Thoughts on Paris

I’ve not blogged much since getting back from tour. I’m still playing catch up. There has been a ton of things to comment on, so in brief:

Paris. Coming soon to a location near you. Mumbai, Beslan, and a thousand others, we’ve seen this before, and we’ll see it again.

On the personal, local level, this is another example of why you should carry a gun. No, we don’t expect every permit holder to be a Navy SEAL, just a speed bump. The best way to stop a mass shooter is an immediate violent response. At best, you drop them before they can hurt too many people. At worst, congratulations you were a distraction, but even distractions can save lives or derail plans.

Running is great. I’ll never fault somebody who chooses to run or hide when bad things happen. Every one of us has a different level of training, knowledge, and commitment, and what is the right answer for you, isn’t the right answer for your grandma. If you are the kind of person to get involved, you need to have a clue. However, since the only constant of gunfights is that they suck for somebody, you can do everything right and still die. On the bright side you at least bought everybody else some time.

For the pacifistic anti-gun dumb asses on the internet who always crop up in the aftermath of any violent event, bitching about imaginary crossfires, or how fighting back would just make things worse. Just shut up already. You’re children, with a child’s grasp of the subject. When people are being mass butchered, barring tossing hand grenades at the bad guy, it is pretty damned hard to make it worse.

Then I see the idiots claiming that they’re only worried about the quality of the regular people with guns… Liars. But okay, thought experiment time. Say there was a proposed law for a federal “super permit”, where if a regular person could pass a rigorous background check and, oh say, the same firearms qualification as an FBI agent, that individual would then be allowed to carry a gun anywhere in the fifty states a federal agent could, and ignore things like idiotic gun free zones, or could carry a gun in states where concealed carry is banned.

This doesn’t replace state laws. Heck, make the federal super permit really hard to get. Have it require a really high level of proficiency, a big knowledge of use of force laws, and one hell of a tough qualification. Make the applicant foot the bill for everything. And you know what? I bet you within a week we could still provide a million of my people as defense in depth, worst case scenario interrupters, spread all over America, for when bad things happen.

Would these people so worried about our level of training be in favor of this? Of course they wouldn’t. They’d find some other reason to bleat. And murderous assholes will continue to target disarmed populations.  Besides, this is just wishful thinking, because any federal program which would empower the general populace would be designed to suck and fail from the get go. Ask any pilot who went through the armed pilot training post 9-11 how easy the feds made that simple,obvious, no brainer program.

Other than learning to shoot, learn first aid. The main things to remember about gunshot wounds is direct pressure. For most of them there’s not much else you can do. Learn how to apply a tourniquet.

That’s all personal stuff that could actually help. You want to argue about putting a French flag over your profile pic, I don’t care if you do or not. Whatever makes you feel better. I’ve seen some people saying that if you want to actually make a difference you need to join the military. That’s great, but missing the point. We don’t have a lack of warriors problem, we have a lack of leadership problem.

Now, big picture. Militant Islamist Wahhibi douchebags want to kill you. Period. Don’t make excuses for them. Don’t try to explain them away. They literally want you to submit or die. This isn’t rocket science. Just ask them. They’ll tell you.

In our current stupid society, you can’t talk about this topic without being accused of racism. That’s just idiotic, since a religious philosophy isn’t a race. But these same idiots like to bitch about Christians being awful and look under every rock for an imagined slight to rail against. Only Christians aren’t blowing people up. But libs love to throw out the racism card to automatically shut down all dissent, because most cons are nice people, who don’t like being accused of being vile, repugnant things. So they shut up.

Like if you say, hey, maybe taking in tens of thousands of completely unvetted refugees from a war torn third world nation that is a hotbed of the philosophy that wants to saw our heads off is a bad idea… They scream racist.

For the people saying the refugees are vetted… How? The Syrian Bureau of Criminal Identification?  I’ve seen some people quoting the plaque from the Statue of Liberty. Really? Did you miss the point of what Ellis Island was for?

Do I feel bad for the actual refugees? Yep. The decent people are running from the same scumbags we’re worried about. However, that doesn’t mean the western world has to commit suicide in order to save everybody. It sucks. There’s evil in the world. Not having it on your doorstep makes it easier to treat it elsewhere. When you’ve got a disease you quarantine it. You don’t purposefully spread it everywhere. We’re in the position to help other countries only because ours isn’t currently on fire.

Some of you are under the mistaken impression that there is a good answer.

Another thing that I keep seeing are two opposing, equally idiotic schools of thought. The immediate knee jerk reaction of liberals flipping out about potential retaliatory hate crimes that almost never happen, but will eventually. Because push someone far enough, and they will inevitably lose their shit. Europeans are good at that.

And the other is the they’re all guilty, kill 1/6th of the world’s population, let God sort them out rage posters. Not getting into morality at all, that’s dumb just from a logistical and target selection stand point. That’s just good business. You’ve got a particular problem, focus on that specific rather than the overwhelming whole. Of course we aren’t fighting all Muslims. If we were fighting a billion people, you would know it. However, we are fighting millions. This isn’t some tiny, violent splinter group. This is a fairly wide spread, violent, jihadist, idealized imaginary history, philosophical movement, and they are motivated and think they can win.

The problem is that this murderous faction has taken over large swaths of everything, all over the world, and it has been going on for a long time. I’m not talking physically taking over either, but they’re in the mosques, in the leadership, and in the money. Yes, there are plenty of moderate Muslims who fight these people. That’s why the nut jobs spend most of their energy blowing up people who are supposedly of the same religion. There are bombings and shootings daily across the third world that barely make a blip in our media because they’re business as usual.

For the vast majority of the moderates however, what do we expect them to do? You can ally with the west, where you can fight against the death cultists, but the minute a progressive gets elected, you are going to get sold out and left to die. So why ally with us? Because the death cultists aren’t going anywhere. Those fuckers are committed.

Look at what happened to Iraq and Afghanistan. Why would any leader side with us now? America will come in, kick ass with the greatest fighting force ever… Oh, wait. MSNBC is upset. Buh bye. We’re out. Everybody who helped us get massacred. A year later, if they’re lucky they might get a hashtag on twitter, because that’s how America shows it cares.

Boko Haram, ISIS, and Hamas are all different groups, but they all share that idealistic, death cult, militant, asshole philosophy.

Barack Obama has two signature achievements. No seriously, check google. That’s all they can come up with.  Two. Obamacare and pulling out of Iraq. Obamacare is an expensive train wreck, that didn’t solve the problems it was supposed to, which raised everybody else’s costs, and now for the handful of the population it did help, all of the exchanges are imploding like everybody who can do math said they would. Brilliant. But back to Muslim extremists, we pulled out of Iraq, and Daesh rolled right in. Yay.

Meanwhile, the rest of the middle east fell apart. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry showed us the brilliance we’ve come to expect from democrat presidential candidates and did… shit. I can’t tell. Our administration totally sucked it up to the point that the western world was literally cheering Putin getting involved. How badly do you have to fuck up that your allies are happy the Russians moved in instead?

Mostly it looks like our State Department yelled at the one little country in the region who isn’t trying to blow us up, for being too mean to the philosophical allies of the people trying to blow us up, or for trying to stop the biggest country that wants to blow them up from getting a nuke, even though they get the population adjusted equivalent of a Paris attack all the freaking time.

Liberalism is a suicidal political philosophy that focuses on non-problems and ignores real problems. We’ve got an actual death cult massacring people? Well, we’d better crack down on regular Americans civil liberties. Hey, there’s a conservative organization in rural Nebraska that has absolutely nothing to do with militant Islam, better tap their phones and sick the IRS on them. We do security theater at the airports, while having a foreign policy that makes zero sense and no border. Bad guys are massacring people with machine guns they smuggled into a country with incredibly strict gun control? Well, we’d better double down on gun free zones to minimize the number of people who could effectively fight back. DHS leadership is issuing warnings about American veterans, while the actual guys fighting terrorists are stymied with rules that make absolutely no sense.

I’ve got a ton of fans who are feds. Oh, the horror stories I hear from these guys. So many plots have been foiled, so many bad guys have been caught, and the stuff they are worried that is coming next is frankly terrifying… I mean, we’ve not seen anything yet. There are some nightmare scenarios out there that I won’t talk about on the internet. But don’t worry, our administration’s greatest concern is climate change. They’re all over that.

Seriously, this bunch of fuck ups will go down in history as the most clueless administration we’ve had. ISIS is the JV team! They’re contained. We spent like half a billion dollars on a training program that produced, what? A squad? But even if we’d turned out an actual Syrian fighting force, because of stupid campaign promises to Code Pink, heaven forbid we let our SF guys do their freaking job, and actual lead or help, because that would be “boots on the ground”, and that is so much worse than having hundreds of thousands of refugees overwhelming the western world a year later.

The other day on book tour I was stuck in an airport watching CNN. I swear airports are the only place that play CNN anymore (and before anybody bitches at me about bias, I’m not a FOX news guy either. I cancelled cable years ago). I caught Obama’s speech about the Keystone Pipeline, and it was just asinine. The whole thing was bullshit. He talked about the lowered energy costs, as if that was his doing, and not because of North Dakota, and Saudi Arabia going all bargain basement to try and stop them. Hang on… Isn’t this the same administration that is always bitching about the evils of fracking. Yeah, heaven forbid we be energy independent. Because if you think things suck now, just wait until the house of Saud collapses, and the same militant asshole extremist JV team that we’ve contained so well rolls in there. But don’t worry, before that we’ve got a nuclear deal with Iran that will surely result in Peace in Our Time.

But that’s us. Europe has been following the liberal, progressive, pseudo-socialist path a lot longer than we have. Instead of doing little things that make sense all along, they’ll let the problem get really big and stupid, and then it is guillotines, gulags, and cattle cars. There’s a lot of really pissed off Europeans right now, and over the centuries we’ve got plenty of examples of what masses of pissed off Europeans do when pushed.

The death cultists are totally cool with that, because they truly believe they’re going to win the apocalypse. The only long term problems liberals can fixate on are imaginary ones that allow them to make the government more intrusive for regular law abiding citizens. So I expect everything to get far stupider from here on out.

For the super isolationist types of the Perhaps if We’re Nice They’ll Go Away school of foreign diplomacy, too late now. We’re dealing with a group of people who literally think they’re helping bring about the apocalypse, and that’s a good thing. Our leadership is made up of petulant children more worried about poop swastikas that may or may not have existed, than actual killers who believe in real oppression.

Solution? Beats the hell out of me. It certainly isn’t whatever it is we’ve been doing. The ball is now in Europe’s court. America’s bipolar leadership has abdicated responsibility. Europe can either decide it is in it to win it, and fight like their survival is at stake, or keep doing their thing. The extremists are happy to die, and they consider everybody on their side expendable.

My guess? Retaliation. Our warriors will do what they’re awesome at, and kill a whole bunch of assholes. Depending on how hard and fast we, or in this case the French, do it, that will stop a whole bunch of other attacks. However, innocent people will die as has happened in every war in human history, which will cause liberals to flip out, which will cause the west to go all half-hearted and stupidly forward. So nothing will get fixed. The west will go back to the next imaginary issue that allows liberals to be control freaks. The security apparatus will then go back to being an ever tightening ratchet against the wrong people. We’ll repeat this cycle until the west collapses, or one particular brand of religious philosophy is utterly annihilated forever.

 

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402 thoughts on “Thoughts on Paris”

    1. And I’m certain you can come with merely 5 examples of such, committed by non-LEO persons, yes?

      We’ll wait……

      1. Wow. Pretty ping pong balls that have absolutely nothing to do with human beings having violent encounters.

        You wouldn’t have a “mass”. You’d have a handful out of thousands, and when the one maniac opens fire, most of those are running away and trampling each other, regardless of who, if anyone, returns fire.

        Now that we’ve got something like 12 million permit holders in the US, do you have any actual examples of these hypothetical dog pile crossfires?

        Nope.

        Meanwhile back on planet Earth, cops are more likely to shoot the wrong person than permit holders. And that’s not bagging on cops. That’s because of one very simple thing. Permit holders who shoot people are usually there when events unfold. Cops who shoot people have to respond to events after they’ve begun.

        This just illustrates another phenomena I see a lot on the internet. I like to call it the Dracula riding Godzilla effect. So you’ve got a violent encounter somewhere. Immediately the anti-gun jackasses launch with but Your gun is useless when there are ten terrorists with AK-47s! or Your gun is useless when you’re suddenly attacked by a dozen ninjas in a surprise attack! Oh yeah! What if the mall is attacked by Dracula riding Godzilla! What good is your CCW then, huh?!

        Got me there. But you’re not normally fighting an entire fire team of dedicated bad guys, and if you are, then see above. Speed bump. This is reduction to the absurd, where they make up unlikely hypothetical situations doomed to absolute failure. The problem there is that these situations are so ridiculous that you could take the most highly trained special operator war heroes America has ever produced, and they’d also be stepped on by Godzilla, ergo no guns for anybody.

          1. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

            Edmund Burke

            There are too many scumbags getting away with far too much because none of those good people will step forward and say “No more.”

          2. @Kevin P.
            At least one person has that font installed. I should probably be more explicit until all the browsers upgrade.

          3. @ Kevin P.

            It was during the ’70s that moral equivalence crept into criminal law in regards to violent crime.

            Interfere with or attempt to interrupt or stop a violent crime in progress then you became a criminal too.

            It’s gotten so bad in so many places that our run of the mill criminal gangs use that to their own advantage. Anyone that’s building momentum in keeping said gangs out of their neighborhood are targeted with violence of a non lethal variety until they raise their own hands in a combative manner to defend themselves. Then, that person ends up in jail where other gang members already in jail can take care of business.

            Most often, they don’t kill the defender. But, when the defender gets released from jail, assuming he hasn’t been forced to commit “acts of aggression” sufficient to get moved up to prison in order to attempt to defend himself, he’ll be so wrecked and ruined that he’ll serve as an example to everyone else in “the hood” on why it’s not a good idea to stand against the gang.

            Our current law system IS the reason violent gangs are as large and powerful as they have become.

            We’re seeing this exact same thing playing out on a global scale now.

          4. With some of these idiots it’s not even moral equivalence: the bad guy isn’t at fault because “Society/We MADE him do it!”:
            A UC Merced student who attended the teach in said he could not believe the school’s event blamed the stabbing spree on “masculinity” and completely downplayed radical Islam.

            “They just want to say it’s not Islamic terror,” said the student, a senior at the school who asked The College Fix to remain anonymous for fear of “retribution” for speaking out.

            “They were trying to understand why the kid did it,” he added, noting about 200 people attended the teach in. He said “Islamophobia” was cited as the reason people want to call it a terrorist attack.
            http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/25127/

          5. I wonder how many recent acts of terrorism are committed by people calling themselves something OTHER THAT MUSLIM?

          6. I’m guessing that you’re being sarcastic (and that eight people failed to notice). Because it’s always better that evil triumph:-P.

          7. …I’m really disappointed that so many people seem to have missed the thread here. What *are* they teaching in schools these days?

          8. To be stupid, ignorant, let liberals think for you and passive. I know I’ve missed a bunch, but this sums up what our colleges and universities are promoting so they have all the money and power to make us slaves.

