Shall-Issue CCW in California

Do you ever wonder what would happen in California if this state adopted a shall-issue CCW permit system?  Then all you have to do is read this article about the 10-year anniversary of Michigan's shall-issue permit law, how "blood in the streets" was predicted, and how the dire predictions failed to materialize.

Just as they have failed to materialize in every other state that has gone shall issue.

Some people believe that guns in a public setting are too dangerous to tolerate, but CCW permit holders are overwhelmingly law-abiding and safe.  And guns have utility for self defense.  As a Californian, I would sure like to have the choice to be armed as I go about my daily business. 

But this state does not allow me to do that.

Norway, Active Shooters, and Common Gunsense

Joan Peterson, in this post on her blog Common Gunsense covered the recent mass shooting incident in Norway.  Her position in her post is very understandable given that Ms. Peterson has relatives in Norway, is consistent in her view that guns in public create more harm than good, and given the horrific tragedy perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik.

In her blog, Ms. Peterson writes:

"Some of the chatter coming from the gun rights extremists pointed to lack of security on the island. If only, oh if only, someone on that island would have had a gun, things would have been different"

To which I replied:

Many, if not most police departments now agree that active shooters must be confronted with force as quickly as possible in order to end the attacks.  We self-defense proponents think that an armed civilian could have provided that force.  This chart of active shooter incidents bear out that some active shooters have indeed been stopped by armed civilians:

http://excalibersecurityservices.com/documents/100323_incident_analysis_spreadsheet.pdf

The presence of an armed civilian, or a off-duty police officer might not have prevented the tragedy in Norway, but could the presence of an armed civilian made it any worse?

I would like to explicate a bit on the data contained in the incident analysis located  at the link above, and explore further how resistance to active shooter incidents can help resolve them and minimize loss of life.

First let me emphasize that I do not know if the incident analysis is comprehensive, but I am going to treat it as a representative sample of the incidents in the last thirty years and seek to answer this question: "Can victims of an active shooter attack resist effectively to stop the attack?"

Upon examination of the 50 listed incidents, one thing immediately falls out of the data: people finding themselves in such an attack are on their own:  64% of the attacks were ended when the shooter chose to stop.  Victims of these attacks must use their own resources, or depend on luck, to survive in most cases.

In 18 cases people attempted to intervene to stop an attack, sometimes police, sometimes civilians, both armed and unarmed. These attempts were successful 83% of the time.  One very surprising thing is that even unarmed civilians were successful 80% of the time. While that appears to be as effective as the armed police success rate, I believe that the armed police rate is artificially low: the one failure by the police to stop an attack occurred at Columbine High School, where police did not follow the modern active shooter protocols.

But, to get to the heart of the matter, do firearms make a difference in the results?  Armed counterattacks were successful 87% of the time, on average.  In addition, armed civilians were successful in their counterattacks 100% of the time.  Armed police were successful only 80% of the time, but their rate would be 100% if not for the fact that older procedures were used at Columbine High School.  This data shows that am armed civilian has a 20% better chance of stopping an attack than an unarmed civilian, and that the armed civilian is just as effective as the police.

Clearly, resisting an attack can have a major beneficial outcome, no matter who resists. So I have to modify my stance expressed on Common Gunsense.  History shows that any kind of resistance by victims can be very successful, but armed resistance stops these attacks almost uniformly.  Only two armed counterattacks, by the police I might add, failed to stop these attacks: the one at Columbine where police chose to contain the scene instead of engaging the shooters, and the one in Fayetteville, NC, where police shot and wounded the shooter, who then went on to kill more victims before police stopped him.  Civilians have a 100% success rate stopping these attacks.

So yes, Ms. Peterson, I am now very confident in claiming that an armed person, either a police officer or a civilian, would have stopped the attack on Utoya and saved many lives.

If Today Is to Be the Day…So Be It.

“If Today Is to Be the Day…So Be It”.

If you seek to do battle with me this day, you will receive the best that I am capable of giving.
It may not be enough, but it will be everything that I have to give and it will be impressive for I have constantly prepared myself for this day.
I have trained, drilled and rehearsed my actions so that I might have the best chance of defeating you.
I have kept myself in peak physical condition, schooled myself in the martial skills and have become proficient in the applications of combat tactics.
You may defeat me, but I’m willing to die if necessary. I do not fear death for I have been close enough to it on enough occasions that it no longer concerns me.
But, I do fear the loss of my honor and would rather die fighting than to have it said that I was without courage.
So I will fight you, no matter how insurmountable it may seem, to the death if need be, in order that it may never be said of me that I was not a warrior.

-- Brian Terry

Rest In Peace.

Second Amendment - Not Outdated!

I read this letter in the San Jose Mercury News:

Second Amendment is clearly outdated

I read the article on "A treasure chest of stolen weapons" (Page B1, May 27). Every day, without fail, someone gets fatally shot or severely injured from a shooting. The Second Amendment is about as outdated as anything that has to do with the pre-Revolutionary and Civil Wars in this country. Since we no longer need a militia (given the new Department of Homeland Security, which the president just renewed), can anyone in good conscience -- especially the police -- explain why we should not have stricter controls over who owns and uses weapons, and the type of weapons allowed? Surely there will be responses (again) that cars kill more people than guns. Does that justify the lax administration of deadly weapons, especially automatic, semi-automatic and Saturday night specials? Haven't we had enough of this?

