Oh no, not again
18. April 2007In the initial hours after another batshit erruption in a “gun free zone” with even more horrendous results than usual, activists in both the gun-rights camp and the victim disarmament camp did manage to withhold their natural reactions to this news, showing a bit of respect for the victims and their families.
But it didn’t take long for this wall of civil resolve to crack. The evening news was filled with reporters demanding statements about the VTech shooting from the Leading Presidential Candidates, and the Lame Duck Himself. The smarter ones refused comment but of course Bush and McCain had to mutter half-heartedly about “2nd Amendment Rights” and “the need to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys.”
But the next day came the first volleys, first the massive whine from the Brady Campaign about “high powered weapons” and wanting background checks at gun shows and bans on selling more than one gun at a time. (None of these measure had any bearing on the facts of this shooting. The fuck-up’s handgun (not an “assault rifle”) was purchased by itself from a licensed gun dealer after he passed the Brady background checks.)
Then while the Bush administration was backing off from its earlier tepid defense of gun owners, a great swell of a meme has come rolling out of not only right-wing blogs but the Wall Street Journal: “That university’s ‘gun-free zone’ rule left those students and faculty helpless against the rampage of a single, deranged fuck-up armed with, apparently, a varmint gun and a midling-calibre Glock.” Or some variation hereof.
Well, I’ll be, an honest-to-God counter-argument! I wonder where they got the idea that letting ordinary people arm themselves for self-defense might be a good counter-strategy against random terror?
It’s fun watching gun-grabbers react to this argument. They practically turn themselves inside-out in screeching, barely-coherent horror. “What! We can’t let everybody have guns! There’ll be a blood-bath the likes of which we’ve never seen!”
Well, the worst blood-baths we have seen — the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian Holocaust, Stalin’s purges and forced starvations, Mao’s butchering of millions, Pol Pot’s killing fields — happened when everybody didn’t have guns, but only approved government employees had them.
If the luckless dormitory resident assistant had been armed, he might have survived his encounter with the fuck-up, or at least stopped him from any more mayhem, saving 30 lives. Or if anyone in the classroom hall had been armed, the fuck-up would have been stopped sooner than he was, and most of those 30 people would still be alive now. If several people in Norris Hall had been armed, no one save the fuck-up need have died.
Much has been said of Liviu Librescu, the valiant Holocaust-surviving professor who barred the doorway against the fuck-up with his own body while his students clambered out the classroom window, giving his life to save them. He certainly was an admirable man and did not deserve to die that way. Wouldn’t this story be happier if, instead, Prof. Librescu had pulled out his own .45 calibre Colt Defender and stopped the fuck-up where he stood?
It’s a balance-of-power issue, dummy. Unless we want to pay for having an armed guard in every building, and on every street corner, unarmed innocents are left powerless to defend themselves by anti-gun laws (leaving aside the issue of who protects the innocents from the guards). Predators are not so inconvenienced, and thus one fuck-up only needs one gun (that .22 hardly counts) and a few spare magazines full of ammo to terrorize a building full of hundreds of healthy young adults and one tough old man.
One of these snarling Holocaust-enablers recently discovered the cartoon displayed above, somewhere on the Web where it’s been spreading like dandelions, and left a lengthy comment (scroll down until you see the sender name “Google Checker”) that was both intentionally abusive (not to mention threatening) and unintentially funny.
What kind of sick fucks are we dealing with here, who would rather see more innocents dead than allow them a fighting chance to save themselves? Get your elitist butts off your phoney-baloney moral high-horses — they’re fake mounts made of horse-shit and they’re stinking up the place.
I came across your blog recently, and was wondering…. May I cross post the April 18 entry both on my blog as well as posting a link and snippets (with proper accreditation) on the forum at Baen’s Bar?
Thank you, I will await your response.
john wagner
Firing a gun in an plan has 4 issues :
- The sound of the deflagration cannot escape, so it will bounce idefinately, creating some deafness.
- A deflagration makes toxic smoke and takes away some oxygen, since the airsystem in a plane is very slow, it could be potentially dangerous.
- The bullet could peirce a window or the side of the plane wich wpuld lead to constant depressurisation and some deaths
- The explosion in the barrell couls light up the air when the levels of oxygen in the air are high
also, when we take the fact that everybody is crammed together and that most people have bad aim with their weapons… many innocents will die. Also, many rednecks could bully up and “kill all the fucking A-rabs”.
It seems like no matter how often that “bullet through the window causes catastrophic decompression” gets de-bunked, people still bring it up. Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel demonstrated conclusively what any aircraft engineer will tell you — even several bullets going through an airplane window will not cause explosive decompression. At worse it will cause a gradual decompression that can be dealt with either by turning up the air pumps (air is constantly being pumped into and bled out of airliner cabins), or descending to a lower altitude.
So stop using “facts” you picked up from an old James Bond movie as an excuse to restrict my right to self-defense.
