Then Why Does the Military Have Artillery, Dennis?

Acting Brady President Dennis Henigan notes about the Norway massacre:

For those who are quick to argue that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” it is instructive that the Norway killer took many more lives with his guns than with his explosives. Violent individuals intent on inflicting multiple fatalities don’t choose knives or baseball bats. With few exceptions, they choose guns.

That the explosives did not kill more people has more to do with luck and bad planning on the part of the killer. His shooting spree, in contrast, was much more thought out. McVeigh’s bomb killed 168 people. There’s no fundamental reason explosives have to result in a lower death toll. If small arms were so unbelievably deadly as Dennis would have people believe, the military would have no use for grenades, bombs, rockets, missiles, and artillery.

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10 thoughts on “Then Why Does the Military Have Artillery, Dennis?”

  2. I think you are looking at this the wrong way. Dennis is clearly making the case that it’s time to deregulate hand grenades.

  3. I’d be willing to bet that the explosives were intended more to distract the authorities and draw away resources than for a high casualty count. IIRC, some politician who would have likely been a high priority target for him was supposed to be at the island. Also, the isolated nature of the island made it an unusually “soft” target, even for Norway, giving him additional time that he put to effective use.

    The fact that the police had to wait for people with guns weighed in his favour, too. Even if they’d had a usable boat available right away, the unarmed officers wouldn’t have been very effective.

  4. One of the most lethal criminal acts in the US was done with a dollars worth of gasoline, the Happy Land arson.

    But yeah, explosives in the hands of an expert are enormously lethal. Luckily most bomb makers are far from experts.

  5. Reminds me of their line of argument that seeks to portray semiauto guns as dangerous and destructive as full auto guns. To me, that’s simply an argument to deregulate full auto guns (because semis are clearly a protected class of arms vis a vis the common use criterion). Not to mention that there are strong arguments that full auto guns, outside crew-served rigs perhaps, are protected too …

  6. There he goes again, Henigan rationalizing his obsession against guns.
    When governments slaughtered millions and millions of people in the twentieth century, they often chose guns with which to do it. Guns don’t kill people, governments do, but Henigan wants governments to be the only ones with guns.
    In Norway, it was the government that not only disarmed the victims so that they could be slaughtered, the government there then failed to respond in a timely manner to save lives. People were set up to be slaughtered and then allowed to be slaughtered. That was both active and passive participation in their murders by the leftist government.
    I’ll carry my own gun and protect myself, Henigan, if you don’t mind, and especially if you do.
    Henigan’s relentless, organized subversion of the Second Amendment should be a criminal activity in a civilized society. His well-funded, guerrilla attacks against our freedom should be ended by law. He should be arrested, tried, convicted, fined and imprisoned, just he like wants to do to private gun owners. He’s always arguing that the Second Amendment is not unlimited; let him find the limits of the First Amendment, to his displeasure. Put him on trial, and let the hypocrite make our arguments for freedom for us.

  7. Henigan is full of crap. If you actually study terrorist activities, you find out that the random crazies will use just about anything they can get their hands on while the organized cells use guns less not more.

    This is because shootings have a very high attrition rate for the shooter. There is a good chance he will be caught or killed as soon as he encounters armed resistance. Long term cells start running into problems replacing these people fairly quickly, so they switch to techniques with much lower attrition rates like planted explosives.

  8. What Chas calls Henigan’s “obsession against guns,” is really his obsession with easy access to guns by the bad guys.

    I can understand why you need to misrepresent what he stands for, otherwise it would be hard to disagree with so vehemently and unanimously.

  9. Violent individuals intent on inflicting multiple fatalities don’t choose knives or baseball bats. With few exceptions, they choose guns.

    They also don’t choose to go on their shooting rampages at gun shows or gun ranges for some odd reason. I guess they prefer their victims to be unarmed?

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