Gus Holweger

San Jose

 Outdated, huh? Tell that to people who really needed to be armed, and, thanks to the Second Amendment, had guns to protect themselves:

After the storm, the neighborhood association had to act as law enforcement and emergency response unit as city services collapsed and the police force was unable to protect them.

Citizens organized armed patrols and checked on the elderly. They slept on their porches with loaded shotguns and bolted awake when intruders stumbled on the aluminum cans they had scattered on the sidewalk.

Gunshots rang out for days, sometimes terrifyingly close.

After any major disaster, a flood, a fire, or an earthquake, some people will use the ensuing disorder to help themselves to your money, property, or valuables.  And sometimes the police are not going to be there to help you, or anyone else.  In New Orleans, some police joined the looters. 

Law and order can break down, and if it does, do you have the means to protect yourself?  If so, then thank the Second Amendment.

Newt Gingrich to Run for President

BFD

Weapons On Campus: Disasterous Only for Anti-Gun Bigots

The Texas state senate has passed a bill to allow citizens with CHL licenses to carry on public college campuses.  This article in the UK newspaper The Guardian has this particular bit of silliness:

Democratic senator Judith Zaffirini, who was a student at the University of Texas in 1966 when sniper Charles Whitman killed 12 people and wounded dozens of others, argued against the bill. She predicted mass chaos if police responded to a call and found several people with guns drawn.

Perhaps Ms. Zaffirini was not on campus that day, because not only was the Whitman massacre perhaps the first campus mass killing, it was also one in which armed citizens, some of them students, assisted police by taking Whitman under fire while officers made their way up to Whitmans position and shot him dead, ending the attack.

Around 20 minutes later, once Whitman began facing return fire from the authorities and armed civilians who had brought out their personal firearms to assist police, he used the waterspouts on each side of the tower as gun ports, allowing him to continue shooting largely protected from the gunfire below but also greatly limiting his range of targets. 

And we have this interesting report:

In the course of that 90 minutes, many of Austin’s citizens, including many Vietnam veterans, risked their lives in returning fire against Whitman or rushing onto campus to pull out victims. Many years now, on the anniversary of the massacre, the UT community pays homage to the heroes of that day.

And finally, we have the remembrances of an eyewitness to the events of that day. And guess what? There were guns on campus:

None of the professor’s offices were occupied except for one whose door was open. As I walked down the hall toward that office the sound of a large caliber rifle thundered from that open doorway followed by two men talking. After all the bizarre events of the last few minutes it didn’t seem strange to me when I peeked around the office doorway to see one professor shooting a deer rifle at the top of tower while the other fed him ammunition. It never entered my mind to question why an English professor would have his deer rifle in his office complete with boxes of ammunition. This was Texas after all. Guns were commonplace. From the office windows, we could see the top of the tower clearly. Small puffs of smoke were coming from the rifle of the sniper on the observation deck. The large glass faced clock above the observation deck was shattered from others shooting back at him. The professor ran through several boxes of shells before running out of rounds. My ears were ringing. 

So, "mass chaos" has already happened,  it happened on the UT campus on August 1, 1966, and the police did what police always do: exercise good judgement. No citizen was shot, injured or arrested by the police, except for Whitman.  Indeed, citizen gunfire is credited with suppressing Whitman and limiting his ability to kill more people.  Citizens also used good judgement, not shooting indiscriminately but making sure they had identified the correct target.

Why is there so much hysterical opposition to on-campus concealed carry?  Perhaps the anti-gun Left is afraid that if the last sacred gun-free zone is lost, then what has happened elsewhere will happen there as well: nothing. No increase in violence or suicides.  No people "snapping" and starting a shooting rampage. No police accidentally shooting students because they encounter one who is armed.  And then it will be proved, once again, as it has been proved in every state that has implemented a shall-issue concealed carry permit law, that their arguments are completely false and without merit.

It's Monday...

... so Joan Peterson has another one of her anti-gun screeds out on her blog.  Here is what I posted in response:

If a "majority" of Americans agree with your view that guns should not be carried in public, why has not one single shall-issue law or constitutional carry law been repealed by the vote of this "majority"? 

Also a survey of 600 individuals in five states hardly proves that a majority of American favor your views.

I once asked, on Common Gunsense, what additional gun policies and regulations Joan Peterson advocated, to state them clearly.  She chided me,, saying that I already knew from reading her blog.  Well, I didn't, but it did inspire me to read some of her old posts, and I can easily gather that Joan Peterson is very much against people carrying guns in public, that the spread of laws liberalizing firearm carry is a threat to public safety.  Her entire article is about the proposed concealed carry law in Wisconsin that has a good chance of passing this year with a State Legislature and Governor both controlled by the Republican Party.

Thinking about her thesis, that more should be done to prevent people getting guns who should not have them, I really cannot disagree.  But the Devil is in the details of just what she might propose.  In a future post, I may finally do what I have been thinking of doing to a while: describe what I think would be the ideal gun regulation scheme.  And note that I DO NOT think that there should no regulation at all, but I do think that citizens should be allowed, if they choose, to carry firearms during their daily, lawful, business.