Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 113

WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS…

The recent atrocity in Paris reminds us all of the continuing danger from homicidal fanatics.  The cowardly murderers ran rampant, unopposed; according to some reports, one or both of the police officers killed in the massacre were unarmed and helpless to fight back.

President Obama is taking a lot of heat for not flying to Paris to join a reported 40 other heads of state in a show of solidarity.  This is one thing I won’t criticize the man for. If I were head of Secret Service I would have stood in the Oval Office and screamed at him, “It’s nucking futs! Can you imagine a more irresistible target for Islamic terrorists than forty-one of you, including the head of the Great Satan itself?!?”  I’m frankly amazed that there wasn’t an attack on the gathering, though I’m glad there wasn’t…and if the free world’s security services are smart, they won’t tell us if there was such a conspiracy and they were able to successfully abort it behind the scenes.

Could it have helped if someone in the Charlie Hedbo offices had been able to shoot back? No guarantees, but it damn sure wouldn’t have hurt!  My take on the matter is mentioned here among others’  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/terrorist-attack-in-paris-newsroom-may-be-wake-up-call-for-u.s.-journalists-to-be-armed/article/2558337 .

I was able to discuss the concept earlier in more depth here, in this very Backwoods Home blog http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2014/11/16/in-the-news/ , and here in Backwoods Home Magazine http://backwoodshome.com/articles2/ayoob150.html .

The prohibitionists and anti-self-defense groups will scoff at the idea that one or more people with handguns among the crop of victims might have thwarted two men who wielded AK47s. They don’t want to hear about Charl van Wyk, who stopped twice that many in a South African attack, armed only with his five-shot snub-nose .38 revolver. You can read about his case and more – and about dozens of helpless victims murdered when there wasn’t “a good guy (or gal) with a gun” to stand up for them – in the current issue of American Handgunner magazine:   http://americanhandgunner.com/the-false-hope-of-gun-free-zones/ .

The authorities expect more such attacks throughout the free world and, yes, here.  My advice is load, holster, and be ready.

It’s not about the odds…it’s about the stakes.

That’s enough about what I think. I want to hear what YOU think about this.

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THINK LIKE A FREAK…ABOUT “GUN CONTROL”

I’ve become a fan of the “Freakonomics” books and podcasts. I like the way Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner apply critical thinking, logic, and “where the rubber meets the road” reality. So, it’s no surprise that I really enjoyed their newest book, “Think Like A Freak.” (Harper-Collins, 2014.)

These guys think in the big picture, using real world anecdotes to illustrate their points.  Readers can’t help but apply their thinking to our own issues. We gun owners wonder why, when even many high profile “gun control” advocates admitted the ten-year experiment of Bill Clinton’s national Assault Weapons Ban didn’t change a damn thing, the Bloombergs of today, more than 20 years later, still go after such things so ferociously. One answer may be found in “Think Like A Freak” at page 192 (hardcover edition): “Quitting is hard in part because it is equated with failure, and nobody likes to fail, or at least be seen failing.”

Levitt and Dubner urge us to look beyond the superficial, and get to root causes of bad things. They write, “In 1960, crime began a sudden climb. By 1980, the homicide rate had doubled, reaching a historic peak. For several years crime stayed perilously high but in the early 1990s, it began to fall and kept falling. So what happened?”  They explain in part, “Gun murders are down? Well, you figure, that must be from all those tough new gun laws – until you examine the data and find that most people who commit crimes with guns are almost entirely unaffected by current gun laws.” (Pages 67-68.)

We all know people who are smart and usually logical, but have an absolute blind spot when it comes to the gun issue, and insist on guzzling the Kool-Aid of anti-gun propaganda. What could account for that? For one thing, self-image.  We all want to think well of ourselves. In discussing the psychology of charity, Levitt and Dubner point out that people contribute to charities because “1. People are truly altruistic, driven by a desire to help others” or “2. Giving to charity makes them feel better about themselves; economists call this ‘warm-glow altruism.’”  In a similar vein, taking what looks like a life-saving position on an issue can give the same “warm-glow” effect. Combine that with Levitt/Dubner’s earlier explanation of why people resist the truth when they’re proven wrong, et voila: we have a piece of the psychological puzzle that explains why many normally logical people can’t see the absence of fact and logic in the “gun control” movement.

