, given the fact that we can’t flip a switch and take care of the spiritual or mental health component of the equation, what do I think we should do?

•    Encourage the warrior mindset of people who already have it. There are some sweet kindergarten teachers, pastors, and Sunday school teachers who have both an incredible nurturing nature and who excel at martial arts and a martial mindset, but they are rare.
•    Don’t ignore training for them—just focus on people who are already predisposed to taking the fight to a bad guy. It’s similar to firecraft. If you throw a log covered with pitch on top of a match, it’ll put it out. On the other hand, if you throw that same log covered in pitch on a fire that’s already healthy, you’ll get a bigger, hotter fire. You can put the log on the fire from the match eventually, but it will take a little time and nurturing to build it up.
•    Pick the right tools. Firearms are one of the most efficient tools for innocent people to use to project force over a distance to stop evil as quickly as possible. If guns are a possibility, then training is the next step. Once training is taken care of, the next thing is secure storage that is QUICK to get into. In a work, church, and school environment, I suggest gun safes with 5 button mechanical locks instead of electronic keypad or biometric locks, but consumer grade biometric locks are STARTING to catch up with the hype and their military grade cousins.
•    If firearms are not a possibility, then I suggest Tasers. Tasers are MUCH better than pepper spray in an environment with young children but pepper spray is better than nothing. As a note, Tasers are NOT stun guns. Stun guns operate on the basis of pain compliance and Tasers use a pulse that interrupts the electrical impulses between the brain and muscles. In addition, civilian Tasers shoot out 15 feet.
•    Most, if not all school rooms in the US have a fire extinguisher.  As Clint Smith says, “Spray them with the white stuff and hit them with the red thing.”  Members of the JROTC at Parkland did just that.  They covered students with kevlar curtains, barricaded the door, and waited in an ambush position with the fire extinguisher!*
•    Keep in mind that the foundation for ALL martial training is empty hands training. Why? You may not always have access to a purpose built weapon like a firearm, and even if you do, you might have to fight to get to it or to buy enough time to bring it to bear on an attacker. Even without a weapon, reloads and malfunctions may provide an opportunity to punch the turd’s throat, jab his eye, or crush his testicles, etc. and lives could have been saved.
•    If the any of the recent shootings were the straw that broke the camel’s back for you as far as knowing you need to get serious about self defense, then I strongly suggest you check out >THIS TRAINING< that combines empty hands fighting, transitioning to a pistol, and using whatever happens to be in your hands at the time as your primary weapon.  At a minimum, get a Stealth Tactical Pen and training in how to use it or training in how to effectively use a tactical flashlight.
•    If you do have a situation where you’re limited to non-firearm defense against firearms, it’s important to identify people with a similar mindset who are willing to take the fight to evildoers in the event of an active shooter incident. One person going head-on with a shooter is likely to be needlessly committing suicide. They’re no doubt a hero, but the goal when confronting an evildoer is to go home at the end of the day, have as many innocents go home at the end of the day as possible, and do whatever is necessary to stop the evil party.
•    With multiple people, though, there’s a much greater chance that at least one of you will have or acquire an angle on the shooter that they can take advantage of to rush the shooter and set up a situation where the rest can swarm the shooter and render them incapable of continuing to hurting people as efficiently as possible.

In short, YOU as an individual can’t control the morality, spirituality, mental health, or tendency towards violence of the people around you. Someone determined to be violent will ignore firearm and other weapon laws. Cain didn’t have or need a gun to kill Abel and even if you could click your heels together and make all firearms disappear, mentally disturbed people determined to kill will still kill. All you can do is equip yourself with the mental training, physical training, and tools necessary to be able to stop evil between the moment when it crashes into your life and a few minutes later when law enforcement arrives.

Questions?  Comments?  Please share them below.  This article was edited after the Parkland shooting.  Some of the comments were made after the Charleston shooting.

Here are some places to find stats that I referenced:

https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/attacks/attacks.aspx?Yr=Last30
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_stabbings

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