Aug 25, 2012

Guns

The NRA claims that the best self-defense is a well armed populace. The logic is that if a bad guy walks into a classroom or a restaurant to commit a mass-shooting, that bad guy will be immobilized immediately by one or more armed citizens (good guys). The good guys will step up and know exactly what to do in this tense, life and death emergency situation. Most of us have never been in a shooting situation, so who are we to argue?

Well, guess what happened last week at the Empire State Building in NYC? A mass-shooting happened! That's what! A gunman shot 10 people in broad daylight! And the NYPD, well-armed and immediately on the scene immobilized [killed] the mass shooter!

Except, no.

Except now we find that almost none of that is true. NYPD Police Chief Ray Kelly (the NYPD's boss, not some liberal hippy flowertard) has come out to announce that it wasn't exactly a mass-shooting being committed by a mass-shooter. It was one guy shooting another guy that he had differences with. The NYPD officers shot the other nine people. Let me repeat that.

NYPD officers (the good guys) shot the other nine people.

The best-armed, best-trained police force in probably the world was so incompetent in the emergency situation that they shot 9 times as many innocent people as the bad guy did.

Here's a question for people who don't own guns. You probably know some people that do own guns. Ever notice that a good percentage of people who own guns are like, exactly the people who should probably never own guns? Yeah, I noticed that too. And responsible, stable gun owners have noticed the freaks as well. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's you. I'll let you in on a big secret. People aren't comfortable around you.

I don't like guns. Maybe it's because the few times I've seen them they've been pointed an inch from my face. Once by a friend goofing around, and it wasn't fucking funny. And once by a spooked campus cop who forgot he knew me.

Fuck that shit, stop arming the incompetent.

2 comments:

Sprout said...

Yes.

Anonymous said...

Nope.
Sorry my friend, I'm a gun owner who is well trained and while I agree those New York Cops violated the number one rule of firing on an enemy combatant-- don't shoot if there are bystanders in the line of fire-- they were given little choice-- from the video it looks as though he had drawn on them.

Where they made a mistake was to KEEP shooting. Apparently from panic and that means not properly trained NYC Policemen.

It was handled badly but they didn't realize the gunmen was the guy in the suit-- they'd been told he was a construction worker and in the video you can see the cops are walking past him and going in the other direction when he draws and fires. Bad situation all around.

I believe in gun laws and the hoops we have to jump through to both be cleared to get a LTC as well as the required training involved.

What we need to do is actually prosecute violators of the gun laws we have. Caught with an unregistered weapon is supposed to mean five years federal time, but a first offense will likely get probation-- and that doesn't work.