If you haven’t looked into the “Freakonomics” series, check it out.  These guys make people think.

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A PERSONAL ANNIVERSARY

Got a personal anniversary this week: January 8, 2005 was when I became the first five-gun master in IDPA.  The acronym stands for International Defensive Pistol Association, and until January ’05, there were four handgun divisions. They were Stock Service Pistol for double action or striker-fired (like the Glock), 9mm or larger caliber; Enhanced Service Pistol, encompassing the above plus single action autos, those with modified grip-frames and enlarged magazine wells, etc.; Custom Defense Pistol for .45 autos; and Stock Service Revolver for six-shooters with four-inch or shorter barrels.  The latter division had been dominated by fast-reloading .45 ACP revolvers with moon clips, so the fifth division – Enhanced Service Revolver – was created for that kind of handgun to level the playing field among the other revolver shooters.

I had earlier become one of the first four-gun masters (never did find out which of us was THE first), and now there are 24 five-gun masters out of some 22,000 members worldwide. I’m still kinda proud of that.

Any anniversary is a time to look back at progress, and how we got from where we were to where we are. This year, Enhanced Service Revolver is “going away,” and IDPA will adopt two new divisions, one for compact 9mm-type pistols, and one to accommodate a small but growing trend of carry pistols mounting small red dot optics.

There have been other changes in IDPA rules. Some pleased the participating membership at large. Some, such as the recent requirement for reloading only while standing flat-footed, did not. IDPA has listened to its membership and that rule is changing. I for one think that is A Good Thing.

As the game changes over the years, so do each of the players.   On my end, I noticed that while IDPA matured, I just got old. I was reminded of that in the three IDPA matches I shot in the last five weeks. Last Sunday in Orlando, shooting a little Glock 26 9mm in Stock Service Pistol, I managed to take “most accurate” overall for the match, but barely clawed my way into top ten when accuracy was combined with speed for final score. In December in Jacksonville, I managed to win Enhanced Service Pistol division shooting a Springfield Armory XDm 9mm and also win the Distinguished Senior category, a kind concession to the decrepitude of those of us over 65. And in between in Gainesville, I shot the same Springfield and didn’t win a damn thing, but still had fun.  My hit potential is the same as ever, but I move slower than I used to between firing points, and in “run and gun” my “run” no longer keeps pace with my “gun.”

But it’s still good fun with great people, and it still keeps you sharp with defensive firearms, so I’m gonna keep doin’ it, even if the day comes when they have to time me with an hourglass instead of an electronic gunshot timer.  If you haven’t tried IDPA, you owe yourself a shot at it, no pun intended.  Go to www.idpa.com to find a club near you that hosts such matches.

Arrows show Mas’ brass in the air as Glock 26 shoots its way to “most accurate” at Orlando match last Sunday. Not shown is slowness of getting to firing station in the first place…Darn it.

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IN GUN-FREE ZONES

Last year, a man ran amok in a mental health facility in Pennsylvania. He murdered one victim and wounded a doctor before the doc drew his own small caliber pistol and shot the guy, stopping what might well have been a mass murder.  The doc was not in compliance with the gun-free zone policy of the clinic.  After the police pointed out how many lives he had saved, that problem sort of went away…

John Gavazzi runs an excellent podcast for ethicists and psychologists, called – appropriately enough – Ethics and Psychology.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/ethicalpsychology/Episode18.mp3

http://www.ethicalpsychology.com/2014/12/episode-18-critical-incidents-and.html.