        1. Once I finish my moon ferret drawings I am now going to have to draw Dracula riding Godzilla… you are a source of endless brain worms for interesting imagery.

          1. Then Google Images for “Nothing is Unpossible” — Mermaid riding a T-Rex as a description barely does it justice.

        2. Oh, I’m sure it’ll be good. I have Gamera to assist me.

          (…they’re not the only one who can be ridiculous!) 🙂

        3. “What if the mall is attacked by Dracula riding Godzilla?”

          That image is too cool not to be a scene in one of your upcoming books.

    2. With all due respect, people aren’t ping-pong balls, and there is no evidence of such a “phenomenon” ever taking place with CCWers. Believe me, there are enough of us out there that if it were going to happen, it would have happened already.

    3. “Pepsi commercial” IOW made up, not real, didn’t happen.

      These kind of things keep being predicted by the pearl clutcher crows, but remain stubborn in their insistence on not happening as the pearl clutchers predict.

    4. So much wrong, I hardly know where to begin.

      But, I can only speak for myself: I am not a ping pong ball. On a mousetrap. In a room with a thousand other ping pong ball/moustrap sandwiches. Plus, if the mousetrap is activated, it throws me across the room. It doesn’t cause me to draw my legally-carried weapon and randomly spray the room with gunfire.

      Your analogy is invalid. lol.

    5. Question for Dan- are you a shooter? Do you have an actual familiarity with firearms? Do you compete with firearms? Are you personally acquainted with people who shoot?

    6. Actually this commercial is the perfect metaphor for anti-gun concern trolling.

      Note the mirrors surrounding the mousetraps that only serve to create the illusion of something larger. It’s just missing the smoke.

    7. Really? Every time I’ve seen those mousetrap demos it was all about explaining how nuclear chain reactions work so well. I think the original was by Walt Disney back in the 1950’s. Sorry, but as Wolfgang would say: “Not Even Wrong”

    8. I think another factor that prevents the chain reaction firefight is that the Good Guys have limited ammo, and are hunkered down, evaluating the situation, in order to use that ammo to best effect.

    9. Well, a lot of people don’t like your post, but I think you raise valid, well-thought-out concerns about the over-consumption of soda.

  1. Haven’t read the whole thing yet, but just want to address this part right now:

    I’ve seen some people quoting the plaque from the Statue of Liberty.

    I’d be pretty happy if we were getting “huddled masses yearning to breath free” Instead we’re getting “angry crowds trying to turn us into the same hellhole they came from.”

    It’s the “yearning to breath free” part that’s lacking, replaced by “yearning to enslave us”.

    1. I would not mind the yearning to be free masses it is the yearning to cut of our head ones that I am not too keen about

      1. This is pure xenophobic, racist, fantasy. The people who want to come here are more like your great-great grandparent from Scotland or wherever than they do to Osama Bin Laden. Challenge your biases.

        1. Derek, challenge yours. Your knee jerked so hard it almost clipped you in the nose. A majority of the people who want to come here are like that, but not all, and to be not keen about the violent, beheading minority is sane, not xenophobic, racist (what race would that be again?), or fantasy. Gosh, I wish it were fantasy.

        2. And you know this how? You’ve personally vetted all the refugees yourself, then?
          To quote the Gipper, “Trust, but verify.” To not check these folks out is foolishness.
          Are you so ignorant of human nature to believe that popular American reaction to a terrorist attack by Syrian refugees would be a “ah, dangit, missed that one! Oh, well!”?
          We need to check them out for the safety of the legit refugees.

        3. So, Derek, I take it from your opinion that you have lived with Arab Muslims in the Middle East for a significant period of time recently? That’s the only way to have a truly informed opinion about what the people in question are really like.

          Or are you merely expressing wishful, nay, childishly magical thinking? Unless, possibly, you mean that like our Scottish and Irish forefathers, they, too, want to kill the English?

        4. I’ve got irreconcilable political differences with that generation on one side of my family. You suppose that we would want to be neighbors with all of our ancestors. You suppose that none of us know that we have terrorists or murderers in our ancestry. You suppose none of us are descended from nasty pieces of work who would kill you on general principles.

          I suspect the evidence is not in favor of your assumption.

          A lot of immigrants to North America were soldiers of fortune, adventurers, and warriors who were driven from Europe as being too savage for the new civilized order being created there.

          Also, the assumption that one should accept the political violence of one’s ancestors because of blood is racist.

        5. Never read the Koran have you ? My grandparents did not believe it was their sacred duty to impose their religion on the world by violence and to kill or enslave everyone who didnt believe in their religion.

        6. Very few of Jeffrey Dahmer’s meals included human flesh, but you still probably don’t want to accept his dinner invitation.

        7. Consider a hypothetical bowl of hypothetical candy. 1% of the hypothetical pieces of candy it contains are contaminated with a lethal poison. How many pieces of candy will you eat? How many will you allow your kids to eat?

          HINT: any nonzero answer is prima facie evidence of incurable psychotic disconnect from reality and absolute contempt for human life, even to include your children’s, and your own.

          HINT: yes, we’re aware, they’re “vetted.” So were the Tsarnev Brothers. So was Major Nidal Hassan. So was Mohammad Abdulazeez, the Chattanooga mass murderer. So was Saadiq Long, who just got arrested in Turkey trying to sneak into Syria with a bunch of other ISIS killers. So was Faisal Mohammed, the Merced killer. All of them, “vetted.” Yes, let’s bring in a few million more of them. Why not? Just put them somewhere in Flyover Country and if they succumb to Sudden Jihad Syndrome, let ’em kill some of those uppity Red-state rednecks who don’t matter, right?

      2. Problem is, we are talking about people who have nothing in common with our culture, and have already fubared their country to such an extent as to make our Federal government look productive and responsible.

        Whether it is ‘refugees’ or ‘immigrants’ the policy should have to answer one question: What do these people bring that the United States and its Citizens need or want?

    2. The Preamble to the Constitution predates the Statue of Liberty. And it says “For ourselves and our posterity.” It doesn’t say “for every Third World Iron Age head-chopping psychotic death-cult atavism with an IQ of 55 who’s already turned his own country into a post-apocalyptic wasteland.”

  2. As a fan who is a Fed, all I can say is the rest of us low level folks are concerned whenever we watch the news and leadership is on it.

    1. This was so back when I was in the military as well, though the administration was a bit better back then at least after the first year.

  3. Regarding CCW:

    As a girl, who *loves* skater skirts and other girly-wear, do you have any suggestions as to how to carry? I really don’t like the idea of using my purse (I can’t find a damn thing quickly there, and it’s altogether to easy to be separated from), but I’m sorta at a loss.

    Any resources would be awesome. 🙂

    1. *Recalls a Japanese action movie with two female detectives and a recent news story…*
      *Smirks evilly*
      *Opens mouth*
      *Thinks better of it…*
      *walks away.*

          1. What is this, I cannot even–

            “Swanton said he did not know if the gun’s safety was on when it was recovered…”

            Because if you’re going to stick a handgun into one of your bodily orifices, you should make sure the safety’s on, right?

    2. There are some very attractive Concealed Carry purses. They have hidden, easy access pouches for the weapon, and are in all other ways normal purses. I would suggest you check out some gunships specifically to look at their selection. As for the take-away issue, wear it strapped cross-body, with the access convenient to your strong hand. Then practice, practice, practice draw with the weapon COMPLETELY unloaded. There are plenty of marksmanship classes available, you might also want to get some martial arts training. I would also suggest you carry a backup. I’m not familiar with “skater skirts”, but .380 pistols can be small enough to conceal in a garter-type holster. You can also look at padding the skirt at the waist so that the profile of a waist holster is blended in to the garment. If it comes down to it, rember: never kick anyone in the groin unless you are trying to drive everything through the bridge of the opponents nose.

      1. I’ve considered the purse route, but I’m the idiot who leaves her purse randomly around other peoples’ houses, doesn’t take it to the bathroom, etc. Just a bad idea all around.

        I’m generally a lost cause with actual fighting. I’ve sprained my neck getting OUT of a lock before, but I’m rather better at absorbing a beating than dealing one out (which I’m kinda trying to avoid).

        I like the idea of a garter holster, as well as some of the bra-related ones (plenty to conceal with there…), and thankfully I’m not girly enough to worry about flashing the room if enough shit is going down that I need it.

        1. I don’t like off the body carry (purses, brief cases, etc) myself. Too easy to not be in control of your weapon, and slow to access.

        2. http://www.30calgal.com/
          http://thewellarmedwoman.com/
          http://girlsguidetoguns.com/
          There are other resources out there too. Kathy Jackson at Cornered Cat is excellent, but someone else beat me to that reference. I’m a guy, but I’ve got a wife so I make note of resources when I come across them. FWIW, my wife carries in either a fanny pack concealed holster or a 5.11 shoulder bag. Like Larry, I’m not a big fan of off-body carry either, but I’m a guy and can get away with dressing like a slob (as Jim Tarr points out, this is the key to effective concealment). I’m not a big fan of tiny concealment guns either, though they’re better than two hands with some skin on them. The advice I got was; find a reliable gun in a major caliber (9mm or higher) that you can shoot consistently well, and *then* address concealment. There are lots of options out there.

          1. I struggled a LOT with carry, because I don’t wear belts and I’m fat. I finally (yes, I have the usual drawer full of unusable holsters… {sigh}) found the Nate Tactical in waistband — it’s SUPER comfortable, doesn’t ‘print’ and so on… I posted pix and discussion here of my search for a holster: http://www.kimbertalk.com/forums/kimber-micro-carry-forum/6111-micro-holster-review.html

            (If the link doesn’t work/show up: it’s on the KimberTalk forum, a thread by SnowTao called Micro holster review.” For this holster:
            http://www.n82tactical.com/store/holsters/kimber-micro

            That website is: n82tactical — pronounced Nate-Squared — cause it’s two guys named Nate!

          2. I’m also portly. If your weapon is a compact try Sneaky Pete. Looks like a tablet case or medical device case on your belt. Can even leave your shirt tucked in.

        1. I noticed that and am still trying to figure out how to get an AC-47 or AC-130 into a purse… ‘Course, given the things I’ve seen women pull out of them, it might be possible.

        1. My gunship’s like my Marine Rifle Company: if I thought I really needed them today, I’d stay home… Staring gloomily at my budget!

      2. Just a thought to consider. I recently completed firearms training, and was advised by the instructor that CCW purses have advantages, but also have a major risk factor. If an attacker grabs your purse, he will get your keys and wallet. But if your gun is in your purse, he gets that too! He suggested to my class that if you’re going to carry, make sure it’s on your person. I feel he made a really good point and thought I’d share.

      3. Problem with the cross-body strap is, when the bad guy grabs the purse (and it’s the first thing he’ll grab), having the straps across your body will either pull you right to the ground (try drawing a gun from a purse in someone else’s hand when you’re on the ground with a broken elbow), or cause the straps to break, leaving you purseless and unarmed. And your assailant will now have your gun. He probably won’t use it on you, because he won’t know it’s there yet, but he might on the next woman he attacks.

      4. I don’t like anything that isn’t attached to you pretty solidly. You can lose purses and bags and packs. Just not secure enough. I don’t actually expect ever to use a gun and feel that if it weren’t in my belt it would be a bigger liability than a help.

    3. Check out the CanCan Concealment Holster. It’s designed by women, for women, and can be worn under pretty much anything.

      1. The girly-girl in me’s eyes just got really wide. I might have to update my Christmas list (among friends…my silly hippy parents would be appalled).

        1. It’s too bad you can’t order products like that undercover – like from a parallel web site that lists the same products and prices, but under unassuming names like “control” or “security garment.”

        2. I *did* just add it to my Christmas list! Now, I’m gonna have to choose between the emergency space heater thingy and this. Decisions, decisions. Maybe I can talk Santa into both 😉

      2. I like that a lot. I’ve been wondering what a good holster would be, and this the first time I’ve seen one that really looks like it’d be comfortable and fit under clothes well. Since the fashion industry makes women’s clothes so much more form-fitting than men’s, it’s tricky.

        Does anyone have advice on what sort of gun to use for a CCW? Particularly as far as balancing safety (safety switch or no?) vs. speed of draw/fire (since when you need it, you need it right now)? Bearing in mind that I have fairly long fingers so small grips aren’t so great. (Balancing size–big enough to handle easily yet small enough to conceal easily–is also a concern I have.)

        1. Does anyone have advice on what sort of gun to use for a CCW?

          You’ll get tons of advice asking that online, but I’ll try to stick to your specific questions.

          For a safety, it’s up to you whether you want to use one or not. (Most CC people recommend not, because it’s one more thing to forget in the heat of the moment.) But even if a gun has a safety, you’re not obligated to turn it on. (There are exceptions however. The 1911 and Sig P238 come to mind. I carry a 238 with the safety on, but my other pistols I leave it off.) Modern pistols are designed to not fire when dropped, only when the trigger is pulled. So learn to keep your finger off the trigger until it’s needed, and a safety become redundant. Revolvers don’t usually have safeties.

          For grip, a number of pistols come with replaceable grip pieces to tailor the fit to your hand. My Smith & Wesson M&P Compact has three different grip covers. You can also get third party replacement grips in different dimensions to customize the fit, especially in revolvers.

          There are tons of guns being sold to the CCW market these days. Visit a gun shop if you can, handle as many as possible to see what fits well, make a list of which ones feel good and research them online. You’re looking for reliability first and foremost. If at all possible see if you can rent or borrow your top candidates and shoot them. There’s no one best model or brand, but for any individual there should be several that work better than the rest. Some popular brands are Glock, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, and Sig Sauer, but there are plenty of others.

          Also, if your budget allows, it’s not uncommon to have a few different guns for different seasons & occasions. Cold weather means heavier clothing, so a bigger gun can be concealed. Summer usually means light clothing, so a smaller gun may be necessary. If you regularly carry a bag, purse, briefcase, planner, or other accessory you can keep a gun in that. (Although I agree with Larry about off body carry, too many more things to go wrong. But it’s your call whether carrying off-body or not carrying at all is the lesser evil.)

          One bit of advice I’ll offer: YOU pick the gun you want. Don’t let a well meaning friend, spouse, or store clerk tell you what you want. Consider their advice, but you make the final decision. It’s your skin on the line.

          1. To add to Dave’s point, first, get proper training on how to shoot handguns. You’ll know better what you’re looking for. Plus, proper grip and technique can “tame” the recoil on some of the smaller compact automatics.

          2. Dave hit every one of the points that come to mind. I carry the M&P by Smith and Wesson, compact and its been a fantastic carry.

            The grips are great and change very easily. My wife was using the smallest grips on hers, has longish fingers as you do, and when we were at the range, we got a great tip from the instructor on using the biggest grips, her shooting accuracy went WAY up in that one change.

            Only other one that I’d say is that CCW is not being your comfort, It’s not supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to be comforting.

            Only other thing I’d add is don’t let yourself get tied into “caliber talk” it can go on FOREVER one what is the best for this or that reason. Do what Dave said, pick the gun YOU want.

            As long as it’s at least 9mm. (See? I couldn’t stop myself)

          3. There’s a few good, shootable, and really small 9mm auto available for not too much money these days. The S&W Shield or the Walther PPS can be had for under $400.

