Millennial Hamilton Nolan advises us geezers to give up on carrying. We’re all too old and too infirm, he contends, to draw, aim, and fire with any hope of success.
We live in scary times: sharia law, foreigners, and rape gangs haunt the streets of this once great nation. Some old people believe that they must arm themselves in order to find peace and safety.
Wrong. Old people. Wrong. Want to find safety? Can you even “find [the] safety†on the handgun you’ve purchased? Probably not very quickly, with your poor eyesight and fingers ravaged by arthritis.
The Wall Street Journal reports that interest in guns among retirees is booming. In just the last five years, more old people are buying guns, training with guns, and cupping their hands over their ears to try to hear whether the instructor at their gun safety course said “Shoot†or “Stop.†In this day and age when you have Obama, ISIS, and Chief Keef, you—an elderly American—are thinking seriously about getting yourself a gun, for protection.
Might as well get yourself a dragon, or a unicorn trained to be your bodyguard. That would help you just as much.
When you’re old you’re slow as hell and decades of muscle erosion have made you weak. Pretty much any healthy young person can beat you up. Is a gun gonna even things out? Nope. In order for that gun to work you have to pull it out and aim it in a moment of crisis. While you’re fumbling to do that, all slow, a young person is just pushing you on the ground. And taking your gun out of your feeble hands.
Leave the guns to the young nuts, oldie.
Smoothly drawing a gun from a holster, aiming it quickly, and firing it accurately despite the kickback require a level of strength and dexterity that you just don’t have. I’ll lay 5-1 odds that any street criminal can kick you in the knee and chuckle as you roll around on the ground, grasping for the gun you dropped, as they rifle through your purse and then steal your gun, too. That gun you bought will end up in a pawn shop before you ever get to blow a hole in one of these disrespectful young menaces. Were you to somehow squeeze off a shot in the course of being attacked it’s as likely as not that you’d shoot yourself in the knee replacement as shoot the bad guy. It’s time to wake up and realize that though your irrational age-induced fear of the outside world may be here to stay, so is your physical inability to defend yourself. And where are you going anyhow that’s so scary? The grocery? Those teens may be delinquents but they probably aren’t a stickup gang. Please return that Beretta to the nice gun dealer before you mistake a stray rap lyric for a death threat and put a bullet in some poor C student cutting class. Yes, yes, Have Gun Will Travel was one of your favorite shows, but you’re no Paladin and there ain’t any bandits on horseback in your subdivision. Stop watching cable news so much. All it does is scare you. Failing to take your medication is the greatest threat you need to worry about now.
Your reflexes are faded as hell so you might as well just learn to get along with people. Who do you think you are, Charles Bronson? More like Charles Osgood. Stop acting crazy.
I was at Woodstock and am definitely getting on in years, but I would bet little Hamilton that if he tossed a bottle in the air, I could still draw and hit it before it came back down, and then still have more than adequate strength and dexterity left over to hammer him into the ground like a tent peg before he could push me to the ground or kick me in the knee.
In an interview with ABC News, the head of Interpol admitted that, in an era of terrorist attacks on civilian target, the notion of a governmental monopoly of force doesn’t really deliver an effective defense in time. What does result in a timely response is an armed civilian population capable of self-defense.
Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month’s deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians.
In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.
“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.” …
Citing a recent call for al Qaeda “brothers to strike soft targets, to do it in small groups,” Noble said law enforcement is now facing a daunting task.
“How do you protect soft targets? That’s really the challenge. You can’t have armed police forces everywhere,” he told reporters. “It’s Interpol’s view that one way you protect soft targets is you make it more difficult for terrorist to move internationally. So what we’re trying to do is to establish a way for countries … to screen passports, which are a terrorist’s best friend, try to limit terrorists moving from country to country. And also, that we’re able to share more info about suspected terrorists.”
In the interview with ABC News, Noble was more blunt and directed his comments to his home country.
“Ask yourself: If that was Denver, Col., if that was Texas, would those guys have been able to spend hours, days, shooting people randomly?” Noble said, referring to states with pro-gun traditions. “What I’m saying is it makes police around the world question their views on gun control. It makes citizens question their views on gun control. You have to ask yourself, ‘Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past with an evolving threat of terrorism?’ This is something that has to be discussed.”