 

I appeared on there recently when the topic in the first paragraph above was on the menu.  As a subject matter expert on deadly force, I was the only one on the podcast panel who was not an attorney.  Yes, you could say I was…shrink-wrapped. The podcast linked above runs about an hour.

I thought the topic was covered well; if you have an hour to spare, you can find it here:

I was one of three speakers who addressed the gun-free zone issue last September at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago, hosted by Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, and the Second Amendment foundation.  If you have 40-45 minutes, those presentations can be found here:

http://www.saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2014_GRPC_Targeting_Gun_Free_Zones_24_kpbs.mp3

http://www.saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2014_GRPC_Targeting_Gun_Free_Zones_24_kpbs.mp3.

And yes, I still say “gun-free zone” translates into “hunting preserve for psychopaths who hunt humans.”

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AND INTO THE NEW YEAR

Ah, a fresh new calendar!

This being a guns and shooting blog and all, what plans do you have in that vein for 2015?

What new firearm(s) do you hope to acquire?

Any gun modification projects in the works?

Thinking about trying some shooting sport in which you haven’t yet competed?  Try an Appleseed maybe?

Going afield after some game you haven’t hunted before?

Any particular class you’re thinking of taking?

You’re invited to share your shooting plans here!

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A GREAT POLICE LEADER PASSES

Christmas week brought sad news: the passing of retired Spokane police chief Terry Mangan, at age 76 after a long illness.  http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2025302256_spokanechiefdiesxml.html

I was privileged to know the man. He was a cop’s cop.  I’ve known many police chiefs who sit behind a mahogany desk wearing a gold-bedecked white uniform shirt, perhaps as a symbol of “I don’t have to go out and get dirty anymore,” and a little vestigial gun as a badge of office, if they wore a gun at all.  Not Terry; every time I met him, he was wearing BDU pants, a polo shirt with the department logo, and on his hip, the same .40 caliber Glock 22 he issued to his officers.

An ordained clergyman in his first career before taking up police work, he was able to separate church and state while maintaining the values of fairness and kindness that had become a part of him before he pinned on the badge.  In his younger days he participated in civil rights marches, and as a chief aggressively recruited minorities and females onto the job – not because it was the politically correct thing to do, but simply because it was the right thing to do. Terry focused on community-oriented policing before it became a buzzword, and worked hard to keep the public positively involved with the police department.

A “gun guy” at heart, Terry could not be seen as such as a public official in one of the most anti-gun cities in America, but he made firearms safety education part and parcel of Spokane’s crime prevention programs.  He made sure that genuine self-defense uses of firearms in his city were treated as such.  Chief of Spokane for many years, his retirement took him to Quantico where he spent the rest of his career teaching and consulting for the FBI.

In a time when there is a desperate cry for police and public to come together and better understand one another, Terry Mangan would have been the ideal person to lead such a national dialogue.  How ironic that we lost him at a time when we needed him the most.

Godspeed, Chief.  It was an honor to have known you.

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WHAT’S FOR CHRISTMAS?

Feeling a desperate need for something upbeat in this column in light of recent news, and bearing in mind that this is a firearms column at a website that celebrates traditional American values, it seems time to ask…

What’s for Christmas?

Under the tree for my significant other are a couple of Glocks.  One is a G37 in .45 GAP (yes, there’ll be a case of ammo with it) for the large-bore Heavy Metal division she wants to try at the Glock shoots which seem to be her favorite shooting sport right now.  She has frequently come in high female (and recently, high non-Master) in the similar Major Sub division, shooting a .45 ACP Glock 30SF that’s a bit big for her smaller hands. Since stock format guns have to be used, she’ll benefit from the 37’s smaller grip girth. The other is a .40 caliber G23 RTF2, the variation with gill-shaped slide grooves and very Rough Textured Finish on the grip area. She fell in love with the RTF2 treatment on a full-size 9mm Glock 17 and wanted the same format, one size down, for carry.  The 9mm Glock 19 in that format is unbelievably scarce, and while a distributor has brought out a limited run with the RTF2 grip treatment, inspired by the great Larry Vickers, it lacks the gilled slide that she’s become fond of. Thanks to the good offices of my gun dealer buddy Ernie Traugh at Cedar Valley Outfitters in Marion, Iowa, I was able to score a 23 RTF2, and given how well she handles a .45, I expect her to wield the .40 with aplomb.