      1. True, and I’m in Nebraska/Iowa most of the time so that wouldn’t be an issue, but I can’t imagine open carrying causing less issues than it would create.

      2. yeah, I’d rather not open carry either. it just turns you into more of target, to be honest, for both criminals and law enforcement.

      1. I’m looking into that one, but teensy guns keep trying to hop out of my hand when I use them. Silly crappy wrists and grip. And being very right-handed and very left-eyed…

        1. your not going to get it into play very quickly but the NAA mini in .22 WMR has the option of a fold over pistol grip that does fill the hand well enough, mind you its a single action belly gun, but it beats throwing rocks.
          i sock carry one when i am without jacket or other concealment garments since all my other carry pistols are .45acp. It small light still offers some protection. barrel ballistics are similar to .380 but drop off quickly and that’s OK since i don’t figure to make more than a 10′ shot with it. its really my cower in the corner and at least go with dignity option or as more often happens, my wife asks for some piece of mind if we end up in the shadier parts of St Louis.

        2. If you can scrape up the money — check out the Kimber Micro .380 — yes, it’s pretty much the same gun as the Sig P238 — but O.M.G.!! SO MUCH smoother shooting! (I’m a leftie, right-eyed…) Superb little carry gun!

        3. You might try the Sig 290rs. My wife hates most sub-compact pistols, but finds that one fairly comfortable to fire. It does have a long trigger pull, which bothers some people, but she prefers a double action only trigger.

        4. I have a Glock 19 that I’ve carried for years, but arthritis in my wrists and hands no longer permit me to carry it. I now carry a Sig P238. It’s a 380 but my gunsmith says not to worry about caliber. The 380 uses a 9mm round, just slightly less powerful. But if you put 6 of them into someone, they are going to stop.

      1. The Flashbang is not safe. The design violates the first rule of gun safety. One user has already shot herself and died. There are plenty of other options for women who want something other than IWB carry.

        1. Please explain how the proper use of the Flashbang violates Rule #1.

          Also, I’d like a cite on that death, if it’s not too much trouble.

          1. I’m not sure what your definition of “proper” use is, but trying out a sample holster, using plastic training firearms, led to the following observations: the design of the holster presses the muzzle into one of the user’s breasts. The first rule of gun safety is “Always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction”. If you prefer Col. Cooper’s rules, it would be rule two, “Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not prepared to destroy”. Rule one or rule two, it’s a clear violation, to me.

            If the user has large breasts or a protuberant stomach, the average user’s draw stroke tends to push the grip down (to get it out or away from the bra band), pushing the muzzle up, into the breast tissue. Further, the holster often rides inside the bra band and one or both bra cups, which can allow the user’s breast tissue to slip out of the bra cups, causing fidgeting. I suspect such fidgeting may have contributed to Ms. Bond’s death. Here are the links:

            http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2015/02/woman_who_fatally_shot_herself.html

            Ms. Bond’s obituary:
            http://www.heraldpalladium.com/obituaries/christina-bond/article_5c315d07-ce80-56e2-8e77-0383a73e13ef.html
            notes that she was an MP in the Navy. From that, I would not presume her to be an absolute novice with firearms.

            My opinion is just that, but it is based on over 10 years as a firearms instructor teaching several hundred women handgun, rifle and shotgun marksmanship and safety, and assisting with concealed carry classes for the same amount of time. The dozen women in our informal training group concluded that the Flashbang was a cute idea that was 1) impractical and 2) not safe. If you like the Flashbang, I’m happy that you found something that works for you.

    4. I’ve seen some lady CCW holder talk about a bra holster but I’m not entirely sure about that, for one if you are too small it would be more obvious, two you are more liable to risk injuring yourself than an IWB holster I would think.

      But they exist and you could possibly look into it and come to your own conclusions.

    5. Google “The Big Shebang! Hip Hugger”. Made by Can Can Concealment. Their motto is ‘Safe Sexy Holstering’. http://www.cancanconcealment.com. I bought one of the hip huggers. Just looking at the package. It says ‘See our full line of safe, sexy, concealed carry options from the World Leader in Women’s Compression Holstering”. I bought it at a Gun Show, and didn’t see the full range. What I bought is perfect. Cannot be seen under any clothing. Good luck.

    6. I like the “Wear your purse on your belt” option.

      Keeps your gun close at hand, gives you an easily accessibly place to keep your keys, and you never have to worry about where your purse is.

      Admittedly, it forces you to absolutely minimize the contents of said purse (or it gets heavy), but I still manage to fit a pistol, two magazines, my card folio (which also has space for cash in), a cell phone, a multitool, a thumb drive, a coin purse, and a handkerchief.

  4. Yeah, the future looks….turbulent. On that note, most all of the LDS canneries are open to non-member – stock up now. 😉

  5. The freaking day after the Paris attack the Democratic monkeys were still dancing to the tune of “climate change is the biggest threat to national security evarrrrrr” and half of our living population and all of the dead ones will still vote for the morons – because “free shit!” – so yeah, things are about to get exponentially worse. And with that I say there is no way in hell anybody is convincing me – through force or otherwise – to give up a single one of my guns.

  6. To quote John Ringo “Don’t go to a gunfight without a gun, and don’t go to a religious war without a religion.”

    1. For a decade and a half now I’ve wondered why so many people with no possible concept of Christian “true believers” think that they’re uniquely qualified to understand and design effective policy related to Islamic “true believers”. It’s sort of like if a vegan declared herself the authority on grilling the perfect steak while insisting that those who smoke a brisket every Sunday have it all wrong. She’s *proud* of her meat ignorance sort of like how the professionally secular are proud of their religious ignorance… But since her very identity requires the firm conviction that she’s just *smarter* than stupid meat eaters she can’t admit that she has no idea how to grill a steak without ceasing to exist at all.

      1. Every time I hear one of these politicians pontificating about how “everything these terrorists are doing is entirely antithetical to what Islam stands for, Islam is a religion of peace that would never seek to convert anyone by the sword, etc.” my only thought is, “And just when did you get your doctorate in comparative religion, Mr. Obama?”

        1. A certain amount of that is appropriate informational warfare and not a *bad* idea as long as the foundational understanding exists that a great number of dedicated Islamic jihadists vehemently disagree and that their beliefs *are* rational ones within their religious context and when combined with a wholly non-Protestant culture (an “honor” culture) means that god, by whatever name, *wants* them to destroy his enemies and favors victory and the winner. There is NO concept of divinely required humility and the downtrodden aren’t the most holy, their downtrodden and defeated lives are, rather, proof that they offended god. When Christ was asked “who sinned?” to explain why someone was crippled at birth His answer was revolutionary. Of *course* someone sinned… being crippled was proof of it. And yet, the notion that one’s godliness could be proven by victorious action persisted in Christianity for centuries and in cultures that were mostly Christian for centuries in the form of judicial combat. The person who’s case was favored by god, or who god knew to be holy and righteous would WIN. Losing only proved that you opposed god and deserved to lose.

          Why? Because for most of History this was the default way of thinking about god and god’s will and why one person triumphed and another was born crippled.

          And yet… we’re “ruled” by nincompoops who are proud that they take our cultural underpinings for granted on the basis, I suppose, that we’re “born that way”… good… without sin… and all this compassion and love toward the downtrodden is the natural state of Man… and they think they can formulate policy? OMG.

          1. In the case of disagreement within Islam – it shouldn’t surprise. Even when Mohammad was alive his followers were confused which of his latest divine proclamations they were supposed to follow. That was resolved by him declaring that his latest ones were the ones they should follow, and the previous one that contradicts the latest one should no longer be followed (that’s the abrogation bit.)

            The story of Mohammad taking his daughter in law as his wife is a particularly illuminating example of Mohammad’s make-ayahs-up-on-the-spot-to-justify-what-he’s-doing-then tendency.

        2. I was repeatedly told I was not allowed to tell someone he was wrong about Wahhabbism being the Reformation of Islam. (Yes it is, especially if you go and read about how Martin Luther’s ‘return to the basics’ push was about.)

          There was a lot of goalpost shifting, a lot of comparisons to historical Christianity/crusades, then shifting that I was ‘painting people with the broad brush’ – except no, thats not the case, I was talking about the fact that it IS part of the doctrine, and thus ‘extremist’ is not an accurate descriptor.

          There is a difference about arguing for doctrine and ideology, and arguing about people. I’m with Churchill on the difference.

          1. It never occurred to me to think about it like that. My understanding is it was an anti-Turkish, anti-colonialist (enter irony here) creation by Arabs who felt the Turkish presence in Mecca and Medina had sullied Islam and so had Arabs who worked with the Turks. At that point the Turks had been the “defenders of the faith” for over 2 centuries. The famous ethnic Albanian, Macedonian-born originally Ottoman figure Mohamed Ali who set up a 150 yr. dynasty in Egypt until Nasser was once sent on an expedition to Arabia to stamp out the “heresy.” The family who most benefitted from Wahhabism remained attached to it and to its anti-Turkish views right up til WW I and its alliance with the British and Lawrence. The family was granted kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan and the latter lasts til this day. ISIS out-Wahhabis the Wahhabis of S. Arabia. That’s why they bulldoze any mosque with images and shoot Shia on sight.

      2. At the moment I’m irritated with the fellow who is indignant about psychos claiming that their terrorism is a political act.

        The international terrorist curriculum draws its theory of terrorism from the Soviet Leftists who wrote a lot of the early lesson plans.

        ‘They learned it from you, leftist spittoon filling.’

        1. Terrorism became popular because of the massive leftovers in explosives and experts to go along with them after WW II.

          1. I should’ve specified random terror, as opposed to the specific or genocidal types.

            I’ll concede that the bomb throwing anarchists would’ve killed more if they had better tech.

            1. Consider the extensive leftist history of political violence prior to WWII.
            2. It was the communists who spent a lot of words selling the idea that killing an uninvolved guy’s kid will make him hate the government more than he hates you. They’ve dressed it up fancy, shown it around town, and attracted a lot of gentleman callers, but it is still a dummy.
            3. Psychos blow up people because they have access to explosives. Organizations need a better excuse to pull in funds than lulz. The folks who have done the vast majority of modern terrorist killings seem to be organizations. Back before they could hold on to territory, their sales pitch was mostly based on 2.
            4. Soviet intelligence seems to have put a lot into funding and training any and every terrorist group that was for the left, or against America.

          2. The theory behind #2 is that a government reaction to bombing that causes the uninvolved to turn on the government. In the case of the I-bastards, the hope is to increase the pressure on western Muslims- by government or population persecution. If they can cut them off from western civilization, they can only turn to radical Islam.

      3. There are a large number of atheists and agnostics who have a strong in depth knowledge of religion — often more than one. They do not believe because they have studied. They often come from very religious backgrounds. So unlike your theoretical vegan, they do know how to grill a perfect steak or smoke a perfect brisket, but prefer not to.

      1. Former atheist here. There’s a difference between atheists who lack belief in any god or gods, and atheists who hate Christ, Christians, and the Bible with the fervent fire of the converted. The former are not *nearly* as loud, usually have a more-than-passing familiarity with several religions (can quote verses accurately and in the right places), and are able to *respect* the religious while disagreeing.

        Needless to say, they don’t get as much airtime. It’s much easier to ignore the calm dissenter who makes you tea but sleeps in on Sundays, and go with the loudmouthed brat who makes radical statements instead. The atheists who’ve actually *studied* religion look at radical Islam with great trepidation. They *know* they will be some of the first to suffer, along with the Jews and the Christians who won’t renounce or pay the bribe to remain second class citizens, the gays who get caught out, and all of the other *different* people who cannot pass.

        That’s not the popular thing to say. And they, the ones that have spent their lives (quietly) dissenting with the loudest, most reactionary and vicious members of their professed non-religion (often disillusioned former religious people), are *very* familiar with what happens when you get caught not following the approved narrative. This is nothing compared to a religion that preaches conversion at sword-point.

        There are atheists who get it. Just as there are people of nigh all religions who do, as well. There are even liberals who, in the right circumstance, can see what’s going on, and react accordingly. I worry about those guys, too. See “zeal of the converted.” I don’t want to see concentration camps happen in my lifetime, but I can see ways it could happen.

        1. That’s me. Atheist because I disbelieve in one more god than monotheists do.

          “But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

          1. I hope it didn’t sound like I was grouping all atheists into a single mass. I know quite a few (to the extent that I know they’re atheist and also know what they think about religions) who clearly understand the concept, either from experience or simply because they’re genuinely interested in other people.

            And the “professionally secular” includes any number of people who are culture and weekend “Christians” who would call themselves such but who are still proud that they don’t let it interfere with their understanding of the world.

          2. There’s also what I call “Bill Clinton Christians”: they’re more than willing to pose for a publicity shot outside a church, waving a leather-bound ‘family Bible’ around (especially when they need to justify whatever they want to do next or have been caught doing this time)… but they’d laugh in your face if asked to consider what the Bible actually said about any other issue.

      1. Speaking of Kratman, Caliphate is looking like a likely ugly future prediction isn’t it?

        Someone asked me if I had read it, on Twitter. Guess who showed up to say it was shit without much example of ‘why’? Stalkers gotta stalk.

          1. Most of Kratman’s books are labeled military SF, but they’re actually horror stories.

        1. For Halloween, I was ‘America’s next President, Pat Buckman’.

          Can’t happen like that. Suppose we do get a ‘three cities’ before the next election. The most extreme level of reaction would probably be a Republican victory. (Barring, say, it happening after the Republican convention nominates Kasich. )

          Sanders, ‘Ecchi Rape Culture’, and O’Malley probably don’t have it in them to ride such to victory.

          ‘Three Cities’ is a reasonable extrapolation of Obama’s Iran policy. So all sound Republicans will have at least thought about the possibility. All of them except maybe Trump or Kasich should be prepared enough that they won’t be that unhinged unless they lose close family to the event.

          Suppose that it happens next term. Supposing that the Republicans have not nominated and elected a Democrat, they should be able to blame Obama and get enough revenge on the mid east to preempt a campaign to elect Candidate Buckman.

  7. On target yet again with your commentary. I am finding myself angrier and angrier at the vile yet expected apologetic what-about-ism and moral equivalence nonsense of my friends and other media that started before the attack was even over.

    1. The latest derp compares Muslims to the Jews, and bitches at America for turning the Jews away, insinuating that it’ll be the same for Muslims.

      Last I checked, if that analogy were to hold up even just a little bit, it’d have to be the various Arab Christian sects/tribes, such as the Yazidi, who would have to be turned away…

      …except that y’know, they mostly dead or enslaved now, or in refugee camps in countries not too far away from where they fled, oh and nobody invited them to come live with them, but threw open the doors to the Muslims.

      I’m not really sure how that’s supposed to work.

      1. The Nazarene Fund is vetting whole Christian communities and getting them outta Dodge. First batch going to Slovakia this week, I think. Yazidis may be beyond help by now.

  8. Your statement about what Europeans will do if pushed is spot on; I also see a scenario occurring in the US per Tom Kratman’s book, Caliphate.

