Category: Personal Defense

Barbarians At the Gate

January 8, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Barbarian thugs attacked a French newspaper and killed 12 because the newspaper published “offensive” satirical cartoons of Muhammad.

Over the past twenty-four hours, I’ve heard a lot of varying commenting. Many going off on Islam. I’m not going to repeat that most Muslims are peaceful. It really comes down to whether you are a civilized person or a barbarian. Currently, many – maybe most – of the barbarian cultures in the world today worship their magic sky-daddy as Allah.

Worse, the powers that be seem to have two responses to the barbarians: cower or emulate the barbarians.

Proving once again that we are on our own. The barbarians are inside the gates. Be prepared.

You Must Always Be In Control of Your Weapon

December 31, 2014 / / 0 Comments

A woman was killed by her two-year-old son because he found it in her purse while at a Wal-Mart.

I’m not a fan of off-body carry, especially when there are tiny hands and inquisitive minds about. I also realize that on-body carry may not always be available, especially for women. IMHO, that means more attention needs to be paid to where the gun is and who is near it.

If you are going to be off-body carrying, please keep this incident in mind and remember to have your weapon under control at all times.

Oh, and if you’re going to use this incident to tell me why we shouldn’t have guns, you’re a fucking vulture and a blood-dancer and you can go to step on a broken Lego.

Friday Quote – Stewart Rhodes

December 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

…in Ferguson, what they’re being told is you only have two choices: 1) a hyper-militarized police state to stop violence, including arson, or 2) let it go and burn the town down. Twenty different buildings have burned to the ground. That’s a false choice.

For Ferguson in particular if…they don’t believe that the police department is legitimate, they should be protecting themselves and secure themselves because the more they secure themselves, the less reason there is for the police to be in their neighborhoods and communities. So they should take care of themselves for both reasons—to be secure, but also to be more free.

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oathkeepers

Emphasis added.

H/t Reason

DC Really Wants to Keep Paying Alan Gura Money

September 19, 2014 / / 0 Comments

DC officials were given 90 days to come up with a concealed carry permitting system. Somewhat predictably, they decided to go with a “may-issue” system.

Of course, the applicant has to have a good reason, like being stalked, under a specific threat, or be politically connected (because if you don’t think those people will get their permits befit the people’s, you’re deluding yourself).

It looks like time for another court case.

Prosecutorial Misconduct Is Just As Corrosive as Militarized Police

August 28, 2014 / / 2 Comments

With the events in Ferguson, Missouri, the public has rightly been discussing the growing militarization of the police forces in this nation. The flip side to that coin has been the increasingly reckless conduct by prosecuting attorneys, both at the state and federal level. Radley Balko, formerly of Reason and HuffPo, and now at WaPo, has done yeoman work documenting cases of prosecutorial misconduct and overreach. Just like the police, prosecutors are protected by qualified immunity and are rarely held to the same professional standards that their civilian* counterparts.

Prosecutorial misconduct is the reason I stopped supporting the death penalty. I can’t trust that the people exercising the ultimate government power are working within the law or even in the interest of justice.

That same reckless conduct led to the overturning of the convictions of police officer convicted for the killing of civilians on the Danziger Bridge during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For those of you who don’t remember this:

The Danziger Bridge shootings were police shootings that took place on September 4, 2005, at the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans, Louisiana. Six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the city’s police department killed two people: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other people were wounded. All victims were unarmed. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. New Orleans police fabricated a cover-up story for their crime, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four people were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival. On August 5, 2011, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted five police officers of myriad charges related to the cover-up and deprivation of civil rights. However, the convictions were vacated on September 17, 2013 due to prosecutorial misconduct, and a new trial was ordered.

From the article:

“The case started as one featuring allegations of brazen abuse of authority, violation of the law, and corruption of the criminal justice system,” [Judge] Engelhardt wrote in his decision alluding to the Danziger prosecution. “Unfortunately, though the focus has switched from the accused to the accusors, it has continued to be about those very issues. After much reflection, the court cannot journey as far as it has in this case only to ironically accept grotesque prosecutorial misconduct in the end.”

This is unacceptable. The War on Nouns has lulled the populace into surrendering their liberty to the police and prosecutors. It’s time that those liberties were taken back and the offenders suffer the consequences.

h/t Ken Ostos, from the Book of Faces

* – Yes, I know that police and prosecutors are also civilians. It was a useful literary tool. It instantly made the dichotomy clear in your mind, didn’t it?

Friday Quote – Steven Novella

August 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

When someone looks at me and says “I know what I saw,” I am fond of replying “No, you don’t.” You have a distorted and constructed memory of a distorted and constructed perception, both of which are subservient to whatever narrative your brain is operating under.

Dr. Steven Novella, neurosurgeon and skepticism advocate

Why Minorities Need to be Armed

July 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Because you never know when trouble is going to be spurred up against you. Also, that the police may not be there to help you when all hell breaks loose.

One account:

Congregants watched in horror as protestors – many armed with knives, axes and broken bottles – stormed the building. The synagogue’s security guards rushed to keep out the intruders. For a few long moments, they fought alone; five sustained light injuries. Then they were relieved by police.

The battle outside raged for hours. Another nearby synagogue was pelted with stones. “So we closed the synagogue and we asked everybody to stay inside until everything would be okay,” Monsieur Benhaim said. He heard the mob outside “all the time singing ‘Allah Akbar’ and ‘Kill the Jews’ – if you can call that a song.” Congregants were particularly concerned that police secure a nearby metro station, to stop them being attacked as they and their families made their way home at night.

(Emphasis mine)

Whether you support Israel or Hamas in the current conflict, can we agree that looting and burning of people’s homes, businesses, and places of worship is wrong?

Now, compare what happened in France to what happened when Korean business owners took up arms to protect their businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

By the end of the day storeowners had slain four looters and fended off the mob. It would be 24 more hours until the National Guard arrived and another two days before the riots were completely put down.

This is why I say the right to self-defense, and by extension, the right to own arms to exercise self-defense, is a human right.

Friday Quote – Edmundo Mireles Jr.

July 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

You have to be mentally prepared for a possible violent confrontation. I can say with some authority that if you give up, if you lay down to die, than that is exactly what will happen. You will die.

FBI Special Agent Edmundo Mireles, Jr., participant in the 1986 FBI Miami Shootout

This was one of the lessons repeated at my MAG-20 class. You may be in severe pain, physically and mentally exhausted, but you must continue the fight. If you stop fighting before the bad guy, you will lose, and you will die.

Good Article on Self-Defense Shootings

July 15, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Here’s an article by Tom Givens on what we should be training for based on what his students have faced when they had to draw their sidearms.

Excerpt:

Based on this data, we believe the following are key skills the private citizen should concentrate on in their training:

Quick, safe, efficient presentation of the handgun from concealed carry.

Delivery of several well-placed shots at distances from 3 to 7 yards.

Keeping the gun running, including reloading and fixing malfunctions.

Two-handed firing. We train our students to use two hands if at all possible and most have done so in their fights.
Bring the gun to eye level. This is the fastest way to achieve accurate gun alignment. All but two of our students brought the gun to eye level, and as a result got good hits. Two had to shoot from below eye level due to unusual circumstances.

Some effort expended on the contact distance problem, including empty hand skills and weapon retention skills. However, these are secondary skills for the private citizen.

Some effort dedicated to longer shots in the 15- to 25-yard range.

RTWT