Category: Carrying / Self-Defense

Nope, no need at all.  They are perfectly safe places, really.

Ace will tell you.  Once you get below the folks who are political appointees, cops tend to be pretty strong supporters of the right to keep a firearm for self-defense.  Police confront the worst humanity has to offer on a regular basis in the course of their jobs.  They know better than your average upper middle class voter exactly what these kinds of people are capable of, and know they have about as much respect for the law as they do the communities they terrorize.

Chief Justice Roberts seems to understands trigger locks, but these guys had to find out the hard way why they are less than optimal for self-defense.

Bitter takes apart a piece in my local paper that talks about the subject.  The instructor interviewed in this article is the guy that runs the shop I do all my FFL transfers through, and handled Bitter’s CZ.  Small world sometimes ain’t it?

Good thing Bitter is back at my house blogging, so I don’t have to.

What’s even more interesting is that they are buying guns for self-defense.  I thought self-defense was a no-no in Europe as a reason for having a firearm?  Well, the Austrian women shall not go poorly armed.  I don’t have any complaints about my Austrian Tupperware, and I doubt these women will find much to complain about either.

I’m generally not inclined to use the word “sheeple” to describe my fellow citizens, but the guy highlighted here… I can’t honestly find a better word to describe.

You think for a minute if you had to shoot a bad guy, that guys like this aren’t going to vote to send you up the river because you didn’t take a bullet first?  Or maybe he’ll go easy on us because we don’t wear “bulletproof” vests.  If I ever find myself in a situation I have to shoot my way out of, if I have hesitation, it will be because I’m worried about having twelve guys like this second guessing everything I do.

One of the primary reasons I think law enforcement ought to support an armed citizensry is because we’ve had to think about this kind of stuff.  We know what bullets and body armor can and can’t do.  And any of us who have done competitive shooting understand how much more difficult it is to shoot under stress than in relaxed conditions.  The fewer people that have any familiarity with this stuff, the less likely that jury is really going to be one composed of your peers. Hell, in Philly and other crime ridden cities, there’s a good chance your “peers” will be those of the guy you had to shoot.

This is pretty crazy.  Elizabeth City State University decides to hold a mock gunman drill:

The News & Observer of Raleigh reported in Wednesday’s editions that an armed man burst into a classroom Friday, threatening to kill students. The drill came eight days after a gunman killed five people and himself in a classroom at Northern Illinois University.

Anthony Brown, vice chancellor of student affairs, said ECSU was testing its response to such shootings. E-mail and text messages were sent five days before the drill, notifying students, staff and faculty, he said.

“The intent was not to frighten them but to test our system and also to test the response of the security that was on campus and the people that were notified,” Brown said.

But not everyone got the word, including assistant professor Jingbin Wang, whose American foreign policy class was held hostage.

“I was prepared to die at that moment,” Wang said Tuesday of the moment the gunman entered the room.

What would you do in that situation?  The report says it was a “red” plastic model gun. I’m guessing the type that officers use for training.  Breda notes, relaying a story about a mouse she found in her garage:

A campus police officer posing as a gunman burst into a classroom, where he proceeded to hold the students hostage and terrorize them with a fake gun for 10 minutes. Not one of the students fought back. Not one thought to pick up a chair or a desk, or even a book, to defend themselves. They all lined up against a wall and passively waited for death.

One of the students said, “I was prepared to die at that moment.” Several students say they considered leaping from a window.

My mouse had more courage than this. Against insurmountable odds, it growled at me and prepared to fight, even to its death. The college students who meekly bared their throats to those who wanted to rip them out are dead already – they just don’t know it.
The will to live is life.

Even with an obviously fake gun, I would at least challenge the “attacker”.  Hell, he might even get drawn on if he’s acting really erratic.  I sincerely hope that most of the students knew this was the drill, and decided to play along.

In a state where open carry isn’t all that uncommon, an entire university would appear to have gone into lockdown over what I’m guessing is someone open carrying:

There have been no reports of threats and no one on campus had been harmed, Hunt said at an afternoon news conference. Several men resembling the description of the man with the weapon were questioned but were not held, authorities said.

“No one has been hurt; no one is in a panic mode,” Braaten said.

All campus buildings had been searched by Tuesday evening and police said they still had no idea who the man with the gun is or whether he is a student.

It’s not illegal to carry a firearm, open or concealed, at a college or university in Virginia, so if the man was seen with a holstered pistol, this would appear to be an overreaction.  Can’t be too safe these days though, I guess.  At least that’s what the officials will say.  Pretty soon we’re going to be panicking because a black cat was seen crossing someone’s path on campus.  Surely a harbinger of doom.