  9. As the ever-wise @TamSlick as said, Europe has been known in the past to go from 0 to jackboots in no time flat.

    1. A few words the bad guys might want to remember: Romans, Francs, Goths (Visi- and Ostro- both), Saxons, Vikings, Celts, Spartans, Conquistadors… yeah. Do they really want to send Europe back to those roots?

      1. Even closer on point: Crusaders.

        There’s a reason why mothers in some parts of the Middle East still scare disobedient children by telling them that King Richard (Malik Ric) is going to get them.

        1. There’s also a reason why until recently (linguistically speaking) in many Arabic dialects the word for ‘European’ was essentially ‘Franc’ I’ve heard similar threats based on Charlemagne, though I don’t remember what their name for him was. (It’s been a while.)

  10. Glad it’s not just the wife and I who are thinking this crap sandwich is going to be the only thing on the menu unless things change in Washington.

    Buckle up folks, looks like a rough ride…

  11. Excellent! Very well thought out and presented.

    I’ve been calling people out all over the internet for their deflection methods. That’s what they’re doing when they knee-jerk start talking about “millions of peaceful Muslims”. It’s a tactic to change the subject so you can’t actually discuss Islamic terrorism. Whenever I see that now I just tell them to stop changing the subject and then I remind them of the subject at hand. I do not engage in their deflection and follow them on their tangents as they’d like. Islamic terrorism is a very uncomfortable topic of conversation, but it cannot be avoided if we don’t want to end up like the places that have to deal with Paris/Beirut/Baghdad style attacks every.

    1. The problem isn’t millions of peaceful Muslims. They are in fact that. The problem is they are only peaceful when they institutionally make everyone else second class citizens. So the peacefulness is an illusion. They are peaceful in minorities too small to agitate or too large to go up against. It’s the in-between where you are seeing the problems and muscle-flexing and power grabs; the transitions.

      1. As I have heard repeatedly, radical Muslims want to kill us; moderate Muslims want radical Muslims to kill us for them.

        1. I realized THAT when I was in my early twenties. Hence the BSOD I had for a few months while I wrestled with that reality and that truth, before accepting it. Now I just shrug, and figure Europe is going to fall, or we’ll have another horrific war which the Left will beat on the West with.

    1. Yep, because if you have defense in depth everywhere except certain places where all the targets are legally disarmed, they’re just going to keep hitting those types of places.

      1. This harkens back to second action scene in MHN. And to think, they’re finally allowing concealed carry in military facility now.

      2. Here in the heart of the country (Nebraska), where the populace is fairly heavily-armed, we consider the soft-bellied targets of “gun-free” Boston, NYC, Seattle, Frisco, & LA to be ablative-armor meatshields.

        1. Seattle is not gun free, much to the consternation of the socialists on the city council. In fact, attempts to make it gun free have been slapped down with the state legislature essentially saying “any attempt to make MORE strict gun laws than state law is illegal.”

  12. Larry is right. Here in Israel many people open carry, and the terrorist attacks that have happened have been neutralized pretty damn quickly. That is why they go for suicide belts, because we take out their gunmen pretty quickly.
    We also have armed guards at schools, coffee shops, malls and most office buildings.
    Unlike the rest of the world, we don’t have them at synagogues, churches or mosques.

    1. And bomb making is a whole different skill set, with a whole different bunch of challenges (like them blowing themselves up on accident) 🙂

      1. There was a suicide bomber recently whose belt went off too early. Blew himself up. The surrounding bystanders recorded the aftermath: his top half lying on the street, squirming and twitching (at least to their commentary) and shocked remarks that he was still alive (not for very long, and likely in deservedly horrific amounts of pain.)

          1. There was a guy arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist a few months after 9/11. He confessed, claiming he wanted to carry out suicide bombings in New York and Paris.

            Apparently he wasn’t clear on what’s entailed in a suicide bombing. If you do it right, you can only do it once.

          2. There was also the video of the two bombers who started ARGUING in the midst of filming their declaration videos, and in the heat of the argument, blew themselves up, and the people around them in the room.

          3. We should be grateful jihadis are frequently the dimmest bulbs. Unfortunately, they can still be effective.

            Example: The USS Cole bombers only succeeded on the second attempt. On the first, they overloaded the boat with explosives and gear and partially sank it. After they left to get help to raise it back up, someone stole the motor.

            Sometimes sheer, stupid persistence wins out over brainpower.

  13. Question for the anti-CCW types- why is the guy with a badge who only shoots 50 rounds a year a better person to be on scene than a regular person who only shoots 50 rounds a year? Some sort of magic incantation present in the badge?

      1. Having worked with a lot of cops, it comes down to whether they are gun nuts or not. The non-gun people can’t shoot. The gun nuts get extra tax payer funded practice ammo and shoot really good. 🙂

      2. Non-representative sample. The ones you see at the range are that handful that go in on their own time to shoot.

        (Side note: let’s see if the notifications work for my personal account now)

      3. Absolutely- there’s a lot of cops that are good shooters… and lots of non-cops who are also good shooters. Every single negative that is written about the supposed uselessness of a non-LEO with a CCW during a mass shooting could also be said about off-duty/plainclothes cops in the same circumstances.
        Don’t forget the Norwegian shooter wore a police uniform- we may see this happen in the future.
        Shooting skills are shooting skills- pretty much the same grip/front sight/trigger press/practice, dammit! that all good instructors teach. There’s no sooper seekret ‘Wanted’ gun kata kind of training for ninjas out there.

    1. Of course they have magic. The magic of “Authority” and “Credential”. Now go back to your vote latifundia and stop bleating.

    2. Anything that falls outside of our experience or knowledge base unfortunately winds up being ascribed to “magic”. For urbanites, creatures of specialization (knowing more and more about less and less) this leaves a lot to be attributed to magic. Having grown up in the Northeast, they (and formerly I) would spout the platitudes about the military and police being the only ones who should have guns, because their only knowledge of guns came from Hollywood. They didn’t examine their “logic” because to do so would threaten their beliefs, which is what they value more than reality or learning.

        1. I fit the 2000 rounds a year. Govt paycheck isn’t that great when you’re low level peon and paying for car…insurance…student loans…food…

          1. Almost got the student loan paid off, myself. And not a gov’t peon (any longer), but balancing feeding the beast that goes bang, me, the car, and the mortgage… Is why I work one full time job and keep looking for another part time job for extra cash.

            On the plus side, being dead broke means you’ve got to make *every* round count. *chuckle*

          2. Gah. Got to get working harder on that whole “capitalism” thing. I want to be able to pick up 1,000+ rounds in practice ammo (in decently large caliber), too!

          3. Sign up for Ammoman and get their deals of the day email. There are other places that are cheaper, but they’ve got free shipping, and shipping ammo is expensive. I think I’ve bought about 10,000 rounds of various calibers off of them this year because of that daily email.

        2. I’d shoot more, but, the nearest range that will let me shoot the way I want to is 40 miles away. The local ranges cater to hunters and don’t want combat shooters.

          1. My local gun range is also mostly for hunters but they do have a pistol/shotgun range for home defense. I hate that they won’t allow rapid fire. No more than 1 round per second or you get thrown out. I used to live in the country where we would go out in the woods and shoot guns but now days all the lands around there have been bought up and developed into housing. Progress sucks sometimes.

          2. I used to live by one of those One Round Per Second ranges. At the time I was shooting lots of competition, so that was maddeningly boring if you need to practice something other than slow fire bullseye. So one day I got my competition pistol, and six mags on my belt, with one round in each mag. Then I’d shoot, speed reload, shoot, speed reload, shoot, speed reload, etc. Repeat. I could tell it was driving the crusty old RO nuts, but I was obeying the rules. 🙂

            (and I say this with love, because I’ve been an RO a lot)

          3. My Range here in Portland allow 2 shots per 2 seconds so you can double tap but not continually. However all competition is of course fast as you can. We have LOADS of forest around to shoot and you can buy machine guns at the local store. (with the right paperwork of course) so shooting in the woods can be a LOT of fun.

  14. SF used to be a type of successor to the Fourth Estate – a journalistic view into the future – a canary-in-a-coal-mine to identify and avoid possible new trends of failure arising out of our increasingly complex society.

    It still is that, but in reverse fashion. The new core SF community is itself an unwitting microcosm of everything that can go wrong when a culture embraces suicidal, insane and Orwellian impulses under a single tent, as does wider liberalism.

    We have supremacists piously pie-charting come-one, come-all awards from amidst a welter of their own identity awards only they can win. Don’t wait for lesbian supremacists like Nicola Griffith to pie-chart a Veterans Hospital or occupy draft offices anytime soon. We now have commenters going one better than a “banhammer” and creating scripts to black out other commenters. We have vicious racists moaning about an award bust who want to put an author in its place for no other reason than her race. The anti-white so-called “author” leading that charge is so stupid he wrote an essay about Lovecraft and thought “Cyclopian” architecture had something to do with eyes. We have SF authors leading the way in throwing down due process and equal protection with hashtags like #JustListen and #BlackLivesMatter. They promote cults which are civilizational and sexual cul-de-sacs. As you can see from the last 2 years, the Hugos and Nebulas have successfully extinguished what it is they are meant to do. The most suspense about the upcoming Nebula nominations is what new disgrace they’ll come up with in addition to past promotions of child-fuckers, group defamation, and hateful supremacists all passed off as “progressive” and “social justice.”

    Our new tent of justice looks a lot like places we used to bomb in WW II. We need a new genre of dystopian literature which can warn us against SF writers, because they have failed at their task. What’s stupider than a writer who can’t grasp what “group defamation” means? That puts us up by at least an entire species of hominids, because if you extrapolate out what our social justice SF writers promote into a future, it is one of caves, chaos and blasted landscapes of past achievements. Keep importing and grooming failure and see what it gets you. It gets you people shot in the head for being dumb enough to import failure and then think they can go to a concert in peace.

      1. The idea of commenters deleting each other’s comments is hilarious. That’s a new level of stupid even for that sack of shit cult. Mike Glyer’s Safe-Space. I wonder when they’ll get around to deleting Glyer’s comments. LOL

        1. It’s a straightforward evolution of the right not to be offended. Everyone can silence everyone. The Terror writ, or rather not writ, small.

      2. As someone pointed out about the Hollywood Left- if the progressives are in charge, why is everything so dystopian and dark? Why isn’t everything perfect?

        My answer- the progressives have a nihilist death wish for Western civilization.

        1. Depends on what you mean.

          If you’re talking about why the themes and movies are so angst ridden and dystopian, I think it comes down to the prevalence of deconstructionism. The foundations of most things, from a left leaning view, are fundamentally corrupt. USA? Corrupt. Business? Corrupt. Government? Corrupt (though usually just the right via business). There’s not a lot that is good in the world, particularly not much that’s actually done anything. Occasionally you’ll get a love letter to someone, but usually those are for people who fought and brought down “the corrupt”. You don’t get a lot of action for the builders and foundations.

          It gets more complicated, power disparity and such, but I think that’s a lot of it.

          1. Put 10 white men on a single spaceship and it’s like an arcane Lovecraftian nightmare to these freaks.

            “Not 10 cis white men. And on a single ship? Ia Ftaghn Aieeeee!!”

    1. Black Friday is coming up.

      Malls and stores packed with hundreds and thousands of people.

      Long lines of people waiting to go into stores.

      Now just use your imagination on what could happen.

      1. I was thinking more along the lines of a simultaneous cyber-attack on the national power grid combined with false-flag “refugee” uprisings in multiple US cities.

        1. I don’t think RIFs have the ability for that kind of cyber-attack. China or Russia possibly, but that would be an overt act of war.

          Also, the numbers don’t add up for any kind of refugee uprisings. Also, too complicated. Strapping a bomb to yourself and wading into a crowd of hundreds is much more effective.

          It also isn’t about just the body count. It is about the response afterwards. The terror it invokes. The response of the government.

          1. SFF’s social justice crusaders and Islamists have one thing in common: institutionalized sociopathy passed off as justice. The latter attacks bodies and infrastructure. The former undermines our Constitution, free speech, due process, equal protection, and law and civilization in general, also in the belief it is justice. It’s like imagining a puff adder is a cute little kitty cat and hugging it. Sooner or later you’ll get bit.

          2. It may not add up for refugee uprisings, but there’s significant parts of Europe that are Muslim-Only-Enter-At-Your-Own-Risk No Go Zones (In France, they’re ‘Zones Urbaines Sensibles’) where the majority population are Muslim.

            The scary parts are for the areas where the ‘refugee’ population outnumber the numbers of the citizens.

            http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/11/watch-anti-migrant-video-going-viral-across-europe/

            I mean, the insanity of putting them into towns and villages with small populations going by the idea that ‘they have no crime and lots of space they can share’ is stupid beyond belief. What town was it that had like a less than 200 person population that was made to accommodate something like 700 refugees? Dutch, I think?

            Yeah, just think about that for a bit.

            Honestly, it’s not going to be a pretty little war. Those No Go zones are a bloody explosion waiting to happen. Assuming that France even calls for NATO article 5, it’s not as easy as flying into the Middle East, bombing the everliving crap out of it, and going home. There’s going to be more bloodshed in Europe as terrorists push them too far, and there will be ‘retaliatory’ killings of Europeans.

            I think the point of no return was reached a while back, for Europe – when they started using immigration to artificially boost population without insisting on integration. That was a big mistake. And now there is no good solution for any of this.

          3. A point of correction: the “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” are not ALL “no-go zones”. That’s a misunderstanding. Fox News incorrectly called them that in January after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and had to issue a retraction. There are SOME “no-go zones” of the type you describe, but many of the “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” are merely inner-city areas with the usual inner-city problems. They have a higher crime rate, and the French government has targeted those zones for higher priority in social spending, police response, and so on. (Hence the name “Sensitive Urban Zones”, which is what the French term ZUS translates to). Now, some of them have so many radical jihadists living there that they have effectively become no-go zones, yes. But I know a Christian missionary living in France who lived in one of those “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” for a year (not in Paris), and who insists that the term “no-go zones” is completely inaccurate when applied to most (not all, just most) of them. And my own experience in France bears that out.

            So keep in mind that when you hear that France has 751 “no-go zones”, that’s a myth. There are some “no-go zones”, but most of those 751 areas are simply high-crime inner-city areas spread around the country. Higher immigrant population in many of them, and therefore higher Muslim population because immigrants to France tend to be from North Africa, but “Zone Urbaine Sensible” does not per se mean “no-go zone”. In most of those zones, the Muslim percentage is higher than average but nowhere near a majority. Only the places where the Muslims are a real strong presence (many of the ZUSs around Paris, for example) have real problems. My missionary friend who lived in a ZUS in a different city said there was no reason to be afraid to be a Christian in that particular ZUS.

            In other words, all “no-go zones” are “Zones Urbaines Sensibles”. But not all “Zones Urbaines Sensibles” are “no-go zones”. The one is a subset of the other. It’s important to keep that in mind, so that we can know the true scale of the problem.

            Shadowdancer, I know you weren’t saying that all ZUSs were “no-go zones”, but part of your post sounded like it could have been read that way, hence my comment clarifying matters.

