Guns

So a “good guy with a gun” decides to save the day when he witnesses a car jacking. He fired several shots, managing to land only one shot at the victim’s head and missing the carjackers completely.

Our hero then proceeded to collect his shell casings and fled the scene. Police are still looking for our ammosexual hero.

So my question now would be, is he still a “good guy”? How do you tell the difference?

Followers of this blog and of my facebook page know that I’m not a fan of anecdotal evidence because it’s meaningless. So why am I posting this story? Because this anecdotal story lines up perfectly with the data, as well as a couple of experiments done to see how effective armed citizens are at saving the day with their binkies.

Remember when a pro-gun group repeatedly reenacted the Charlie Hebdo shootings with all of the victims armed? SPOILER ALERT: they all died in every reenactment they did. Well, except for the one time one of the armed victims chose to flee instead. That guy survived the reenactment. All of the Rambos died over and over again, but their ammosexual fantasies of being heroes were impervious to the evidence and survived.

Another simulation done by researchers at Mount St Mary’s University produced the same results.

Study after study after study (I can do this all day, but you get the point) show that owning a gun makes you much more likely to be a shooting victim. Or a perpetrator, since you’re more likely to shoot yourself or someone you know with your gun, than you are to stop crime.

The FBI reports an average of about 25o “justifiable homicides” each year. Remember, George Zimmerman was recorded as a “justifiable homicide”, but I’m willing to go with the 250 number. So for 250 instances of people defending themselves, we have the highest homicide rate in the developed world. For 250 instances of people defending themselves,we have about 1,000 children shot every year.

In order to entertain the ammosexual hero fantasies of about 35 million American households, we have a situation where those nutters are feeding the “illegal” gun market. We know that the size of the “legal” gun market and the “illegal” gun market are inextricably intertwined since all guns start out “legal”.

We accept the unacceptable because a minority of us are literally deluding ourselves. I’m sorry to break it to you ammosexual, but you’re not Rambo and you never will be. You’re much more likely to be the sad sack who shoots their toddler in the face. The studies are very clear on this.

Here’s the funny thing. When I was fact checking the story I started this post with, my search came up with another story of another carjacking, also in Houston. This one was only a little over a month before the first story. In this story, the ammosexual was the guy whose car was being jacked. He decided that it would be a good idea to open fire on the carjacker. Wanna know how it ended? With both the carjacker and the ammosexual receiving freedom bullets, and the car wrapped around a cement post. Awesome. Thankfully, no one else was caught in the crossfire.

Does pulling out your binkie and firing off rounds to save your fucking car make you a good guy? It’s a car. You’re shooting at a person, and risking the accidental shooting of other people. For a car.

We don’t have “good guys” with guns. We have delusional “dumb guys” with guns. If they were smart, they would have done unbiased research on whether owning a gun was a good idea before making that choice. The evidence is clear, and you can’t possibly hang your hat on a handful of debunked NRA “studies” because you like what they’re telling you. The ratio of studies telling you that guns are awesome are roughly in the same proportion to legitimate studies, as the “cigarettes are awesome” studies were to those legitimate studies. When the ratio is 10 or 20 studies to 1, telling you that gun ownership is a bad idea, you’re not “responsible” by definition.

That’s how you present an anecdotal story. It has to be accompanied by data, otherwise you’re doing it wrong and you’re deliberately disinformning yourself.

That’s how the South Carolina shooter was able to obtain his gun. Contrary to the way the story is being reported, the FBI didn’t screw up. The system was set up with a loophole that the shooter was able to exploit.

Here’s what happened. The shooter went to buy the gun on a Saturday (April 11th). According to South Carolina law, if you go to a legal gun dealer and they instigate a background check (as they’re legally required to do), you get a gun in three days unless the FBI comes up with a felony that would prevent you from getting one. Three days. You must get your gun in three days, whether the FBI has released you to get a gun or not. In other words, if they don’t have all of the information they need, and don’t explicitly tell the dealer that the applicant isn’t allowed to purchase a gun, the applicant gets the gun. An incomplete background check means that an applicant gets their gun. The FBI never explicitly told the dealer to release the gun to the shooter, so the dealer was perfectly in his legal (not so much moral) right to make a dollar and sell the gun. The dealer doesn’t have to sell the gun, but can if they want. This gun dealer is a giant piece of ammosexual crap. Big gun dealers like WalMart won’t sell the gun until the background check process is complete.

What type of person has to get a gun in three days? The paranoid, or the crazy who intend to kill a lot of people. That’s who. Normal people can wait 30 days.

