Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 107

A FRIEND, AND A GREAT WRITER, PASSES

Well, damn. My friend (and favorite gun blogger) Tamara Keel emailed me to let me know our mutual friend Frank James had passed.

Read Tam’s moving goodbye to him. If you aren’t familiar with his work, be sure to follow each of her links.

When I wrote about him recovering from his stroke here on this blog a year ago last April, lots of you wrote to say how much you enjoyed his work. When I last spoke with him a few months ago Frank was upbeat and felt his rehab was progressing well.

Frank parlayed a family farm into millionaire status the same way he became a popular gun writer and gun show TV star. Research, sound knowledge of what he was doing, and common sense…because, quite simply, the common sense that was his trademark demanded in turn that deep research and thorough knowledge of the subject at hand. Combine that with his genuine love of family and country, and his deep caring for his fellow man, and you’ll understand why we who knew Frank James so deeply mourn his passing.

Goodbye, Frank. All of us who knew you were better for it.

 

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OF GUNS AND PRESIDENTS

I did a “whiskey-tango-foxtrot” when I read this.  I’m surprised the Gipper didn’t tell his security detail to pound sand.

Ronald Reagan had a long history with guns.  As a young man, he supposedly used a Colt pistol to save a person he saw being attacked in the street (no shots fired).  Nancy Reagan spoke of the “cute little gun” she kept readily at hand in the White House. Legend says that Reagan got a permit to carry a Smith & Wesson .32 in a shoulder holster when he got death threats back in his Screen Actors Guild days.

Most American presidents have been gun owners…until, ahem, recently.  There is that faked-looking photo of Barack Obama shooting at clay birds.  Bill Clinton had some part in assassinating a duck with a Benelli shotgun in a waterfowl hunt supposedly staged to show his support for Second Amendment rights.  (Yeah, right.)  And, yes, when you kill something for political reasons, I think “assassination” is the appropriate term.

A bit more on Presidents and their guns, and more discussion on Secret Service separating Reagan from his guns.

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LARRY CORREIA

Who stands six feet, five inches tall, weighs 300 pounds, and carries a cocked and locked STI 1911 pistol? 

Well, I can think of two. Owen Zastava Pitts and Larry Correia. Or maybe that’s one, ‘cause Larry created Owen as the lead protagonist in his best-selling science fiction/fantasy series of novels, and the two have a lot in common.

A little while back in this blog, when I wrote about meeting Stephen Hunter, one of my favorite writers, I mentioned that I hoped to one day meet Correia, too, because he was one of the very few writers I read in that genre. The reason was that he got his details right, did not break my “willing suspension of disbelief” … and was also funny as hell.

In person, it turns out, Larry Correia is also funny as hell in person, and totally down to earth, and of course, One of Us. What else should we expect from a guy who was associated with the coolest named gun shop in history, Fuzzy Bunny Movie Guns, in his younger days?

I enjoyed heck out of his best-selling series, Monster Hunters International. In his second best-selling series, the Grimnoir Chronicles (which he describes as a blend of early 20th Century noir and steampunk), he had me in the first such novel when he made John Moses Browning one of the characters. The evil princess and I have the next two in the series as audiobooks and will be consuming them on our next long drive.

If you’re a gun person and you haven’t read Correia, you’re missing some great entertainment. Check him out – Amazon will get you to his work, and Google should get you in among his many fans – and I think you’ll be glad you did.

Oh, and by the way, Larry’s last name is pronounced “Korea,” not “courier.”

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POV

Point of view is critical to assessing eyewitness testimony, all the more when a camera makes eyewitnesses of us all.

This point has been made here before, and now comes another excellent example.  It is the nature of our arrogant species to say, “I saw the whole thing. If what you say happened had actually occurred, I would have seen it.  I didn’t see it. Ergo, it didn’t happen.”

It’s all too easy to for us to forget that from our angle, our POV, what someone else saw may have been blocked from our own line of sight, or simply ignored because we weren’t looking for it (inattentional blindness).

In this case, the POV of the patrol car dashcam leads us “witnesses via video” to see “OMG! A trigger happy jackbooted thug pointing his gun at an innocent citizen for no reason!”

But the POV of the officer’s bodycam shows us what HE saw…and now we realize that his swift draw of his service Glock may well have prevented the officer and/or the motorist being shot.

Watch and learn. It’s the sort of lesson all of us who constitute the vast Jury of Public Opinion cannot review too often…and it can impact peace officer and armed citizen alike.