And she, bless her, got me a canopy for the shooting bench at my often rain-swept shooting range.

What guns (or gun-related stuff) are you hoping to receive?  What gifts in that vein will you be giving to others?  And why did you make those particular choices?

Please share here.  Your comments may inspire another reader who has one of those hard-to-buy-for shooters (or potential shooters) on their Christmas list.

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GEORGE ZIMMERMAN SPEAKS

Mark Walters’ nationally syndicated radio show and podcast, Armed American Radio, is one of my favorites.  I’m a regular listener and an occasional guest.  This past Sunday night, after Mark had completed one of my two-day, twenty-hour MAG-20 Armed Citizens Rules of Engagement courses, I joined him on the show along with Claude Werner, The Tactical Professor, who hosted the class in Atlanta.  Other scheduled guests included Gail Pepin, Amber Kunau, Beth Alcazar, and famed instructor Rob Pincus.

During the second hour, listeners got an unexpected surprise guest: George Zimmerman called in.

If you’ve ever heard the Internet BS of “a good shoot is a good shoot” or “if you’re acquitted, nothing else matters,” you’ll appreciate the reality of what Mr. Zimmerman had to say. He spoke in detail about how profoundly the massive media campaign against him, and of course the ordeal of the court proceeding itself, impacted him and his family.  That impact is still huge, still cruel, and yes, still ongoing.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time George Zimmerman has discussed this side of things publicly.

George Zimmerman’s comments can be heard in the second hour of the three hour show, here: http://armedamericanradio.s3.amazonaws.com/12-14-2014_Hour_2.mp3

The entire three hour show (mostly self-defense issues in the first hour, and mostly women’s gun selection and self-defense issues in the third hour with the three famous female authorities), are available if you download the entire podcast at: http://armedamericanradio.org/show-archives

Thanks to Mark Walters and his sponsors for making this much needed dose of reality available to a nation which was widely lied to in regard to this matter.

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PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS, FROM MY BROTHER

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve noticed that a recurring theme is, “Get both sides of the story before you make a decision.”  It’s a sad thing that it has to be a recurring theme.

As I said here most recently (http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2014/11/26/ferguson-part-iii-the-fire-this-time/) , “Back in 1972, when they first pinned a badge on me, I was told that we were the keepers of the secrets of the community.  We owed the suspect/defendant and the victim alike their rights to privacy.  We learned to say, ‘No comment’ to reporters. ‘It will all come out in court.’ What I realized early on and have preached to brother and sister cops in the decades since is that this doesn’t work when the cops themselves become the accused.  An accusation of wrongdoing that goes unanswered is seen as a silent plea of nolo contendere, which translates roughly from the Latin as ‘we do not contest the charge against us.’  The general public doesn’t see much difference between that and a plea of Guilty…and ‘pleading nolo’ generally results in a penalty remarkably similar to what would accompany an actual Guilty verdict.”

Now comes Brian Willis to explain that better than I did.  Brian is a fellow member of the Advisory Board of ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association. For many years, all of us at ILEETA have admired Brian’s ability to not only inspire the professional in the field, but to “train the trainers” of those professionals.  If you ever teach anyone anything, you can learn from him. As you watch the following, you’ll first be mesmerized by his ability to capture your emotion and make you think…and they you’ll realize that the strongest element of his ability to do so is the certainty that what he is teaching is absolutely right and true. That is what gets Brian’s message – and the truth – across.

Share this, please, with others who need to learn from it, on many levels.