Because the shooter triggered the background check on a Saturday, the FBI effectively had one business day to determine if he was a felon. The FBI were able to determine, within the three day waiting period, that the shooter had been arrested on a felony drug charge this year but an arrest isn’t enough (under federal gun laws) to prevent someone from getting a gun. The arrest prompted the FBI to reach out to the the county where he was arrested, but didn’t get a reply from that court house before the three days were up. They didn’t get the information that the shooter had plead guilty to felony drug possession in time.

When the law says that “we haven’t completed the background check” means “go ahead and release the gun”, that’s not a bug. That’s a feature. A clean record comes back quickly. “No arrests” can be determined in minutes. So anytime the FBI can’t beat the three day clock, it’s always because there’s something that warrants obtaining further information. And that’s precisely when a rational system of gun laws would slow the process down.

But not in Ammosexamerica. In America, “we can’t give you the thumbs up to sell a gun” means “sell the gun”. That is batshit crazy.

Don’t let anyone tell you that this instance of the South Carolina shooter obtaining a gun was just a fuck up, and that the laws don’t need to be changed. That’s just pure bullshit. But I’m sure that felons all over South Carolina are delighted to hear that some people think the current system is just swell. Do you think some of them don’t now know how to beat the system?

Followers of my Facebook page are familiar with my "child sacrifices at the altar of FREEDOM" posts. I intermittently post one shooting of a child per day. I do it intermittently because I can’t spend every day looking for a child shooting story. It’s emotionally exhausting. So when I don’t post them, it’s because my heart is tired, not because I can’t find them. I use a very narrow parameter of criteria to choose my child sacrifice stories. I post only stories in which a child shot themselves or someone else "accidentally" with a weapon that their "responsible" gun owning friends or family members didn’t secure. Occasionally, I post a story about a dumbass gun owner who intentionally put a gun in the hands of a child that has no business playing with guns at their age. You know, like the Bullets and Burgers shooting this week when a nine year old killed a firearms instructor because her idiot parents thought that putting an uzi in the hands of a nine year old seemed like a good idea. To be clear, I don’t mourn for the dead firearms instructor. He was as big a dumbass as the dumbass parents. He went along with this insane idea of arming a nine year old with a semi-automatic weapon. I just hope he died before he had a chance to procreate and further this idiot "gun culture" of ours. If he did procreate, and raised a dumbass, I hope that dumbass learned a lesson from daddy’s death. If that sounds harsh to you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that you don’t care more about the kids and our country. Anyone who is actively participating in the furthering of our idiotic gun culture gets no sympathy from me when they fall victim to their own idiocy. Better the death of the gun whackadoodle, than their unsuspecting neighbor or friend who wasn’t a dumbass. Darwinism makes me happy, and the death of a dumbass evokes no feelings of sympathy from me.

Anyway, the point of my posts is bring attention to the number of children who are victimized by the "freedom" loving idiots charged with caring for them, but also to highlight the fact that those idiots seldom face consequences for what they’ve done. My third criteria for my posts is that they’re all incidents where no charges are filed against the dumbass. Why are charges filed in so few cases? Cause the NRA wants it so. So to recap, if your kid gets a hold of your pot and gets a little high, you’re in a world of hurt but if they kill their sibling with your gun, no problemo. Huh. I wonder if this lack of accountability is shaping our culture?     

I capitalize the word FREEDOM every time to illustrate that as a society, we care more about this fetishized bullshit fantasy of freedom than we do about our kids. Without fail, and much to my delight, an ammosexual troll always shows up with an ammosexwellian comment. What’s an ammosexwellian comment? It’s a dystopic, Orwellian style comment constructed to distract you from the gun. It’s always a moronic comment like, "what about cars and swimming pools?". Yeah, cause pointing in another direction is a smart defense of your position. Fucking jackasses.

Until January of this year, I was unable to find out how many child shootings we have per year. Why? Cause the NRA doesn’t want us to count. They’ve done everything in their power to limit our ability to study the effects of guns and wide spread gun ownership. I promise you that if they believed that gun ownership was so fucking awesome, they would make sure that we study the shit out of them The American Academy Of Pediatrics published a study in January that tallied how many kids are shot every year in America. That study is behind a pay wall now, but I have it if you want to download it from me. They found that about 8,000 kids a year are shot in America. They had to compile the data by getting gun shot records from each hospital. Since being an irresponsible gun owner isn’t a crime, it’s not as simple as going through arrest records.