            P.S. I’ve tried to keep my comments about my missionary friend as vague as possible. He wouldn’t be in any personal danger if his identity was revealed (see above about how he’s nowhere near Paris, and the ZUSs in the city he lives in are far from being “no-go zones”). But he still works with many immigrants, including some Muslims who could be in danger if their families found out about their interest in Christianity. (Islam is still Islam, after all, and even in the relatively peaceful areas there will be the occasional fanatic. But if counter-intelligence people are targeting ZUSs for surveillance, I would hope they’d target the TRUE “no-go zones”, and not spread their efforts too thin by targeting all 751 ZUSs in France.)

          4. Every large urban area has “no go” areas. Even “Christian” Port Moresby PNG has places you just do not go.

          5. No, I appreciate the clarification.

            Muslims who could be in danger if their families found out about their interest in Christianity.

            I’d actually read a few stories where they have to move away from their homes and change their names post conversion.

          6. There’s an app for that. It’s called an airstrike. Wouldn’t surprise me to see it happen in France.

          7. Yeah, I think one of those French no-go tent city zones got torched after the attack. Just one that I heard of, though.

          8. But who says the Chicoms &/or new USSR aren’t actively helping them? Both have a long history of funding/training terrorist groups, after all.

        2. Not as easy as it sounds. I’m not an expert in that area, but more than one power grid guy has commented at length about the issues with such an attack.

          1. On the other hand, and speaking as a former security guard for an electric company, substations and non-nuclear power plants would be very easy to sabotage/destroy.

      2. This is the one I am afraid of. There’s simply no way to protect against it. And considering the number of people usually outside standing in line, the nutcases wouldn’t even need to be on foot.

    2. Mumbai or Breslau. “Mumbai” if the bad guys only stay long enough to empty their magazines; “Breslau” if they hang around and plant bombs. It doesn’t have to be on a busy shopping day (in Mumbai, the bad guys just blocked the entrances and went floor to floor), but any overcrowded environment would be good.

    3. Second Tuesday in November, after the polls open on the west coast. Five to ten suicide bombers with sidearms stroll into moderately busy polling stations across the country, including a couple main vote collecting stations. (It’s November, it’s cold, heavy jackets make it easy to hide stuff.) (I have never gone through a metal detector to vote.) Small scale carnage in less than a dozen places, but nation-wide uproar.

      [snipping out a couple added effect scenarios because I’m starting to give *me* the heebee jeebies.]

      And when the bad guys are (momentarily) contained, then the real stuff kicks in. Do the polls stay open? How do we allow for people too scared to come to the polls later in the day? (Or who refuse to bring their wives/kids/grandmothers to the polls?) Are the votes before the attacks invalid? What if candidates say incredibly stupid things that cause voters to change their minds, and want to invalidate earlier/absentee ballots? Does this incident invalidate any election results from that day?

      IIRC, Bush & Cheney asked these questions post-9/11, in a legal sense, to figure out what could and could not be done in the case of this sort of attack. (And for this sort of cautious, worst-case pre-planning there was hysteria in some corners of the internets that they were going to do away with elections, period.) I never heard what the legal answer was.

      Post 2000 election/hanging chads, I tend to think that we would survive this, too. I think.

      1. You know, as an author and as a reader, I’ve come across a number of nightmare scenarios and also discussed how terror attacks can be enacted with my soldier husband and my IT housemate whenever such events come up on the news. We’ve a number of utterly terrifying ones that haven’t been seen yet, which I won’t list here because that’d give them ideas.

        As a reader though, I’m wanting to read Brad Thor and Robert K. Tanenbaum as a result.

  15. > or could carry a gun in states where concealed carry is banned.

    Just as an aside, isn’t some form of CCW available in all 50 states now? I remember until recently Illinois was the last hold out, and the courts had to force the state to accept some form of CCW (much to the anger of many libs here).

    1. There is a big difference between “some form” and actually achievable by people who aren’t body guards for politicians or movie stars. 🙂

    2. May issue and shall issue.

      Even with shall issue, the locals can put roadblocks in the way, or make it financially hard for people with tight budgets to get a license to carry.

  16. “…or could carry a gun in states where concealed carry is banned.”

    Isn’t some form of CCW available in all 50 states (or 57, if you’re a Democrat) now? I remember until a few years ago Illinois was said to be the last holdout, and the courts had to force it to accept CCW.

    1. True that. My instructor used to teach FBI. He wasn’t impressed, and trains us to a higher level of proficiency. To the point that if we do poorly he’ll deride us (tongue-in-cheek) as “shooting like the FBI”. In the past at least, DA/SA triggers were not a good idea for the FBI.

      1. That’s one reason I said that. Hard core gun nuts love getting our hands on various agencies’ qualifications. Back when I was shooting competition we wouldn’t even bother to use them as stages in matches, because they were too slow and not challenging enough.

        Let’s put it this way, my 15 year old daughter can pass any PD qualification I know of. 🙂

        But, but, but TRAINING! CROSSFIRES! PING PONG BALLS!

        The part that they miss is that the cops and feds who are gun nuts go to regular open to the public gun schools to learn to shoot better. Yes, there is elite government training out there, but that’s usually reserved for special teams, and the average dude carrying a badge hardly ever gets to do any of it. In most big cities that have run off all of their gun ranges, they usually don’t even have enough range space to get every officer qualified, let alone spend time on additional training.

        1. My local PD, there were three of their SWAT team that came to the regular range and shot every week. We asked them why and they told us that the PD bought them TWO boxed of ammo per year to practice with and that most of their fellow cops used to sell one box because they didn’t even practice that much. 80% of cops shoot 20% of the time they should.

  17. LC: “No, we don’t expect every permit holder to be a Navy SEAL, just a speed bump.”

    You and others might be very surprised at how dense the population of former specops guys is. When I was working on Wall Street, there were 20-30 former frogs on the island, but that is a bad example since nearly everyone who is operating legally in the five boroughs is disarmed by fiat . In NoVA (think Arlington, Fairfax, Chantilly and so forth) there is an absurd number of former SOCOM bubbas, nearly all of whom carry. If there is ever a mass shooting attempt at the Tyson’s mall, for example, it will likely look a little different than Paris.

    When I got out in the late 90’s, I calculated the number of graduates of BUD/S at about 38k, potentially 40k. By now it has to be over 50k.

    However, the counter to my argument is that there weren’t any CCWs in the audience in Aurora a few years back. I know that saying CCWs don’t stop mass shootings is specious, since there is no way to count something that didn’t occur (if a mass shooter is stopped, there isn’t a mass shooting, so how do you count it) and most of the shooters pick places with low/no CCWs (recruiting center, military base, schools etc.). A few happen where you think a CCW was likely (Tuscon, Aurora…). Ideas?

    1. There apparently was a CCW near the Tucson shooting (the Walgreens a couple doors down?) but the fight was over before he could engage. It’s not a 100% solution (insisting that the opposing solution be airtight is a hallmark of the fanatic trying to preserve their beliefs and shut down the argument), but even when a CCW isn’t in a position to engage (a smaller envelope than might be obvious, see above) CCW certainly doesn’t make the problem worse, and has the potential to make is less shitty than it otherwise would be.

      1. I thought one of the guys that tackled shooter was ccw. Had no shot and was more conscientious than these hoplophobes believe. Same with Clackmas

    2. Considering the people I’ve worked with, no, I wouldn’t be surprised at all how many there are. 🙂 (plus, the most heavily armed place in any given city is a Larry Correia book signing)

      That’s why I said give me a week, and we could get a million capable shooters. Just think, then all those retired SEALs on Manhattan could be legally packing. That would be a wonderful thing.

    3. “A few happen where you think a CCW was likely (Tuscon, Aurora…).”

      I’m pretty sure there’s never been a mass shooting event at TusCon. There certainly hasn’t been a mass shooting event at any TusCons I’ve attended…. 😉

      Concerning the Tucson shooting in January 2011, I live in what was AZ8. Republican Jesse Kelly, a strong advocate for gun rights (I met him at a campaign event held at Chosin Firearms in Whetstone, AZ)), very nearly unseated incumbent Gabrielle Giffords; had half of Libertarian candidate Steven Stoltz’s votes gone to Kelly, Kelly would have handily unseated Giffords.

      For an alternate history short, imagine a constituent meet-and-greet, much as the one Giffords held that day, but with freshman Representative Jesse Kelly, and his supporters, present….

      1. Aurora theater was posted No Guns Allowed.

        Tucson was a meet and greet for a DEMOCRAT. Because you know those die hard democrat voters and their love of concealed carry.

        1. IIRC, the Aurora shooter drove past several theaters to get to the one he picked. Why? They didn’t have “NO GUNS ALLOWED” signs.

  18. What would Reagan do? Truth is, ISIS would likely be a small, local group lacking support.
    Why?
    Reagan was a crazy, unpredicted, teflon, cowboy that scared our enemies. His “open mike slip” declaring the Soviet Union illegal and sending missiles? It likely wasn’t.
    Compare that to the Obama’s “red line .” When his bluff was called, he did nothing.
    I watched him his morning. Poor speaking ability, more a petulant child then a leader.
    What happens when a mass shooter is confronted with an armed response? They fold.
    ISIS. carpet bomb with B-52. Destroy utilities, infrastructure, oil production. If these barbarians want a 7th century world, let them live in one.

  19. While I hope I never face it, I am prepared to be a speed bump. Just like the passengers on flight 93 made up their mind that day so did I. I refuse to be a willing victim.
    With a lot of luck I’ll kick ass.

    1. I’m right there with you. I don’t expect to be a hero or to come out of a really bad situation alive, but I’m willing to do my damndest to take at least some of those bastards with me. And every second they’re focused on me is a second they aren’t focusing on somebody else and gives that person more time to get out. I’m fine with that. Though it would be just my luck it would be some stupid Bernie voter who stops trying to escape to start lecturing me about white privilege and how my cisnormative heterosexual Christofascism is the reason the guy is shooting up the place and would then completely waste my sacrifice. I’d then be forced to kick that guy’s ass seconds later when he met the same fate.

      1. I think like you do. I can’t maybe stop them, but I can slow them down. The point of a defense in depth is that you CAN do just that. If every school had a sign saying “2 teachers in this school are armed and you don’t know which 2” … THAT is deterrence.

  20. You thoroughly under-estimate how thoroughly World War 2 and the subsequent Leftist pogroms of anti- Communist Europeans changed Europe’s cultural DNA.

    Those who fought to stop Communism in the 30s and 40s and survived WW2 and its aftermath were all lumped into the Nazi-collaborator basket and any opposition to collectivism earned a similar label. After 75 years of that, along with almost complete diarmament of private citzens, total surveillance, far-left media and a limitless police state=no way in hell any non-leftist revolution has a chance of taking place in Western Europe.

    Any jackboots will be those rounding up “Ultra-Nationalists”, alongside state-sponsored lawfare against thought criminals who don’t condem opponents to the current group-think.

      1. I did say “Western Europe” in there. If you’re from the Eastern side of Europe (i.e., used to be behind the Iron Curtain), it doesn’t seem to be the case, as they saw what collectivism really was.

  21. The tricky bit it to go after the bad guys and potential bad guys without giving your government a tool to go after you later.
    Be very wary of cutting out safeguards. Cut out freedom of religion to stamp out Islam, and you’ll find that your beliefs (or lack thereof) might be next. Make it easier to go after potential domestic terrorist without hablius corpus… and oh yeah, the NRA and veterans are next on that list.
    Yes, terrorism is really bad. Organized terrorism can kill lots of people. But, it has nothing on the body count produced by determined government action. Do you really want to give Obama or Hillary the kind of power needed to send every single Muslim (citizen or otherwise) in the USA out? Say goodbye to the First Amendment.
    But one may say that their religion may make them commit terrorist acts, so we need to act preemptively. Sure, and just how many guns do you own, you potential mass shooter, you? A preemptive confiscation may be the thing to keep you from shooting up the place, citizen!
    Should we stop the current McNamara type neither hot nor cold nonsense when dealing with ISL? Absolutely. Time to get with the serious killing and bombing over there. If they want to be a bad nation state, time to show them what happens to bad nation states.

  22. It’s more than mere millions of extremist Muslims we’re talking about here. We’re only talking about the millions which are in action or willing to act violently. A culture does not produce millions of violent “extremists” without tens of millions of sympathizers and supporters.

    Islamic violence occurs with frightening regularity in the eastern hemisphere, not just the Middle East. Africa, India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, central Asia – all have regional and focal points of horror that rarely hits the media. When Gallup did their gigantic survey of the Muslim world several years ago, I was struck by the fact that 14% of Muslims were in the Mostly Justified/Completely Justified range on the 9/11 attacks.

    That represents 140 Million muslims who hold an extreme view. Add on 11% more who answered on the 3 scale of 1-5 and another 12% for those who answered 2 on the “Mostly Unjustified”, and you get 37% of the Muslim world holds a view that 9/11 was justified in some way. That’s more than the population of the United States. This is how you end up with a culture able to wage significant violent conflict across three continents.

    This isn’t just a few people ruining it for the many. This is a gigantic problem.

    1. And the majority who do mentally oppose the jihadists are mostly too afraid to speak out. And the political leadership of the West is doing nothing to help them trust that we’d have their back: if they did speak out, they’d be killed and we’d do nothing about it. So they stay silent to save their lives, and the jihadists continue to hold power.

      I’ve talked with a former Muslim who converted to Christianity. Wow, was that an eye-opening experience. Especially when he mentioned the climate of fear that ruled in his home country: everybody made sure they were seen going to the mosque, so that they wouldn’t be thought of as less religious than their neighbors. If you got denounced as not being a good Muslim, say goodbye to any chance of, say, arranging good marriages for your kids, getting that promotion at work, and so on. Really made me understand WHY the majority of Muslims who oppose jihad (e.g., the 63% who felt 9/11 was not justified in any way) don’t speak up. They don’t just THINK they would suffer for it, they KNOW they would suffer — and we don’t make it any easier for them by having weak leadership.

      And if we started opposing jihad in a real way, even some of the 37% who said it was somewhat justified would change their tune, because they’d want to end up on the winning side. Remember what bin Laden said about the weak horse and the strong horse: he knew the mentality of the Muslim world.

      1. Actually it was just 55% who felt it was completely unjustified since 8% didn’t respond to the question. Which speaks to your excellent point here – despite the privacy of the survey, did they even feel comfortable answering truthfully because of what you mention? I suspect the answers would have roughly had the same distribution, but an 8% non response rate on a question like that seemed odd, and I hadn’t really considered why until you brought this up.

        1. Huh. Yeah, that 8% non-response rate could be any number of things. Could be “I feel afraid to speak my opinion”, could be “I’m in favor but I don’t want the interviewer to know that,” could be “What 9/11 attacks? Never heard of them.” (After all, interview a hundred random people on any US street and at least two or three of them won’t have heard that Paris recently suffered a bunch of terrorist attacks; no reason it wouldn’t work the other way. It’s not only Americans who don’t follow news about events happening outside their own country.)

          Also, I’m not really a survey expert, so I have no idea if an 8% “no opinion/don’t know/no response” rate is higher than average or not. A quick Google search turned up lots of survey people debating on whether “No opinion/Don’t know” should be offered on survey questions or not, but I couldn’t find anyone mentioning typical rates of “no opinion” responses. So that 8% could also be explained by the “I really haven’t thought much about it, I don’t know what I think” effect, too. Hard to know what the reason is.