 

Or view it here: https://youtu.be/Gu0wMBJn-r8

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ABOUT RETRAINING POLICE…

A couple of posts back, we had a guest essay by one of our regular commentators.  Much of what I’d have said has already been posted by other commentators, so I’ll be fairly brief.

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) is, as others have said, seen by some as being a bit left of center. I don’t actually mind that. I am more concerned that some, myself included, see PERF as tinged by “ivory tower” syndrome.  When you perceive yourself as very high above the street, you forget that the street is where policing takes place, and it’s easy to lose sight of realities.

Speaking as a sworn officer for more of my life than not: Yes, we understand that “the voices” may have told him to attack you (or us), and it “may not be his fault.” However, it’s not your fault (or ours) either, and cop or “civilian,” your right to protect yourself against his assault and meet force with force does not change.  Neither an artificially altered state of consciousness nor an official diagnosis of insanity makes your attacker – or mine – a protected species.  Yes, it would be nice if we could bring in an intensively trained Crisis Intervention Team to talk your attacker down and get him in touch with his inner child, or perhaps, his inner juvenile delinquent.  Time is the essence in any sort of negotiation, including verbal crisis intervention. “Detached reflection” is a key ingredient.  Unfortunately, that ingredient is missing from the recipe of reality in the cases that have brought about this discussion.  It has been almost a hundred years since Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “Detached reflection is not demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” (SCOTUS, Brown v. United States, 1921.)  It remains the law, and the truth, today.

The police are actually pretty well trained in bloodshed-reducing crisis intervention already; witness the prevalence of George Thompson’s “verbal judo” concept, championed today by my old friend and master police instructor and martial artist Gary Klugiewicz.

But neither you nor I can fit a whole lot of detached reflection into a second or two when the soon-to-be “unarmed victim” is trying to stab you with his knife, or kill you with your own gun.

Unfortunately, in a time when screwing with cops in front of your iPhone so you can upload your douchebaggery instantly to YouTube is seen as something about to become a national sport, nobody has trained the public how to react to law enforcement. Police/citizen contacts ARE a two way street, after all.

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REFLECTIONS ON ROANOKE

Yeah, I know, you were expecting me to respond to Dave (the liberal, non-uncle one) and his take on the Police Executive Research Forum’s suggestions on what police need to change in response to Black Lives Matter and all the rest of the latest spate of anti-cop stuff.  And one commentator here at the blog (and more in private correspondence) asked me to address the recent atrocity in Roanoke. The latter seems more timely at the moment; the issues Dave discussed will be with us for a very long time, and can wait a moment, at least in this space.

Two promising, good young people are murdered by yet another disaffected loser whose motives straddle “workplace violence” and “hate crime.”  The killer was (A) a black man who killed white people to avenge the murders of the innocent in a black church by a white racist; (B) a gay man who felt discriminated against by straights, who killed two heterosexuals; (C) the owner of two cats (whose lives he apparently also snuffed out) and whose home when searched by police after the murders was filled with cat urine and feces, and (D) was obviously mentally ill.  He didn’t buy his murder weapon until after the atrocity at the church in the Carolinas, and he obviously planned his sick murder spree long in advance. With no documented mental health or criminal history, he would have passed any “background check.’

Politicians from Hillary Clinton on down have demanded “more gun control” as the answer, many of them blaming the National Rifle Association and, by extension, its millions of law-abiding members of all genders, races, and belief systems.

Good Lord…

I suppose we should at least be glad they didn’t blame all gay people, or all black people, or every owner of a feline pet, or every person who ever sought psychological counseling.  Racism, homophobia, “crazy cat people,” and the mentally ill are all off limits, but it’s always open season on gun owners, it seems.

We all remember the crazed narcissist in California not so long ago, who killed multiple people with contact weapons and ran some over with his car as well as shooting a few, and who posted his sick screed on YouTube like this latest sicko did, before he faced armed people who might fight back and killed himself at that moment.  History repeats itself.  Then, as now, the father of one of the victims went on TV and declared himself the latest warrior for “gun control.”

At least, the father of the young woman murdered in Roanoke seems to be limiting his crusade to keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people. I wish him luck with that.  Going back over decades, the politically correct de-institutionalization of the dangerously insane opened a Pandora’s Box we may never be able to close.  Complicating the matter further are anti-gunners like the politician who said any military combat vet must have post-traumatic stress disorder (and, by clear implication, must be denied ownership of firearms), or those whose psych degrees are burdened with clueless political correctness that makes them believe anyone who would want to own a gun must be nuts in the first place.