As for Essel55’s other objections — bang echoes are a problem inside any closed space. Keep in mind however that airliner cabins do have a bit of sound-proofing, in attempt to cut noise from the jets, which would mitigate bang loudness a bit. But I’d rather be a little bit deaf than crashed into a skyscraper.
And modern gun cartridges burn primarily the tiny amount of oxygen trapped inside the cartridge with the powder. You can fire a gun in a vacuum. The smoke resulting from, say, 20 people firing would be momentarily irritating (the pilot can turn up the vents and dissipate it quickly), but again, I’d rather have a bit of toxic smoke than get crashed into a skyscraper.
And I’d rather risk getting hit by a stray bullet than be used as an instrument for the murder of thousands.
Wouldn’t you? Why the hell not?
Also Scott, if worse comes to more worser, decompression could be reduced even further by stuffing napkins in the bullet holes. (Seriously!)
On the noise issue, the sound of firearms going off in an enclosed space may make your ears ring for a time, but you would have to be exposed to that sort of noise repeatedly over a long period of time for it to have any permanent effect on your hearing.
Also, gun smoke isn’t toxic. And depending on what kind of gun powder is in use, it actually smells kind of nice. Black powder is the exception . . . that stuff really stinks!
Ken V.
I didn’t hold my breath out of respect on this one. Seeing that my school career has included Jonesboro, Columbine, 9/11, and now Virginia Tech, each one of which has made life worse as the anti-rights crowd foams at the mouth with “zero tolerance,” I was rather pissed off at another avoidable disaster that could have been at the school I go to. I mainly ranted about it on facebook and told everyone who asked that gun control encourages this and has only historically made oppressors and murderers safer. I also did not change my long-made plan to sell toy guns on campus while giving out flyers on gun safety and how to legally buy them. I was going to write about this for The Libertarian Enterprise but it ended up being really uneventful (a few sales, some smiles and cringes, and a couple of positive and negative comments).
…and I guess I should say that it seems like more people “get” that carrying firearms could prevent things like this. Hell even the mainstream media is at least acknowledging that our side exists now.
Ken, I actually enjoy the aroma of black powder. Reminds me of my childhood, when my closest friend and I started making the stuff from scratch for rocket fuel. Of course, that earliest rocket fuel is also the earliest explosive and the earliest projectile propellant. I’ll admit that during those years (grades 6-8) we made more progress with explosives than with rockets. I consider it lucky that we both survived those years with all hands and faces intact. Our quality control wasn’t that great and our manufacturing methods really bad. (Melting a mix of potassium nitrate and sugar on an electric kitchen stove usually results in the loss of a house).
Hi Ward,
Traditional black powder is a mixture of Sulpher, Charcoal and Potassium Nitrate. Although sugar can be substituted for charcoal, as you say. With the traditional recipe, it’s the burnt sulpher that makes for the stink. If you were using just Potassium Nitrate and Sugar, the smell would be quite different.
And traditional black powder is made by mixing those three compounds in water, and then letting the water evaporate.
I still shoot black powder on occasion, and if there’s no breeze to carry the smoke away . . . cough, hack, wheeze.
That’s the way it effects me anyway.
Another answer to Essel55:
“Firing a gun in an plan has 4 issues :
- The sound of the deflagration cannot escape, so it will bounce idefinately,[sic] creating some deafness.”
The interior of a commercial airliner is made of plastic which absorbs sound, as do the seats which are covered with foam and fabric. Even the bodies of the passengers have a tendency to NOT reflect sound waves. So the noise of gunfire will be attenuated fairly quickly. Furthermore, EVERYTHING has a greater or lesser tendency to absorb sound; metals, rocks, vegetation, even the air itself. If this were not true, then a very sensitive microphone might still be able to pick up Lincolns Gettysburg Address.
The noise of gunfire will have some temporary effect on ones hearing, (ringing in the ears) but that will go away soon, and after about three days your hearing will be back to normal. As hearing tests have shown. Hells bells, even the sound of a dentists drill will have an effect on your hearing. Like firearms, it’s only harmfull if one is exposed to the noise over a long period of time. Did you know that after a number of years, dentists become deaf in their left ears. That is, if the dentist is right handed, it’s the opposite for left handed dentists.
“- A deflagration makes toxic smoke and takes away some oxygen, since the airsystem in a plane is very slow, it could be potentially dangerous.”
Gun powder has its own “built in” oxygen. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be able to burn inside the cartridge. If the powder used in a firearms cartridge burns at a slow enough rate, some of it will still be burning when the bullet exits the barrel of the firearm (which accounts for the muzzle flash you see on occasion) but it’s still burning its own oxygen and not the atmosphere of the aircraft — or microscopically little of it. And the smoke is not toxic unless that’s all you have to breathe. Just as Argon, Nitrogen, or Helium are not toxic if there’s sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere.
The smell of gunsmoke could be annoying to some, but in that case, all the pilots would have to do is to increase the circulation of air in the passenger area. That’s one of the primary reasons that commercial airline companies lobbied for eliminating smoking on aircraft. They wanted to eliminate the fuel expense of having a high rate of airflow in the passenger spaces of the aircraft, the more frequent changing of the air filters, and the expense of removing the smell of tobacco smoke from the seats and other parts of the interior of the aircraft.