          But yeah, one thing I always keep in mind now is how much living in the Muslim world must resemble living in a Communist country: constant fear of denunciation. And suddenly, the people celebrating 9/11 in the streets of (insert city here) started looking to my eyes a lot like North Koreans celebrating the “Dear Leader”‘s birthday. Some are genuinely celebrating (there’s always some), others are going along out of fear, and nobody but a mind-reader is going to be able to tell which is which.

          1. For those of us old enough- remember the Cold War? Remember how the assumption was that every person living behind the Iron Curtain was some die hard to the death committed Communist? Remember how much later we found that was pretty much not the case.

            The assumption that just because someone belongs to (organization/philosophy/religion), that the usual doubts, indifference, casualness, and other human feelings are excised. People are still people, even Muslim people.

          2. I’m definitely old enough to remember the cold war and you’re projecting your own assumptions about it. Even at a young age I was never under such a misapprehension.

            And no one here has asserted that every Muslim was a committed jihadist, so your point is unclear.

          3. “And no one here has asserted that every Muslim was a committed jihadist…”
            Pretty much my point. If we’re all agreed on that, perfect.
            Now, let’s work toward getting those folks on our side. Protecting those brave enough to speak out would be a good start.

          4. Remember how the assumption was that every person living behind the Iron Curtain was some die hard to the death committed Communist?

            While I remember the Cold War quite well, for some reason I can’t remember this. The assumption was that the Russian (and other) people were oppressed by the Communists in The USSR, not that they were die-hard supporters.

          5. Hard Left mostly, with a few on the Bircher side of things.
            Ponder how pretty much every SF author pre 1989 pretty much assumed the future existence of the Soviet Union. Remember how the US government kept actually believing the Soviet’s own economic figures.
            And how many pundits thought Regan was a senile idiot for standing up to the USSR?

      2. Remember the riots after the cartoons? Dozens dead. People in the streets. Yet Andres Serrano dumps a crucifix in a jar of urine and it goes into the MOMA. People got worked up but no one died. No one was hit.

        There is a cultural difference on how we deal with external insult. Most of us giggle or sigh or ignore and then worry about the game tonight or what the bills say this month.

  23. I believe William S. Lind is correct. The only way to combat a 4th gen enemy is with a militia (the real thing, not National Guard) and at least a 3rd gen military. That’s a complete anathema to the western welfare state, so I fear we might be screwed.

  24. We don’t have a lack of warriors problem, we have a lack of leadership problem.

    Pretty much, this. I’m over in the Middle East right now, as part of a multi-national task force trying to deal with ISIS (the French and many others call them DAESH) and the chief problem from the American side, is the fact that we’re trying to fight DAESH without getting our knuckles bloody. That’s a politician problem, not a lack of troops problem.

    Granted, after 15 years of pretty much constant deployments to this area of the world, the U.S. military is a bit tired of having to be the one who sends in the brigades. We drop bombs and shoot Hellfires from drones, but like most everyone else, the U.S. political leadership is loathe to commit tanks and infantry to cleaning out DAESH. It doesn’t help that the Syrian regime is a client of Russia, and where Russia is involved, nothing is simple. Absolutely nothing.

    Honestly, the situation in Syria has a lot of “sides” that the news back home never talks about. I would love to discuss it more, but it’s tough to get into nitty gritty details without violating OPSEC. And I am just a paper-pusher. The SOF guys know even more, and are in an ever harder spot.

    For folks back home, I think emergency preparedness — stores, weapons, training — really is the best possible response. If it’s not DAESH planning attacks, it’s crazy shooters gunning up schools. If it’s not crazy shooters gunning up schools, it’s a natural disaster. Life isn’t now, nor will it ever be, safe. Live every day of every week knowing that dreadful things can and do happen. Guard your family, yourself, and your property. Be ready. Don’t live in fear. Just be ready.

    1. Brad, thanks for your service, and I wish I was still flying top cover for you guys/gals. I’ll tell you and your buddies over there worried about the homefront this: Keep killing these assholes over there, we’ve got things covered back home. We won’t stop them before they act (being a civilian sheepdog means ceding the initiative to the bad guys…I can’t preemptively cruise neighborhoods shooting people I think might be terrorists – that’s assault, attempted murder or murder, depending on my aim), but we can shut them down quickly. That’s one reason you don’t hear about most defensive gun uses. The body count never rises to the threshold of acknowledgement by the “if it bleeds it leads” MSM.

      “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” – Helen Keller

    2. We had this bullshit as early as Nam too. My uncle was a marine that volunteered and WANTED to go to Vietnam. I didn’t find this out until way later from his wife, but then again he lives in Alaska and us in Kentucky. Regardless when on about a three hour long phone call to my uncle’s wife cause dad got hurt she was checking in on him and she rambles even worse than me, she told me not only did he go to nam he told her that the brass hamstrung them on how they could fight.

      They were suppose to only fire if fired upon- no ambushes-even on clearly uniformed VC troops. Which made me think. They know they sent SOLDIERS and not POLICE there right?

      But the sharks and well the sharks with bars seem to not understand that. They are probably the same dipshits who think you can “shoot to wound” and have it work with any really efficiency.

      1. Really, what it comes down to is this: does America want to be respected, or does America want to be liked? We seem to be desperate for the latter, while guys like Putin aim for the former. I think (very often) that obtaining the latter is a foolish quest that merely chases an illusion, while the former can be had if you’re prepared to smash your enemies to the ground, stomp on the remains, and not say you’re sorry. That’s how America fought in World War 2, and magically came away “liked” by the world as a result. Since Vietnam, though, we’ve being trying to be “liked” first, thinking this will earn us respect, and we keep having problems.

        1. and magically came away “liked” by the world as a result.

          I think “trusted” might be a bit more accurate. You’d be willing to deal with someone if you know where they stood and that they’ll do what they say, even if you don’t like them. But if you can’t trust them, it doesn’t matter how much you like them.

  25. The fucked up true about mass shootings is that they are nearly impossible to stop.
    Aside from rounded up every gun on the planet, destroy them all and then shut down all of the gun dealer there are going to be times when some mentally unstable person who showed no signs before hand decides to go postal.
    Hell even if you did somehow get that herd of pigs to fly, you would then have to deal with people who can use house hold items to make explosives that can cause A LOT more damage than most firearms.
    Guess what people, we live in a dangerous world!!!! There is no absolute safety!!!!
    We as a race have simplified killing each other to a degree that defies logic. The knowledge of how to do it is also so easy a kindergartner get off the family ipod.
    Sorry leps the genie’s out of the bottle and he left the cow out the barn , led the fox to the hen house and just for shits and giggles left the cat with the canary in the coal mine.
    Odds are if your in the US, Canada, the “good” parts of Latin America, or most European countries you are more likely to get killed for every day fuck ups like falling in the bath or shower, falling down a flight of stairs, accidental overdoses, poor heath, and car accidents just name a few than you are from being gunned down in a mass shooting.
    If your so worried about dying in something that will in all likely hood not happen to you go to your local police and ask if there are classes for handling emergency like that and if there not try to get one started.
    Now matter how much the hippies and lebs talk about how we’re all unique one of kind individuals we are all but number in a win, lose or barely survive game. The best we can do is prepare ourselves for the worst for when it might come.

    1. You’re right about how things could just get worse if a magic wand somehow removed all guns and you prompted maniacs to ponder other options. The deadliest school massacre in USA history didn’t involve guns, it was 38 people, mostly children, killed by a dynamite bomb. And of course the 9/11 attack killed 3000+ without any gun.

  26. Thanks for the well-written, well thought out essay. You’d think you were a professional writer or something :).

    Did anyone catch Obama’s G-20 press conference yesterday? Holy shit, it was like not even he had much faith in his own beliefs and bullshit any more. I wasn’t expecting the Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V but damn, I’ve seen cereal commercials that were more inspirational. He’s a one trick pony (rhetoric) but even that was delivered with the leadership skill of Eeyore. How the hell can you look at Friday the 13th in Paris, and then devote most of your ire to the folks calling for turning away Syrian refugees? Republicans are causing Islamophobia!?! How about the jihadists killing and wounding hundreds of innocents!?! Maybe you ought to save the lion’s share of your angst for those guys and the effect on the global perception of Islam *they’re* having.

    His relentless treatment of enemies as friends, friends as enemies, victims as criminals and criminals as victims continues to highlight his priorities. His first (and only substantive) goal is the preservation of his beliefs, even over acknowledging reality. The US press kept asking him how he was going to defeat the IS, and he actually got annoyed that his fluffy rhetoric wasn’t satisfying the reporters. Yeah Barack, you’re delusional “strategy” long on buzzwords but short on details, that isn’t the problem, it’s these pesky reporters actually holding your feet to the fire trying to get a definitive answer. I don’t know what’s worse, that he’s committed to running out the clock and handing this burning bag of shit he created off to the next President, or that he’s composing his excuse list for his inevitable memoirs.

    1. If there’s such a thing as Islamophobia it would be Muslims guilty of it, since they are fleeing Islam by the millions. The idea the countries taking them in are Islamophobes is typical of the lies told by intersectional morons.

  27. Lord, make me fast and accurate. Let my aim be true and my hand faster than those who would seek to destroy me. Grant me victory over my foes and those that wish to harm me and mine. Let not my last thought be “If I only had my gun”; and Lord if today is truly the day that You call me home, let me die in a pile of empty brass.

    1. I love that shirt.
      But that’s the spirit. Rather than going to my judgment saying “I just wish I could have done something!”, I’d rather be the one saying, “I just wish I could have done more!”

    2. Where is this shirt of which Mike and Dave P. speak?

      Can we add something on the bottom or back?

      This shirt is one of a hundred thousand like it. You have been warned.

  28. The normalcy bias is really bad in the states, and I think LE (federal) is being focused on looking for a Christian Fundy boogeyman. We’re not going to be serious about ISIS (can’t be, the border is wide open) till something pretty terrible happens. There was two good opeds that went around the net about the nature of ISIS and Islam the day after Paris and they’re already well back into the misunderstood/hijacked/twisted meme. We, for some reason, can’t be bothered to learn anything other than by hard knocks.

  29. “However, since the only constant of gunfights is that they suck for somebody, you can do everything right and still die.”

    A profound amount of wisdom for life in general, this line.

  30. I have two things to add to the list of things to do.
    1. Commit and force the left to either commit to or disclaim the idea that we’re going to treat seriously any private judicial body that issues judicial physical punishments (beatings to death penalty and everything between). If they’re a foreign private judicial body claiming sovereignty over us, that’s war. Those who are on the wrong side of this are beyond the pale.
    2. In general recognize the bigotry and racism of not listening to, and believing the plain statements of our enemies. These people have moral agency, just like WASPs do and denying them that is just wrong.

    Both these points are designed to get liberal heads to explode. I like it like that.

  31. 0bama is demanding we immediately take in another 10,000 of these so-called “refugees”…
    10,000
    03% = The current estimate of how many of the “refugees” are actually trained jihadis
    300 = 3% of 10,000
    8 = How many jihadis just attacked unarmed peaceful people in Paris
    129 = Death toll in Paris (Would have been much larger if the suicide bombers had succeeded)
    1032 = Therefore, how many (at a minimum) 300 jihadis would kill here in the USA…
    Wonder if we could get them to target the Dem Convention?

  32. My thoughts on ‘Thoughts on Paris.’

    Yep, military action means people will get killed, and hopefully they’ll be the bad guys. Good luck with those seventy-two virgins. But some of the dead will be the good guys and some of them will non-combatants. It’s war. It happens. However non-combatant casualties – innocent casualties – must never be casually accepted, and for moral reasons, and for reasons of morale, all reasonable steps must be taken the minimise them.

    Larry’s idea of “Federal Super Permit;” does that – and I am a Brit here – sound like a “Well regulated militia?”

    1. Good question. I think the answer hinges on what your Super Permit holders are expected to do with their weapons. If they’re supposed to be first line of defense, peacekeepers, sheepdogs, first responders, whatever you want to call them – in other words, help protect the general population – then yes, I think they’d be a militia. But most jurisdictions that require a permit to carry a weapon only allow it to be legally used for self-defense, not for the defense of the general population. In that respect a permit holder might be a militia of one (would that be a militium?) defending a population of one. But that’s not how the term is generally used.

      1. Hmmm . . . interesting point, I suppose it’s easy to get overly concerned with semantics. However using “reasonable” force by an individual in defence of innocents / to prevent an atrocity is generally considered reasonable.

        1. This is true. Some guy threatening a crowd with an AK is very unlikely to be an undercover police officer making an arrest, so intervention by an armed citizen would be acceptable. But the government won’t issue carry permits based on that reasoning. The official position is that the government, through law enforcement and military agencies, provides for public security. (I imagine the unofficial position is that a cadre of trained, legally armed citizens who are not sworn government employees are an insurrection waiting to happen.)

  33. “I’ve got a ton of fans who are feds. Oh, the horror stories I hear from these guys. So many plots have been foiled, so many bad guys have been caught, and the stuff they are worried that is coming next is frankly terrifying”
    I understand the desire for secrecy, to conceal how plots are detected and foiled, but it seems that by keeping everything under wraps the public has no idea that these attacks really are happening. And so they question the magnitude of the threar. Or even the very need for serious measures.

    1. Don’t kid yourself. Within hours after an actual massacre the same people were questioning the magnitude of the threat, and demanding tighter controls on regular people for imaginary threats.

      1. I remember this stuff being talked about more opening during the early mid Bush administration. Democrats said that it was lies, purely intended to evoke fear and drive people into supporting Bush.

        The deniers would deny, even if the provided information compromised methods and sources, or worse. Those open to being convinced either don’t value knowing, or more or less know anyway. (I might not have any connections, and certainly don’t have anyone passing me sensitive information. With only open sources even I knew that our guys were doing stuff.)

  34. I don’t disagree that more trained armed people would reduce the likelihood of a mass-shooter racking up the body count without risk to himself – i suspect that there might be some increased chance of accidental shootings, but we deal with that already, cops miss too.

    I must disagree that excluding refugees is either good policy, or a wise long-term decision – those moderates, unless they have a place to escape to, will have to eventually succumb to the extremists, and support them, or die. That’s the choice they’re left with, if they can’t escape. We won’t arm or support them, but the extremists have no difficulty arming themselves – in a world where the good guys can’t get guns, only the bad guys will have them. And finally, being Christian, i’m reminded of His counsel in Matthew 25:40.

    1. ‘Moderates’ who escape to America cease to have any impact on how things go in their own countries. Ask the Cubans the Germans, the Japanese, the Vietnamese…
      And the only guiding light on refugee policy should be the good and safety of America and its citizens, not the smug it gives some people. Do your own good deeds on your own time, don’t ask for me to do them for you at my own expense.

      Do you also approve of a more prominent place for Christianity in America’s government and politics, and of using the Gospels and traditional Christian philosophy as a guide in other social issues, like abortion and women’s rights?

      “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
      An evil soul producing holy witness
      Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
      A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
      O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!”

      –William Shakespear, “Merchant of Venice”

      1. Better to only let in the ones that actually want to become Americans- with the understanding of all that entails.
        Of course, the Oh-So-Caring SJW brigade would do their best to screw that up. They want racism and discrimination to boost their sense of morality, and would work to make sure these folks stay insular.