The father of that tragically murdered young woman in Roanoke was quoted as saying he might need to buy a gun now.  The implication is that he’ll need it to protect himself from crazy gun nuts.  The California dad has now faded from the scene; perhaps he realized it was about dangerous aberrant people, not guns. Maybe the Virginia dad will, too.  As a father myself, my heart goes out to each of them.

But, for us gun owners or those who believe differently, there are cruel truths we all have to face.

Those include:

How we think things should be is not the same as how things are.
Crazy and terrible people, unrestrained by society, will do crazy and terrible things.
Laws which, by definition, will be obeyed only by the law-abiding will do NOTHING to deter those who, by definition, are law-breakers.
When you don’t have enough hose-dragging firefighters, bandage-bearing paramedics, or gun-carrying cops to shepherd 320 million people one-to-one 24/7, those people need fire extinguishers, first aid kids, and guns to ward off death until the designated professionals can be summoned in to help.

And yes, dammit, it IS that simple.

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AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT…

Among other things, regular readers here know that (A) I don’t usually host guest blogs and (B) as sort of the “resident cop” in the Backwoods Home writers’ stable, I frequently visit criminal justice topics in the news as related to guns and use of force.

One of our regular commentators here – “Dave, the liberal non-uncle one” – offered the following and rather than have it run as a thread veer, I thought I’d let it stand on its own as a guest blog.  I have some disagreements with it, but I’m really interested in what you reading it have to say.  The following are Dave’s words, not mine:

I asked Mas if it was all right to post this as an off-topic comment to one of his blog posts and he instead graciously suggested that he post it as a guest column.

Mas has argued several times in his BHM articles, most notably in the “Understanding a misunderstanding” section of this article that police chiefs and other police administrators often support gun control because, “In the great majority of communities, municipal police chiefs are appointed by the mayor, the city manager, or the city council. If those political entities are anti-gun, you may be sure that they will either appoint an anti-gun candidate, or make it clear to the appointee that he will speak the lines he is given or he will no longer be Chief.” On the other hand, says Mas, county sheriffs are elected and are more likely to be more pro-gun.

We are recently seeing a trend in relation to the Black Lives Matter issue for employers of law enforcement officers and prosecutors (who are usually also elected) to quickly take actions against officers who have shot Black people, especially unarmed young males. It happened in the Tensing/DuBose matter in Cincinnati and in the Miller/Taylor matter in Arlington, Texas. Though not a shooting, it also happened in the Various Officers/Gray case in Baltimore.

I’ve predicted in comments here that the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter campaign aren’t going to go away and that if law enforcement officers refuse to engage in dialog and procedural revisions that they’re going to find those revisions imposed upon them. This trend toward quick action against officers could be just that, and it could be worse than what I predicted. The political will to give officers the benefit of the doubt appears to be fading.

 

Instead of working towards a new set of rules of engagement, the trend may be to just second guess or Monday morning quarterback those police-involved Black deaths which cannot be absolutely and unquestionably identified on the very first and most superficial examination to be a justifiable homicide. In the recent Tyrone Harris shooting in Ferguson, there are even questions being raised in the face of claims and video showing that Harris had a gun and shot at officers first.

(An aside: Traditionally legal analysis of whether or not a shooting was justified as self-defense or under other justifiable-homicide laws tends to focus on the events immediately prior to the shooting. The Black Lives Matter movement, however, wants to expand the analysis far beyond that to issues such as whether police action was “really” needed in the first place, the seriousness of an action causing a need for police action, whether confrontation could have been avoided, and the like, and then adjudging whether the death was justifiable in light of the entire circumstances, not those just immediately prior to the confrontation. For example, in both the Sandra Bland and Sam DuBose matters the question is being raised whether the deaths were justifiable because the reasons that they were stopped did not justify what happened after, thus saying in effect that they should have both been written tickets and allowed to go on their way without the interaction which led to the officers wanting them to get out of their vehicles. That analysis, supported by continued protests and public complaints, is one of the things which is gaining political weight.)

That’s a reversal of what generally happened in the past where the officer was almost always given the benefit of the doubt unless the facts clearly showed him or her to be in the wrong (which is itself a practice to which the Black Lives Matter campaign objects). If the trend continues, then every officer involved in the death or injury of a Black person had better be prepared to hire a lawyer as soon as he or she can get to a phone, had better be prepared not to file a report or make any statements without that lawyer present, and had best be prepared to be fired because he or she will not do those things. In short, killing a Black person, or perhaps any mentally disturbed person or person of color, may except in the clearest of circumstances become a career-ender for many, many cops regardless of the eventual determination of whether or not it was legally justified.