It wasn’t about any actual danger, it was about lowering their expenses without lowering their ticket prices.
“- The bullet could peirce a window or the side of the plane wich wpuld lead to constant depressurisation and some deaths”
There is at most, about six pounds of atmospheric pressure differential between the interior of an aircraft at altitude and the air pressure outside the aircraft. The windows are made of Lexan which will not “blow out” if punctured by a bullet — even multiple bullets. A fourty-five caliber bullet through a window will make a fourty — or slightly smaller — caliber hole. Literally, all one would have to do is to place a finger or thumb over the hole to stop the air from escaping. And it would escape at such a slow rate that even THAT wouldn’t be necessary.
There are valves in the exit ducts of commercial aircraft which automatically close if the interior air pressure gets to within four pounds of the outside air presure. (I used to make those valves.)
“- The explosion in the barrell [sic] couls light up the air when the levels of oxygen in the air are high”
Firstly, as I already said, the oxidizer is in the gunpowder itself. If this wasn’t true, the cartridge wouldn’t fire in the first place . . . the gunpowder wouldn’t ignite if it didn’t have its own supply of oxygen.
Secondly, oxygen doesn’t burn by itself. It only aids in the combustion of something else, so it couldn’t possibly “light up the air.”
And thirdly, the oxygen level (the percentage of oxygen in the air) in the cabin of a commercial airliner is no more or less than of the percentage of oxygen anywhere else on this planet. (21%) So, the oxygen level in the air wouldn’t be “high.”
The idea of the air itself catching on fire is a myth.
“also, when we take the fact that everybody is crammed together and that most people have bad aim with their weapons… many innocents will die.”
When it comes to shooting skills, about the only people who are worse overall than police, are the criminals themselves. (And people who have never handled firearms at all.)
Last year, I took a “web-buddy” shooting. He had never fired a handgun before in his life. At the end of the day, he was firing one-hole groups with a high-recoil 45 automatic.
Although the internal mechanism of handguns can be fairly complex, the operation of them is fairly simple. I can teach an individual to shoot well in far less time than it takes to teach someone to type competently.
Ken V.
I never get tired of that cartoon. Marvelous work.
Is a marshall or two per flight, or giving air stewards guns a better idea than everyone having a gun?
-Difference between law and order and Vigilantism.
I think your overall argument is flawed, and perhaps borrowed from the much over-used Exodus 21:23–27. “Eye for an eye” etc.
Potentially an endless cycle, where does it stop? And the ONLY problem with any “no gun zone” is in the enforcing. If no-one has a gun, problem solved. GUN FREE should really mean gun free. Blame lack of security.
However, in response to my own argument, I have to stand corrected on my own opinion:
If there is no way of stopping students bringing guns into a gun-free-zone, then why have a gun free zone?
Again, guns for teachers, staff etc and NOT STUDENTS!
And maybe the family of the victim will disagree, but I think you’re mocking the death of Librescu. “wouldn’t it have been better if…” can be over applied.
Wouldn’t it have been better if the shcool had big old steel doors, or everyone was wearing a vest, or guns had never been invented or ..um or god was pro-active?
Niko, I think you are mis-understanding the whole self-defense argument here.
I am not looking for “an eye for an eye.” I am not advocating vigilantism.
“Eye for an eye” demands that if someone takes out my eye, I have the right to have my attacker hunted down, detained, and have his own eye plucked out in pursuit of “justice.”
Vigilantism involves going out in the streets and hunting down criminals, and otherwise looking for trouble. I don’t advocate that either.
Self-defense is not vigilantism, and it is not “eye-for-an-eye.” It is the inherent human right to stop an attack against oneself or one’s family and friends.
In the cartoon, notice that the armed defenders are not shooting the would-be hijackers. They are stopping the hijackers from carrying out their plans. Presumably after the moment depicted in this cartoon, the hijackers would be restrained and taken into police custody after the plane lands.
Actually, of course, what would happen is that anyone planning terror would note that American airliners are full of armed passengers and they would not have attempted the hijacking in the first place.
But it seems most of my critics here haven’t thought the matter through.
Love your work cartoon! Just had to bookmark your blog!
Scott -
I came across this post while googleiing for “disarming pilots”. I can’t believe that in the news today the loons in the White House were talking about disarming airline pilots. Absolutely unbelievable…..
>Although the internal mechanism of handguns can be fairly complex, the operation of them is fairly simple. I can teach an individual to shoot well in far less time than it takes to teach someone to type competently.
Ken V.<
That’s good news, because I failed typing in school!
Googling I came to your post and it has all what I was looking for.
Thanks a lot Scott.
Great cartoon and article Scott. I have shared it with many friends.
LOL! I almost choked when I saw your cartoon. That’s one way to deter terrorism.
Very cute cartoon.. I need to see more like this