      1. Too right. I suspect that even with a favorable Congress and President, there would be so many provisos and red tape added to such a bill that it would be essentially useless. 50 state reciprocity would be great. Even better would be the ability to legally carry in “gun free zones”.

    1. It’s a bad idea.

      You don’t need a permit, because 2nd Amendment. If you let them create a permit, you just kissed that 2nd amendment right away forever and then they make the permit impossible to get.

      See Canada for example. Try to get a Federal carry permit here. Fair chance you go to jail just for asking.

      1. I guess I saw such a permit as being an add-on to a state issued permit, perhaps with a state issued permit being a prerequisite toward obtaining the Federal permit. With regards to the 2nd Amendment: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” I guess it hinges on how you define the word “regulated”. Does” regulated” mean “trained to standard”? If so, then I would see a permit as being proof that you have been trained and may legitimately carry. Perhaps the word “regulated” means “properly organized or formally organized into a professional body” as of the military. If so, the government still has the right to define how that takes place. If it weren’t for the second part of the 2nd Amendment “the right of the PEOPLE to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” the Feds could make a case that ONLY military or law enforcement organizations should be permitted to keep and bear arms. In fact, many Lefties are already making that argument. Regardless, the government has its foot in the door, as multiple Supreme Court rulings have demonstrated, to regulate the sale, use, and carry of firearms. Obviously, I think we are better off with less gun control and more carry. I support measures that recognize our constitutional right to keep and bear arms and I support organizations that work towards removing the limitations that Federal, State, and Local governmental bodies have imposed on those who legally exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.

        1. Michael, you might want to look at the definition of militia. Both the Founders and present-day US Code 10 consider the militia to be the whole population, whether enrolled or not.

    2. Leosa, (Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act,) comes close, but it has some key differences. It grants national reciprocity for permit holders, but it doesn’t extend rights to gun free zones. It’s also limited by state laws, people visiting new jersey can still be arrested for owning hollowpoints, for example.

      There was a bill introduced this spring that would have pushed for national reciprocity, but as far as I know it never made it past the bone pile.

      1. I believe the 2010 amendment of LEOSA does permit those who can legally carry under LEOSA the right to legally carry firearms loaded with hollow points in New Jersey, despite New Jersey’s prohibition of hollow points. It also allows my cousin to legally carry in Minnesota despite the (current) lack of reciprocity between Utah and Minnesota. Fortunately, I can still carry in Utah.

          1. Does New Jersey WANT more injured bystanders when the bullets over penetrate, not to mention more rounds fired? Someone ought to sue them for endangering the public; (un?)fortunately, I don’t live in New Jersey.

            Morons.

  35. And now they found an ambulance packed with explosive outside a soccer stadium in Hannover, Germany in a Netherland-Germany game. German Chancellor Merkel is scheduled to attend, the game is obviously cancelled. Those dastardly Lutherans strikes again.

    1. At the moment, it seems that the ambulance full of explosives is an unsubstantiated rumor. German authorities are saying they were informed of a plot, but have (so far) found no explosives near the stadium. Something bomb-like *was* found in a train station and was destroyed safely by the police (they said it was either a real bomb or a very convincing decoy, and they weren’t going to gamble on its being a decoy). But no explosives found outside the stadium so far, in an ambulance or otherwise. (Which might just mean that they haven’t found them yet).

  36. Former Homeland Security type here, There is no vetting of refugees coming from Syria/Iraq. There is no database to check, Document fraud is the norm, anyone can get any type of document they want for a price. These same docs are what we accept as valid and we never check them (how?) Easy way to get terrorists into this county (and the American Taxpayer foots the bill !!

  37. I know that this is completely off topic, but just wanted to know if you were going to head to a Foodmachine event this weekend? I am sure your Mercs need a day out away from the madness of real life.

  38. I’m your token bleating-heart sheeple liberal, and personally I am all in favor of that “Super Permit” idea. In fact, I proposed something just like it on one of the previous threads. I think that any gun policy has to be evaluated in terms of net lives saved — which equals the number of deaths the policy prevents, minus the number of death that it causes or enables; and I think that the “Super Permit” policy will save lives on the net. By contrast, a policy of allowing everyone to wield automatic weapons with no restrictions (I know that no one here is arguing for such a policy, this is just an example) will result in a net loss of life, despite potentially preventing more deaths from terrorism specifically.

      1. The prices went through the roof after the ATF closed the registry, and the paperwork is annoying, but all it takes to own a machine gun is money.

        Granted, before 1934 you could walk into any good hardware or department store and buy a machine gun (though they would probably have to order it in for you) but that’s a different problem.

    1. I might argue for such a policy, and that you would be a racist for opposing it.

      I oppose restrictions because of their history as a tool for Democrats to murder Republicans, and because I am not convinced that the modern Democratic Party is any different from the Democratic Party of, say, 1840-1880.

      It seems plausible that restrictions on automatic weapons might have been the additional factor that let y’all get away with burning down minority neighborhoods in the national eye this year.

      On a lighter note: http://moelane.com/2015/11/14/tweet-of-the-day-this-is-in-fact-true-edition/

    2. Are you aware that until the 30’s, you could buy a full-auto weapon at your local hardware store? Or mail order? No problems. In fact, the only time guns became a problem is when your type start passing gun control, which leaves good people unarmed. When the balance of power shifts to the bad guys/criminals because the good people tend to obey laws, we end up with big problems.
      You do realize that ALL gun control laws here were originally racially and ethnically based? IIRC, the last group was the Irish, although it might have been the Italians.

      1. Most people know of the Irish Mob and Italian Mafia, but there was a sizeable Jewish gangster culture as well, typified by the likes of Meyer Lansky, Mickey Cohen, and Bugsy Siegel.

      2. Actually, Prohibition was the Irish and the Italians (and the editorials writers of the time made no bones about it). Gun control was more social than racial paranoia, with fear of the Bank Robbers in the Midwest, organized crime in the big Northern cities, and violent union activism in the coal-mining country. It was also pushed by the Roosevelt (the Lesser) Administration, who were always big into social control.

  39. It is always – always! – easier to make and enforce laws that affect law-abiding citizens because 1) you know who they are and where they are and 2) they’re not nearly as likely to break the law you just passed as, say, a convicted felon with nothing left to lose.

    The flip side of the same coin is that it is hard to go out and fight criminals and terrorists. They want to hide, strike from concealment and actually hurt you. It’s dangerous, dirty work. Frankly, nobody wants to get their hands dirty like that. Hell, just a few months ago DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier tried to call an “all-hands” weekend to stem the homicides in that gun-free nirvana. She wanted all of the police officers out on the streets in a show of force to actually fight crime.

    Know what happened? The police union called for, and got 11,000 police officers to vote “no confidence” to try to get her fired. They claimed she was violating their rights to vacations, pensions, leave time and on and on. How dare she try to get them out from behind their desks and send them after known gang members, drug dealers and dangerous criminals? That is not what (by the way, 11,000+ police in a five-square mile federal enclave?) DC police are paid to do, is it?

    Is this the same story elsewhere in the nation? Will our local police, State Police, National Guard, Coast Guard, FBI, CIA, NSA, all of the acronym agencies, plus the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines refuse to actually go after the bad guys?

    I know the Marines are ready. Who else is in?

    1. Speaking of Cathy Lanier, when I saw this particular article, I thought of y’all:

      http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/427576/cathy-lanier-highly-confused-charles-c-w-cooke

      The tl;dr version is that she, just like Larry, would like citizens to help take down gunmen and terrorists rather than just waiting for the police to show up. Unlike Larry, however, she apparently doesn’t believe in allowing said citizens to carry guns in order to help them in this task.

  40. Don’t worry, you guys, the Swedish Foreign Minister has found the culprit. What happened in Paris is all Israel’s fault, according to the Genius of Stockholm.

    1. It’s always Israel’s fault. And George Bush’s. And [flips through card index… today is an even-numbered Wednesday…] the TEA Party. If it was an odd-numbered Wednesday, it would be “children affected by violent comic books.”

  41. So utterly sad, but so true. And our youth, who think they know it all, have no idea of the enormity of this, otherwise their focus would be so different. Our leaders, if you can call them that, are leading us to destruction .

  42. I’ve noticed since Paris that the Left has found religion again. Liberal after liberal insists that it’s the West’s Christian duty to take in refugees. Left-wing Twitter feeds are suddenly full of Scripture.

    But don’t worry. In a few weeks time, they’ll be back to scolding people for saying “Christmas” and freaking out over public Nativity displays.

  43. You have some good points but you seem fixated on blaming everything on liberalism. You don’t have cable but you’re spitting out all the Republican propaganda. The problem with all these issues is that people are too caught up in their political parties BS. I’m not sure where you get your info from, but people reacting after the scene like police are less likely to hurt innocent people than permit carriers. We should be allowed to have guns but the issue isn’t about gun control it’s about stopping crazy people before they murder. Both sides don’t know how to get it done so both arguments fail. Either way law enforcement ends up taking care of business as they should. On to the refugees. History show’s us that taking in people not willing to fight for their own country brings their problem into your country and then they expect the host country to fight for them when they would not.

    1. I blame it on liberalism because it is mostly liberalism’s fault. 🙂

      Don’t get me wrong. Republicans suck at a lot of things. But when it comes to foreign policy this isn’t really much of a contest. Where the GOP is food poisoning, the DNC is a brain tumor.

      Where do I get my “talking points” from on CCW? Here is the most widely read article on the subject around. I wrote it. At the beginning I’ve got about four paragraphs of my resume. That’s where I get my talking points from. https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/06/23/an-opinion-on-gun-control-repost/

      So in other words, you want to debate that particular topic, bring your A game. 😀

      1. But before you post anything else about CCW here, read that first, because I’m too damned busy to keep repeating myself.

    2. Over here in adult world, you are expected to put forth an actual argument and make at least half-assed effort at a rebuttal.

      Your argument seems to be “I don’t understand or even know the arguments, so that means they fail”, and your rebuttal seems to be “Talking points!” *mic drop*.

      Neither of these amount to half-assed.

      1. The talking points thing is funny, since most of the gun ones originated with gun people, and the media picked them up from us.

        The lib screams YOU SOUND LIKE YOU WATCH FOX NEWS!

        Yeah, but only when I’m on it. 😀

    3. Ivan-is there a single thing you say about permit holders that cannot also be said about off duty police officers or plain clothes Law Enforcement?
      And before you answer, do you, Ivan, personally have any experience with the subject matter? Do you have any firearms training?

      1. And that’s pretty straight forward and simple for the basic reason that CCW holders are usually there when the situation unfolds, wheras cops respond to a situation already in play and have to figure out what is happening.

        1. Another (related) reason is that cops have an obligation to wade into violent chaos and “do something” (it’s their job) despite uncertainty, whereas a private citizen faced with the same thing does not have that “YOU must do something” role and is thus most likely to just “wait and see” until/unless clarity presents itself.

  44. It’s not a perfect solution, but we used to keep refugees on Ellis Island until they were cleared medically and vetted politically. Bring them in, just reopen Ellis. This worked for decades and with multiple waves of refugees. Apply it to everyone who seeks asylum.

    It’s easier now to weed out people who lie about family connections. Draw blood and wait for the DNA results. Any lie on the application gets the person tossed. If they don’t want to go back, tough.

  45. I don’t always agree with you, Larry, but thank you for this post. I’m jewish. my family came to USA on a refugee visa (as did my husband and his family, before we even met). let me put it to you this way… it wasn’t nearly as bad as what’s happening in Syria right now… but it wasn’t sunshine and bunnies either. fear for lives? was there. along with quite literally having far fewer rights solely based on accident of our birth and nothing else. in order to be accepted into USA… we had to pass the screening. blood tests, vaccinations up to date and interviews. individual interviews btw, for adults AND kids, one at a time, to avoid active coaching by parents.

    and I thought it was fair. I still think it was fair. so when I see people railing against the “unfairness” of screening the refugees… all I can do is shake my head. there’s nothing unfair in trying to make sure that while you are helping those who genuinely need it – you at least try to keep out those, that these people are running from in a first place.

    and Israel. I have family and friends in Israel. there is a reason (that I see now all too clearly) why my parents insisted that we immigrate here and not to Israel, even though it would have been so much simpler to go there vs USA. sometimes.. I’m actualy amazed at the tolerance they mange to exhibit after decades of this. but god forbid they try to fight back. sigh.

  46. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud several times as I read your “thoughts on Paris” correia45. But, I would like your response to some other posts I have read. I’ll link one, and paste it’s applicable contents in this message below. It seems that allot of people are seeing what happened in Paris, knowing that, so far, 2 of the attackers entered the country as wolves in sheep’s cloths via the refugee program. However, is it not true that refugees are allowed to settle in European Countries (in particular France) before they go through the “vetting” process? While as refugees seeking asylum in the States must go through the “vetting” process prior to entering the country? I read in one article that this process typically takes near to a year to complete. If that’s true, then wouldn’t a terrorist seeking entry to the State simply go a different route? Everyone’s always slamming our lack of security on the southern border. Why not get to Mexico, then hop the border?

    http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/david-miliband-syrian-refugees-not-threat-article-1.2434327
    and
    http://alancrosswrites.com/considering-the-facts-a-christian-response-from-alabama-to-the-syrian-refugee-crisis/
    Decided not to paste the applicable parts in the post, to keep it a little more concise.
    Thanks for your thoughts.

    1. Not sure what your point is, seeing as how there isn’t actually a vetting process. The directors of both the FBI and CIA have gone on record (in sworn testimony IIRC) that vetting is impossible.

      As to the Mexican border, the number of people that get across it is a testament to how many attempts are made. Too, there would be the small difficulty of blending in with a the largely monocultural and monoethnic (totally a word) Mexicans making the trip. The actual border jumpers might have something to say about it.

      1. Gotcha on the Mexican border point. My original point was: that people were saying, see links posted above, that there was already an effective method for vetting Syrian refugees. Another point being that the vetting process for the refugees in Europe doesn’t have to be completed until after they arrive in Europe. Thus, this movement by the states to reject Syrian refugees is unwarranted. So, I was hoping to elicit a response from people with more knowledge of the vetting process. As it stands, it appears to be a simply he said she said argument.
        On a tangent, I did think the process the McCaul put forward sounded like a good compromise. Then of course Obama said he’d veto it, so we made allot of pogress
        http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/house-set-to-pass-bill-limiting-syrian-refugees-216035

  47. You cannot have a Welfare State and open immigration.

    When leftists decry opposition to immigration, legal or otherwise, they claim we’re all hypocrites, as we all had ancestors who immigrated here. The catch is, prior to the New Deal and the subsequent expansion of the Welfare State to include almost everyone in the country, immigrants came to the US incentivized by hard work and opportunity. Ever since, going back a good 30+ years, we have been incentivizing the lazy and the criminal with a system easy to game and “Free stuff”.

    My ancestors came here only for a chance to work hard and be free, there was no easy ride for immigrants pre-1960s. Now there’s a whole new demographic of leeches and criminals that see in the West an easy ride and a chance to scam their way along. Obviously not all immigrants are this way, but there was no incentive for the welfare scammers to come here prior to the Welfare State.