Well, someone else just used the same method to compile numbers for a ten year period between 2002 and 2012. Brace yourself for enough FREEDOM to make you vomit, cause I’m going to share what they found.

• For every U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan during 11 years of war, at least 13 children were shot and killed in America. Yay FREEDOM!
• More than 450 kids didn’t make it to kindergarten. Yay FREEDOM!
• Another 2,700 or more were killed by a firearm before they could sit behind the wheel of a car. Yay FREEDOM!
• Every day, on average, seven children were shot dead. Yay FREEDOM!
• Between 2002 and 2012 at least 28,000 children and teens 19-years-old and younger were killed with guns. Yay FREEDOM!
• Teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 made up over two-thirds of all youth gun deaths in America. Yay FREEDOM!
• More than 1,100 children and teens were killed by a gun that accidentally discharged. Yay FREEDOM!

Go to the link to the story. It’s full of facts that I don’t want to lose focus by writing about. This post is about our fucked up culture and how it got so fucked up. It’s not the fucking video games, it’s not just a function of mental illness, it’s not any other ridiculous ammosexwellian excuse you want to make to absolve the volume of guns in this country by blaming goddamned everything else.

It’s the fucking guns. And every time an ammosexual points in another direction, they’re helping to insert another FREEDOM bullet into a child they were supposed to take care of. Oh well. Everyone knows that you have to crack a few kids to make a FREEDOM omelet.

Let the ammosexwellian comments begin!    

Another day, another mass shooting, another excuse for the gun nutters to flap their useless gums.

The first wave of batshittiness came in the form posting memes about how Bill Clinton passed a law in 1993, disarming military bases. These memes, of course were accompanied by the assertions that if these bases weren’t “gun free” zones, yesterday’s shooting would have been stopped by an armed Rambo. I didn’t comment, because I like to have facts upon which to form my thoughts, but I found it fairly inconceivable that a military base in America would be left sans any protection. Sure enough, we find out that there were an ample number of armed marines guarding the base.

Did that shut the nutbags up? Of course not. Facts never do. The next wave of fact-free douchebaggery asserted that if there were more armed people on that base, the problem would have been solved. Because naturally, the armed guards at the base were overtaken by the shooter because the real Rambos on the base weren’t armed. Okay, well now you’re shitting on our marines and their training in order to maintain your batshit crazy world view, but don’t let that stop you.

So the problem in America is that Rambo is never armed when these shootings happen. Never mind the fact that there were armed armed guards at Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, and the shipyard yesterday. The problem is that none of these armed guards are Rambo, the way these nutters are. They would have saved the day with their guns, if only they had been there. Here’s the problem with the Rambos. Despite their mad shooting skills, they seem to lack the ability to show up when it counts. In fact, armed civilian intervention (with a good result) accounts for 1.6% of all mass shootings in the past 30 years. Rambo saving the day is very rare.

There was one case in our data set in which an armed civilian played a role. Back in 1982, a man opened fire at a welding shop in Miami, killing eight and wounding three others before fleeing on a bicycle. A civilian who worked nearby pursued the assailant in a car, shooting and killing him a few blocks away (in addition to ramming him with the car). Florida authorities, led by then-state attorney Janet Reno, concluded that the vigilante had used force justifiably, and speculated that he may have prevented additional killings.

But there are also these stories;

In 2005, as a rampage unfolded inside a shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington, a civilian named Brendan McKown confronted the assailant with a licensed handgun he was carrying. The assailant pumped several bullets into McKown and wounded six people before eventually surrendering to police after a hostage standoff. (A comatose McKown eventually recovered after weeks in the hospital.)

In Tyler, Texas, that same year, a civilian named Mark Wilson fired his licensed handgun at a man on a rampage at the county courthouse. Wilson—who was a firearms instructor—was shot dead by the body-armored assailant, who wielded an AK-47.

So the Rambo factor can go either way. Sometimes, more people get killed because a Rambo managed to work out that timing thing, and ended up at the right place at the right time.

But these fucking nutbags cling onto their fantasies of being Rambo and someday saving the day. Never mind that your fellow Rambos seldom seem to get it right. You’re special, and someday your day in the sun will come.

I have a message for the Rambos of the world. Until you personally have stopped a mass shooting, or any shooting for that matter, you need to shut the fuck up. You have neither statistics nor anecdotal evidence to support your lunatic fantasies or your childish claims. That’s what you are; a fucking child with childlike fantasies. Do us all a favor and engage yourself on a more productive fantasy, like becoming an astronaut, or a fireman. Your Rambo fantasies are comical.