“For me it’s a profound question,” he continued. “People are quick to say ‘gun control, people shouldn’t be armed,’ etc., etc. I think they have to ask themselves: ‘Where would you have wanted to be? In a city where there was gun control and no citizens armed if you’re in a Westgate mall, or in a place like Denver or Texas?'”
The shooter and the location of the shooting are nowhere identified on the Web. A lot of viewers are indignant and express criticism that the snowmobiler did not turn around or leave the trail, but snowmobiles have no reverse and it is really unlikely that he could have gotten his machine out of that tree-bordered trail. The YouTube version offers additionally the extenuating information that the shooter had a heart condition and was defending his son. Obviously the moose could have left the trail more easily and the moose clearly initiated a physical contest for possession of the right of way.
73% of respondents to a Wyoming radio station poll thought the shooter should have done more to avoid the confrontation. I do wonder how many would have felt the same way when on the receiving end of an incoming moose hoof.
I was myself surprised to see a Glock so effectively drop a moose. I wonder what it was chambered in.
David Frum (the poor man’s Andrew Sullivan), got a good deal of attention for his tweet last weekend: “Hypothesis: the people who most want to carry are the very last people on earth who should be allowed to carry.â€
One of the best rejoinders came from David French.
In my experience, those individuals who carry do so because they very consciously do not want to belong to the class of citizens that is inherently helpless — totally reliant upon the state to protect not just themselves but their family, friends, and neighbors. If the choice is between protectors and protected, they choose to be protectors.
This identity is often inseparable from the notion that there is no set of government policies — no utopia — that can eliminate from human society the need for immediate protection. People can and will try to hurt others — using whatever means immediately available — and it strikes us as utterly reckless to be unprepared for this reality.
The protected class has a different view. The protected class is a dependent class — not economically dependent of course, but dependent on the state in perhaps a more fundamental way (for their very lives) – and like members of other dependent classes, they are terrified of flaws in the state’s protective apparatus. Walled off from gun culture, they read the occasional, aberrant story of (legal) gun-owner stupidity or recklessness and cower in fear of a nonexistent threat. (While of course blithely sending their kids off to far more dangerous activities, like swimming in neighbors’ pools or riding in neighbors’ cars).
To the protected class, private ownership of firearms is the flaw in the system that makes them feel vulnerable. It’s the barrier to the safety they crave but can’t provide.
Thus the irreconcilable cultural divide: The very thing that provides security and safety for the gun-owner and his or her family frightens their non-gun-owning friends and neighbors, but the root of the problem is not the gun but the protected person’s very sense of themselves.
Today, in proper and enlightened jurisdictions, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) could be prosecuted and convicted for failing to retreat from gunslinger Liberty Valence.
Stanley Fish, in the New York Times, tells us, once again, that the frontier has closed, and as Hollywood has testified, the old America of Gary Cooper and John Wayne, of rugged individualism and manly courage, is dead.
We are now a country more appropriately represented cinematically by Alan Alda, in which the feminine aversion to violence and dependence on the Leviathan State to handle our problems for us has triumphed. Personal honor, chivalry, and manhood are all obsolete concepts consigned without regret by our elite intelligentsia to the dust heap of History.
As civilization advances, and the law book replaces the gun… rationales for violence sound increasingly hollow, and more and more westerns are self-consciously elegiac — “High Noon,†“The Gunfighter,†“Ride the High Country,†“The Magnificent Seven,†“Lonely Are the Brave,†“The Wild Bunch,†“Monte Walsh,†“The Big Country,†“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,†“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance†— caressing the lonely figures at their center even as they say farewell to the values they embody. Outright satirical comedies like “Cat Ballou†(1965) and “Blazing Saddles†(1974) announce loudly and without nuance what the genre as a whole had already implicitly proclaimed: the reign of what Bosley Crowther (in a review of “Shaneâ€) called “legal killers under the frontier code†was over.
Stand Your Ground laws bring it all back. That is what President Obama meant when he said on Friday that such laws seem “designed in such a way that they encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations … that we saw in the Florida case rather than defuse potential altercations.†Do Stand Your Ground laws, he asked, really contribute to “the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?†The answer is that not everyone wants to see them. There are some who imagine themselves as the modern-day Wyatt Earp or Will Kane or Shane — bravely seeking out malefactors, confronting them in the main street, and shooting them down to the applause and gratitude of less heroic citizens. Stand Your Ground laws are for them.