    Once we implemented a Welfare State, the borders should have gone up.

  48. >>>At worst, congratulations you were a distraction, but even distractions can save lives or derail plans.

    This deserves more consideration, I think. There are worse things than dying.

    It’s best to win, and live. Sometimes that’s not on the offered options.

  49. I wish I had a good solution to the problem of ISIS, I really do. I will say that I am sick of hearing the “these aren’t all Muslims,” line. It is true, but I also want to draw another parallel. Not all Germans in the 1930s and 1940s were Nazis. That minority still seemed to do a lot of damage didn’t they? That is what we are facing today. This generation’s equivalent of the Nazis. Sadly, we have more Chamberlains than Churchhills in the political spectrum right now

    1. Chamberlain at least realized he made a mistake and didn’t try to sabotage the war effort every chance he got.

  50. Muslims always back the strong hand, or, they run from it.
    Isis looks stronger than they are, we look weaker than we are.
    I bet they meet their recruitment numbers before we do.

  51. Every Citizen has the Right to Bear Arms without any such “super permit”. A “permit, by definition, transforms a Right into a grant of permission by some bureaucrat scumbag.

    1. That’s great. Carry a gun around Manhattan and see how that works out for you.

      I don’t deal in idealism. I work within the bounds of reality, even if I think that reality is stupid.

  52. France and most all of Europe is hopeless. We have an insane president. So it will be Russia that destroys ISIS . We have been “bombing” them for a year without touching their capital or their oil wells. Russia is leveling both.

    1. Of course they are; they have an incentive to remove the supply and prop up the price. Obama hopes to put American frackers out of business first.

      With this President, the Anti-American motive is most likely.

  53. I just discovered your side and I rather like it. Personally I agree with both most you’re saying but what we’re going to have to go back to his Curtis Lemay mentality otherwise we’re going to lose. Will make doctrine says that you kill as many as them as quickly as you can do and it is quickly as you can. Yes there’s a lot of collateral innocent death but there’s no other way to deal with fascist Just us the Germans and Japanese

  54. Mr. Correia, I regret to inform you that you are no longer eligible to run for President due to suffering from excessive honesty.

  55. Apologies if someone already linked to this but I loved it so much I wanted to post this often. A lament on liberal view of “why they hate us”:

    “”It must be incredibly frustrating as an Islamic terrorist not to have your views and motives taken seriously by the societies you terrorize, even after you have explicitly and repeatedly stated them. Even worse, those on the regressive left, in their endless capacity for masochism and self-loathing, have attempted to shift blame inwardly on themselves, denying the terrorists even the satisfaction of claiming responsibility.
    It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:
    “We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”
    “No you didn’t.”
    “Wait, what? Yes we did…”
    “No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”
    “WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”
    “No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”
    “Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”
    “Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”
    “What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!””
    …”OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?””

    (link, until FB deletes it for racism or something else)
    https://www.facebook.com/faisalsalmutar/posts/906729506085781

    1. It’s the flipside of the unspoken “Great White Hope” thing that every SJW believes but won’t ever articulate. SJW’s believe that all minorities are powerless without the Mighty White Savior who will end oppression, prejudice, and homophobia.
      The flip side is the other unspoken SJW belief that only the White Man is powerful enough to have brought evil and oppression to the Non-White Noble Savages. Remember this whenever you read the self-flagellation by Scalzi and his ilk- they are engaging in a perverse form of white supremacy.

      1. Similarly:
        Liberals: “Non-white people are far less capable of getting a free photo ID given a two-year lead time before the next election, thus we vehemently oppose voter ID!”
        Conservatives: “We’re pretty sure non-white people are capable adults who can manage that simple task just as well as anyone else.”
        Guess which group is called “racists”?

  56. “Solution? Beats the hell out of me. ”

    Why not try the notion the great Angelo Codevilla has been advocating for years, in Iraq and elsewhere: “Figure out whom we need to kill in order to bring us the victory and peace we desire. Then go and kill them.”

    He points to Vladimir Putin as pursuing this strategy in regards to Syria and ISIL: http://bit.ly/1PjQbZ5

    Unlike the addled policies we’ve been espousing in the region for decades, and especially since “Mission Accomplished.”

  57. RE: the Left’s seemingly blatant double standards when it comes to Christianity and Islam, it’s actually logically consistent from the particular psychology they are practising.

    I had read somewhere (very likely Fjordman, though I can’t find the article at the moment) that the explanation for the liberal hypocrisy is astounding simple: Secularism/atheism/humanism/liberalism developed in the Christian West. Hence, they are reactionary against their surrounding origination culture (just like a spoiled teenage rebel who thinks their completely average middle class parents are THE WORST, like, worse than HITLER man!).

    Hence to a liberal, whatever Christian = bad, whatever not-Christian = good or at least not AS bad. Extend it to the kind of philosophies, politics, policies and social norms that Christians tend to support, which often overlap with Conservative & Libertarian principles. And suddenly all the inconsistencies and oxymorons the Left displays make perfect sense.

  58. Attention Lord of Hate: My brother (an attorney) found this essay (not from me, I add) and sent its URL in email to others in the family. I mentioned your writing career, as well as your founding the SP campaign. My brother’s reply was as follows:

    “Based on this one piece – he’s a great writer. Cogent and persuasive ”

    Thought you’d like to know.

  59. Mr. Correia,

    ———————
    For the vast majority of the moderates however, what do we expect them to do? You can ally with the west, where you can fight against the death cultists, but the minute a progressive gets elected, you are going to get sold out and left to die. So why ally with us? Because the death cultists aren’t going anywhere. Those fuckers are committed.
    ———————

    It reminds me of a letter sent by the prince of Cambodia to the US ambassador when offered asylum as the Khmer Rouge were taking the country over:
    “Dear Excellency and Friend, I thank you very sincerely for your letter and your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people, which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it. You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad, because we are all born and must die one day. I have committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans. Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments. Prince Sirik Matak.”

  60. Muslims from the Middle East are not refugees. They are not a persecuted class.

    Muslims are fleeing the results of a system run by people holding views such as their own. Ignoring the 1947 UN Declaration of Human Rights with abominations such as supporting the death penalty for renouncing Islam or being raped, they are what asylum seekers flee from.

    What is the benefit to our society to letting Muslims in? Very, very little with a large inventory of problems. They do not assimilate like other immigrants. After 3 years here, 91% still receive food stamps. 73% will be on Medicaid. They are backward and don’t play well with others.

  61. One of the best summaries of this screwed up world I have recently read. Going to check out the rest of your stuff and follow in future.
    Respect from an Aussie in Qatar

  62. Small correction: Technically speaking, Boko Haram (or Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad, if you prefer the full name) and the Islamic State are no longer separate groups, as the leader of Boko Haram had pledged bayat to the Islamic State:

    http://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=22899

    And while we’re on the topic, here’s a roundup of Jihad-related news, with another one (including a link here) due a bit later today:

    http://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=25267

    1. That’s interesting to me in an oddball way. I wrote a story which takes place 500 yrs. in the future. I call the Nigerian Empire in that story “Rule of the First Two,” which is a strain of Ibadi Islam which recognizes only the first two caliphs and not the normal Sunni 4 “Rashudun.” ISIS is Ibadi, though they often lay claim to be Wahhabi and many people refer to them that way. The difference is obscure and sometimes purposeful misdirection.

  63. The best way have found to describe jihadis to the coexist crowd is this: they want to kill your children so badly they’re willing to blow up their own to do it. And you can’t coexist with that.

  64. I agree, but heck that was a chapter or so in a new book you tossed up here… Channel your power young author… give me more to read…

    I absolutely agree that it makes me sick to hear all the pacifists telling us how any gun there would have made things worse because terrorists have super powers. They can see in all directions at once whilst killing and moving, they can see everyone and know which ones have guns. When shot they don’t die, they simply kill the shooter and then keep killing civilians. If it takes 10 minutes for the cops to show, in Paris, probably without guns, then that ten minutes is probably better used writing a poignant letter to the Times Editorial Page to be published when the shooter gets around to shooting you. – no need to defend one’s self…

    People who don’t know guns have a right to express an opinion, but to tell us what is going to happen when they have no clue is just stupid. I don’t tell surgeons what to do or attorneys and I love biology and the law.

  65. I would submit that in the US currently (!) the real problem is one political party. ISIS will just compound the spilled blood:
    Too Wit:
    In 1865 a Democrat shot and killed Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States.
    In 1881 a left wing radical Democrat shot James Garfield, President of the United States who later died from the wound.
    In 1963 a radical left wing Democrat socialist shot and killed John F. Kennedy, President of the United States.
    In 1975 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at Gerald Ford, President of the United States.
    In 1983 a registered Democrat shot and wounded Ronald Reagan, President of the United States.
    In 1984 James Hubert, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 22 people in a McDonalds restaurant.
    In 1986 Patrick Sherrill,a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 15 people in an Oklahoma post office.
    In 1990 James Pough, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 10 people at a GMAC office.
    In 1991 George Hennard, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 23 people in a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, TX.
    In 1995 James Daniel Simpson, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 5 coworkers in a Texas laboratory.
    April 20, 1999 – Columbine School shootings thirteen premeditated murders by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebolt, too young to vote but both from families who were progressive liberals and registered Democrats.
    In 1999 Larry Ashbrook, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 8 people at a church service.
    In 2001 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at the White House in a failed attempt to kill George W. Bush, President of the US.
    In 2003 Douglas Williams, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people at a Lockheed Martin plant.– April 16, 2004 – VA Tech shootings thirty-two premeditated murders by Cho Seung-Hui, a registered Democrat who had written hate mail to President George W. Bush.
    In 2007 a registered Democrat named Seung-Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.
    November 5, 2009 – Fort Hood shootings thirteen premeditated murders by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim and a registered Democrat.
    In 2010 a mentally ill registered Democrat named Jared Lee Loughner, shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others.
    In 2011 a registered Democrat named James Holmes, went into a movie theater and shot and killed 12 people.
    In 2012 Andrew Engeldinger, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people in Minneapolis.
    July 20, 2012 Aurora, CO. Century Theater shootings twelve premeditated murders by James Holmes, a registered Democrat, Occupy Wall Street participant, and a progressive liberal who had been a staff worker on the Obama election campaign.
    December 14, 2012 – Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings twenty-seven premeditated murders by Adam Lanza, a registered Democrat whose facebook rants showed he despised Christians.
    As recently as Sept 2013, an angry Democrat named Aaron Alexis shot 12 at the Washington Navy Shipyard in Washington, D.C.
    2015 Vester Flanagan – racist paranoid psychotic Black gay liberal Killed 2 news reporters on live camera.I’ve been a human powder keg for a while … just waiting to go BOOM!!!!” ABC quoted him saying. Flanagan also, ABC said, praised Virginia Tech mass shooter Seung Hui Cho, who killed 32, and the Columbine school shooters, Eric Harris and Dylann Klebold.
    ALL of these shooters were progressive liberal Democrats – – none were NRA members – – none were members of a Tea Party – – none were conservative Republicans.

  66. I have only one thing to say about this piece.
    PEOPLE, READ AND HEED!!!
    Here is a person who has an actual grasp of the situation and who has laid out all the business that I have put forth on my facebook page.
    Liberals don’t like to face the truth. They think that the problems and the terrorists will all go away and leave them alone. They think that erecting “gun free” zones will save their children from the next Islamic Jihadist looking to free up housing for his fellow Muslims.
    Now you hear that not all Muslims are bloodthirsty bastards who revel in killing innocent children and others. Let’s hope that at least one more person who starts to read this piece finishes it and changes his/her mind. It would be better if this became a Number One Best Seller piece, but our Liberals wouldn’t allow that to happen.
    REMEMBER, WHEN ALL ELSE GOES WRONG, WHEN THE ONLY THING LEFT IS DYING, TAKE SOME STUPID ISLAMIC JIHADIST WITH YOU.

  67. Way late to the fight, as usual (vacation with no internets, the way I like them) but from a purely practical point of view, ladies particularly, the other thing to know about first aid and gunshot wounds is tampons. Seriously, there is a reason my medics stock them by the gross and carry them in aid bags everywhere and it has nothing to do with who forgot their feminine hygiene products when they went to the range that day.

      1. Plain old cotton TAMPAX with the cardboard applicator are the brand of choice for the US Army FWIW. I have a whole medchest full in my supply cage.

        Of course, anticoagulants would seem to defeat the whole purpose of tampons!

        1. Beats me. I do not understand the mysteries of feminine hygiene products. I’m just going off of what I was told during a first responder class. 🙂

  68. Having just spent the evening watching the news out of San Bernidino, all I can say is what I posted to Micheal Bane after Paris……. It must really SUCK to be Right sometimes, right, Larry?

  69. Have you guys seen some of the TOTAL LIES that come out on Huffington post? I never comment on that commie site because I’ll bet they compile data on you and when crap hits the fan they will be visiting you fast with cuffs or weapons drawn. You wouldn’t believe what happened to my PHD brother just before the 2012 election! Trust me, I’m not conspiracy theorist. I think JFK was shot at by only one guy and that was Oswald, etc.

  70. I’m kinda concerned that even some republicans think the preventing a specific group of people from entering the country in “unconstitutional”? Could someone please quote me the exact place in the constitution where it said we CANNOT EXCLUDE SOMEONE or group FROM ENTERING OUR COUNTRY, WHO IS NOT A US CITIZEN??? People within this country and are citizens are protected by the constitution, not every friggin asshole in the world!

  71. Taken from Slate.com

    Immigration proceedings are matters of administrative law, not criminal law. (As a result, the consequence of violating your immigration status is not jail but deportation.) And Congress has nearly full authority to regulate immigration without interference from the courts. Because immigration is considered a matter of national security and foreign policy, the Supreme Court has long held that immigration law is largely immune from judicial review. Congress can make rules for immigrants that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens.

    In 1952’s Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, the Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to expel noncitizens who were former Communists. “In recognizing this power and this responsibility of Congress, one does not in the remotest degree align oneself with fears unworthy of the American spirit or with hostility to the bracing air of the free spirit,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in his concurrence. “One merely recognizes that the place to resist unwise or cruel legislation touching aliens is the Congress, not this Court.”

    Still, immigrants facing deportation do have some rights. Most are entitled to a hearing before an immigration judge, representation by a lawyer (but not one that’s paid for by the government), and interpretation for non-English-speakers. The government must provide “clear and convincing” evidence to deport someone (a lower standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt”).

    This, BTW, is assume the immigrant IS ALREADY HERE! We can prevent ANYONE from coming here for whatever reason we want to!

  72. “However, innocent people will die as has happened in every war in human history, which will cause liberals to flip out,”

    And conservatives will utter inanities about making omelettes and breaking eggs because innocent human life shouldn’t get in the way of the fun of dropping bombs.

    1. Oh, I’m terribly sorry I didn’t write up a War College thesis on the history of warfare in this blog post for you.

      But the point stands. Anything you do to combat them in the Middle East, civilians will get hurt. Liberals bitch uselessly. We pull out of the Middle East. Civilians get hurt here. Liberals bitch uselessly. The main constant is that liberals bitch uselessly.

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