There will doubtless be counter-suits by fired officers and protests by police unions, but whether to act quickly to fire cops will likely be judged on a cost basis for the employers of LEOs: What’s the financial and political cost of fighting with one officer’s lawyers or dealing with some labor problems versus the cost of an outraged Black community and even widespread protests or riots? Which one hurts the worst and is the hardest to make go away, especially since each new shooting or injury simply fans the protests to a new, higher level and since the Black Lives Matter issues are not going to go away. If police chiefs are political animals as Mas suggests, the political will may be turning.

———————

I wrote the foregoing a couple of weeks ago after reading about the Miller/Taylor matter and was waiting to post it as a comment here until I could do so at a time that it was not too off-topic. Since that time, a new report “Re-Engineering Training On Police Use of Force” has been issued by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), “an independent research organization that focuses on critical issues in policing” whose membership and board of directors is made up of executives, mainly chiefs of police, from law enforcement organizations around the country. What that report says led me to contact Mas to get his consent to post this sooner than I had intended.

That report says that police training and emphasis on de-escalation of confrontations is woefully inadequate. It comes to that conclusion in part because “the rioting last summer in Ferguson was not a story that would fade away quickly” (pg. 3) and “in the immediate aftermath of the demonstrations in Ferguson, there has been a fundamental change in how the American people view the issue of police use of force. A year later, this upheaval in policing is continuing, and it is unlikely to abate any time soon. … here’s why: Over the past year, the nation has seen, with their own eyes, video recordings of a number of incidents that simply do not look right to them. In many of these cases, the officers’ use of force has already been deemed ‘justified,’ and prosecutors have declined to press criminal charges. But that does not mean that the uses of force are considered justified by many people in the community.” (pg. 9)

It goes on to say, “there is a growing recognition in the policing profession that a review of an officer’s use of force should not focus solely on the moment that the officer fired a gun or otherwise used force. Instead, leading police chiefs are saying that the review should cover what led up to the incident, and officers should be held accountable if they failed to de-escalate the situation in order to prevent it from ever reaching the point where the use of force was necessary. And that is the type of analysis that community members make when they watch a video of a police shooting and wonder, ‘Why did all those officers have to shoot that homeless man? Just because he was holding a knife? All those officers were there, they had him surrounded. Why couldn’t they Tase him, or pepper-spray him, or just wait him out? They didn’t have to kill him.’ Police chiefs increasingly are recognizing this perspective, and are making a distinction between ‘could’ and ‘should’ when it comes to evaluating officers’ use of force. While a use of force might be legal, that is not the end of the discussion if there were less drastic options available.” (pg. 9).

 

In short, a professional association of chiefs of police is basically confirming — and recommending — what I had written a couple of weeks ago and, indirectly, what I wrote here long ago: that the real issue in the Black Lives Matter issue is ultimately going to be whether deadly confrontation could have been avoided, not just who was legally right after that confrontation occurred. If the report by PERF accurately characterizes public sentiment and the direction that law enforcement administration is heading, then law enforcement officers are either going to have to change or put their jobs in danger.

Just to wrap up, here’s some conventional thinking which is questioned by that report:

– Officers thinking solely about their own safety, rather than a broader approach designed to protect everyone’s lives.

– “Never back down. Move in and take charge.”

– Resolve dangerous situations as quickly as possible by whatever means legally available.

– Rigid or mechanical use-of-force continuums.

– The 21-foot rule being seen as “a green light to use deadly force”.

– The right of officers to have their need to make split-second judgments in tense and uncertain situations factored into whether a use of deadly force was legally reasonable should also be the ending point on whether their use of force was professionally reasonable.

– Officers thinking of themselves as warriors rather than guardians.

And here’s a few of the training ideas from the report:

– Emphasize training in de-escalation at a greater level than combat techniques.

– Utilize a decision making process which emphasizes gathering information, threat assessment, strategizing, identification of legal and policy requirements, and identification of options before taking action and then re-assessment of all those issues as events develop; train this until it becomes second nature and can be done in an instant.

– Considering objects which can be used as cover while creating and maintaining distance and time.

– Standing back to assess situations and allow communication, rather than immediately rushing in.

– Communicating and engaging with suspects, rather than just issuing orders.

– Realization that containment does not necessarily mean in restraint and that an officer can back up and still have someone contained.

– In after-action investigations always consider whether the officer’s actions created the exigency.

– Strongly emphasize the sanctity of all human life.

– Put very strict limits on foot pursuits and shooting at vehicles.