Let me publicly thank here not only Brian, but the young woman who brought this video to my attention. She is a Charge Nurse in the Emergency Room at a very busy hospital.  She, like Brian, knows what it’s like to have blood on your hands and human life in your hands, with only a very few seconds in which to decide and act, in a world where clueless or agenda-driven critics will have literally millions of times longer to condemn you at their leisure if the outcome displeases them.

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GRAND JURIES

The grand jury concept has been much in the news of late.  People with axes to grind (including multiple talking heads on CNN) decry the fact that grand juries in Missouri and New  York exonerated the police officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson and the one who grabbed Eric Garner and pulled him to the sidewalk in NYC.  Benjamin Crump, the plaintiffs’ attorney for the families in the Brown case, the Garner case, and the Trayvon Martin death before that, has called for a prosecutor to indict without sending the case to the grand jury in yet another racially –charged case.

I know many defense lawyers – and many citizens from the far left to the far right – who hate the grand jury system and believe it should be abolished.  Having worked within the American criminal justice system in one way or another for more than four decades – as arresting officer, as police department prosecutor, as expert witness for both sides – I have to profoundly disagree.

When people hear the word “jury,” they think of the regular, “petit” jury: normally six to twelve people with some alternates as “spares” who determine guilt or innocence in a full-blown criminal trial, or apportion responsibility between plaintiff and defendant in the trial of a civil lawsuit. The grand jury is exclusive to the criminal side of the justice house, and is called by the prosecutor to determine whether or not there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, or at least, enough question thereof that the matter should be sorted out in a full-blown trial.  The grand jury will return either a “true bill,” which means that the person in question is now a defendant, stands indicted, and is fully inserted into the gullet of the criminal justice machine, or “no true bill,” which essentially exonerates the potential defendant, though that’s not exactly 100% because the prosecutor can usually re-file the case.

The grand jury is the province of the prosecutor. Often, a defense lawyer for the “person of interest” won’t even be allowed in the room, and if he is, he won’t be allowed to advocate for his client. This is what led to the famous saying that “a prosecutor can convince a jury to indict a ham sandwich.” The members of the grand jury hear what the prosecutor allows them to hear.  This is what ticks off absolutists on both far left and far right.

And of course, if you are the one who wants to lead the lynch mob that hangs the defendant, you’ll be ROYALLY pissed off if the prosecutor actually allows exculpatory evidence which convinces his or her fellow citizens to return “no true bill.”  This is apparently why Benjamin Crump does not want people he hopes to pillory to go in front of grand juries, and it is why CNN’s Sunny Hostin, a former prosecutor herself, was outraged that exculpatory evidence was presented to the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri.

Having been on both sides of this two-way street, I support the grand jury concept, and I applaud prosecutors who perform their duty as ministers of justice to allow exculpatory evidence (indicative of innocence) to go before the grand jurors as well as inculpatory evidence (indicative of guilt).  Their job is as much to exonerate the innocent as it is to prosecute the guilty.

Some say, “But if the prosecutor is the sole arbiter of the evidence, he can get anyone he wants indicted!”  To which I say, “SO WHAT?”

Please understand: IN MOST JURISDICTIONS, THE PROSECUTOR CAN INDICT ON HIS OR HER OWN WITHOUT A GRAND JURY ANYWAY, under what is generally called an “offer of information.”

In the cases currently under media scrutiny, the grand juries heard both sides of the story, while the public and the talking heads only heard one side’s narrative.  Before anyone joins in the howl of the lynch mob, they should ask themselves one question:  “If I was the one accused, would I want my side of the story and the evidence supporting me to be heard, before I was sent to trial in a case that would likely cost me six figures worth of dollars and incalculable suffering for myself and my family, before the decision was made to put me through that ordeal?”

The grand juries in the Brown death in Ferguson and the Garner death in New York did hear both sides.   Having heard that, they each issued no true bill.

I for one respect that, and the prosecutorial authorities who allowed those grand juries to hear both sides.

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