– Give special training for dealing with mentally disturbed individuals and individuals attempting suicide-by-cop.

The foregoing is a summary of some of the problems and responses highlighted by the report. Before reacting strongly to any of them, I’d strongly recommend actually reading the report, especially the interviews with two law enforcement officials from Great Britain where these techniques have been successfully in use for some time.

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ADDED SAFETY FROM TARNHELM

Gunsmiths customize firearms to add value in different ways.  To make the gun more accurate. To make it recoil less.  To make it fit the shooter better.

My old friend Rick Devoid does those things for customers’ firearms, but he specializes in another kind of added value: he makes them safer.

Many people decline to keep a loaded gun at home or at work for fear that some unauthorized person may gain access to it.  Rick is the sole purveyor of the one “smart gun” that actually WORKS: the Magna-Trigger conversion of a double action Smith & Wesson revolver. It can only be fired by someone wearing the provided, low-profile magnetic ring on their middle finger. I carried one for many years and kept it loaded at bedside when my kids were little.  We tested hell out of it, even shot matches with it. The thing works: it shoots when its legitimate user wants it to, and won’t fire when someone else tries to make it do so.

Rick also has the exclusive on the less expensive Murabito safety conversion of an S&W revolver, invented by the now-retired Frank Murabito. It turns the cylinder release latch into a thumb safety, too.  It’s very fast, and highly likely to confuse any unauthorized person who gains control of your handgun.

Rick is also famous for his action jobs on Smith & Wesson and Ruger double action revolvers, and his slick-up of traditional double action S&W semiautomatic pistols.  Finally, he is an approved – and very experienced – installer of the Joe Cominolli thumb safety for Glocks. Allowing the right thumb (or for southpaws, the left index finger) to activate the device, it operates with the same movement as a cocked and locked 1911: up for “safe,” down for “fire.”Rick also reduces and reshapes the grip on Glocks; he did so on my first .45 caliber Glock 30, and made it shoot way better for me.

Rick and Tarnhelm Supply are known for reasonable prices and fast delivery times.  I have many Tarnhelm custom guns and am happy with every one of them.  Information is available at www.tarnhelm.com.

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PACKIN’ OLD STYLE

So here I am, teaching a class of mostly high-tech polymer pistol shooters. Glocks, S&W M&Ps, Springfield XD series, and the very popular and very cool new Heckler & Koch VP9.  And what’s on my hip but that old WWI relic, the 1911 pistol?

Well, hell, I’m a relic myself. I try to change guns every training tour to stay current with everything out there. But the still-popular 1911, even though it happens to be the only one on the firing line this week, is like the proverbial handshake of an old friend.  Been using one since I was 12 years old, and frankly, still shoot the old .45 as well as I do anything else.

My significant other, smugly flaunting polymer pistolry on her hip, considers it a symptom of fogeyism.  I suppose the diagnosis is confirmed.  Still, there’s something to be said for the old, proven hardware.  It isn’t fair to teach with one of the fancy custom ones – it gives the student the false impression that you need a Ferrari to drive skillfully, when a Chevy can still get you where you’re going perfectly well.  So this week’s .45 is an out-of-the-box Springfield Armory Range Officer, which I think is as nice a 1911 as you can buy new for under a grand today.

How about y’all?  Is there any corner in the world of the gun where you cleave to the old-style stuff instead of the latest and greatest?

 

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STEPHEN HUNTER

It’s always a pleasure to meet a favorite author.  This past week, I was able to introduce my class to Stephen Hunter, who pens the Bob Lee Swagger series and is, unquestionably, more knowledgeable about firearms and their use than anyone else writing in mainstream fiction today.  I’ve corresponded with him for years, but this was my first opportunity to meet the man face to face.

As intelligent in conversation as he is in print, Steve in the flesh is a down-to-earth regular guy, and very much One Of Us.  The class loved his commentary on the interface between the gun culture and the mainstream media today, a topic he is eminently qualified to discuss by virtue of his many years at the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post, from which he is now retired.

If you haven’t read Hunter’s work, do yourself a favor and dip your toe in that water. I enjoyed his first book, “The Master Sniper,” back around 1980 when the publisher sent me a review copy, but he had me at “Dirty White Boys.”  That said, my single favorite is his non-fiction “American Gunfight,” a deeply and superbly researched account of the attempted assassination of President Harry Truman.

Now, I just have to meet Larry Correia, who is to science fiction what Stephen Hunter is to mainstream novels…

This is the class…

 

…that got to meet Stephen Hunter.

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