Grappling with Guns

There's a great post over at Pro-Gun Progressive that addresses a number of philosophical weaknesses of the anti-gun movement. It also addresses court cases that used disarmament as a means of oppression after the Emancipation here in the United States as well as liberal court cases that stopped the oppressive policies.

Take a look.

After all, didn't Washington fight for democracy? http://www.guntards.net/nyt-liberal-case-for-gun-rights-sways-judiciary

1988

“Please turn off your engine and remain in your car,” Eddie’s voice squawked over the loudspeaker as the driver’s door of the car in front of us popped open, smoke still sputtering from its tailpipe.

We had pulled over a blue Plymouth with expired plates near the local college campus. The engine cut out on the car in front of us, the door swung shut and the driver poked her head out the window to look at us, then pulled it back in.

Eddie swung his door wide and it bounced back toward him a little at the end of it’s reach. I slid out of the passenger seat, a little awkward with the unusual weight of a .38 revolver on my hip. Eddie swaggered slightly in his powder blue uniform as he approached the driver’s side of the stopped car.

I approached slowly, scanning the vehicle for any signs of foul play.

“Maam, are you aware that your registration has expired,” Eddie asked, bushing his thick glasses up on his nose. We were both sweating in the summer heat.

“No, oh I didn’t know,” she said, turning toward Ed, looking up at his unruly mop of blond hair.

“Gun,” I shouted and drew my pistol.

Neither Ed nor I knew anything about gun laws.

Strike that. I know that when hunting pheasant a driver may not keep a loaded shotgun in the passenger compartment of a car. I know this because my mother’s friend’s husband from church took my brother and I hunting while we were being watched one afternoon while my mother went to her weekend psychology class the college. He drove with the breach of his double barrel shotgun open to show it was empty, the barrel pointing down at the floor between the two front seats. I know that to carry a handgun loaded and concealed requires a permit from the Sheriff. I know shotguns and rifles may be purchased at age 18 with no felony record, history of internment in a psyche ward or current restraining order, while to buy a pistol the purchaser must be 21 and meet the same standards as well as pass an instant background check. I know that being surprised to find an unholstered pistol in the passenger compartment of a car during a traffic stop is not a good thing.

The handgun was sitting between the driver and passenger on the padded median next to a Big Gulp in a cup holder.

“Get out of the car,” I said.

The man complied.

“Spread your legs and put your hands on the hood.”

I dove into the passenger side, grabbing the pistol from beside the driver, then set it on the hood of the car. Eddie stood on the driver’s side pointing his pistol at the driver and, inadvertently, at me on the other side of the car.

“move back and put your hands on the trunk,” I said.

The man did what I said and I moved around behind him so I was pointing my gun on the diagonal toward him and Ed.

“Ask him if he has a concealed weapons permit,” Ed shouted at me, still pointing his gun at the driver.

“Do you have a concealed weapons permit?” I asked.

The man dipped his finger and thumb in his back pocket and produced an invisible card. He handed the card to me. I looked at it blankly.

“Is it real?” Ed asked.

“How should I know?” I shouted. “It’s invisible.”

The troop, standing behind Ed rolled with laughter.

The parking lots extend for almost a mile around the college football Stadium on thee sides. During games the lots would fill up and parking would spill out into the neighborhoods across the river that snaked through the plain creating a tenuous situation between many of the citizens and the university. During the week the lots would be vast and open, not being close enough to campustown for faculty or students to use them extensively.

That afternoon the Explorers took two patrol cars and a light blue Plymoth out to the lots to practice traffic stops. The point wasn’t to do things right so much as to teach us how much we didn’t know.

I'm posting this with apologies to Man in the Moon over at Democraticunderground.com. Over at Jessie Jackson's anti-gun rally last week protesters called for the murder of the shop owner as well as any congresspersons that support gun rights. For those of us who are democrats who oppose murder and support the right to self-defense, this rhetoric is extremely disturbing.

Here's the post and link from democraticunderground.com.

"Seems there was a rally at a gun store in Illinois.

Wonder why the MSM didn’t mention the death threats?"

I call on Rev. Jessie Jackson to repudiate this kind of rhetoric and to oppose unprovoked violence rather than guns. Guns are a tool that can be used for good or ill. Unprovoked violence comes from people and can be perpetrated with a host of tools including cars, hammers, fists, and speech (as it was by Rev. Michael Pfleger at Rev. Jackson’s rally). I doubt that Rev. Jackson and his friends are prepared to illegalize these tools as they would illegalize guns.

1987

Killer flipped on his lights and hit the siren so it chirped twice, two short bursts or the long wail that a cop car makes while in route to an emergency. The car in front of us slowed and pulled to the curb. Our patrol car glided to a stop two and a half feet behind it and four feet from the curb, offset from the stopped car to give Killer a protected zone in which to stand while talking to the driver of the stopped car.

"How did you get your nickname?" I had asked earlier that day.

We were working the South East quadrant of the city. Killer made a right turn onto Lincoln from Duff Street. The border that divided the East and West quadrants was the train tracks one block West of this intersection. We headed toward the industrial outskirts of town.

"When I was hired the Chief asked me to do some undercover work."

He slowed the patrol car as we approached an old seedy hotel with weekly rates listed on a hand-printed sign taped inside the office window.

"A couple of coke dealers were living in here."

The hotel ran perpendicular to the road, the front office on Lincoln with the rooms behind it, opening to an alley that divided the block. We pulled into the alley and rolled to a stop.

"I spent two months living here and hanging with those guys. They were part of a ring that runs drugs across the country. Interstate 80 is the main channel."

"So they call you Killer because you arrested those guys and broke up the ring?"

Killer laughed. "No." He laughed again. "One night when I was cleaning my gun it went off. I didn’t know there was a round in the chaimber. Neighbors called the cops and they ran an investigation. No one knew I was undercover except the Chief and I wasn't going to say anything."

I looked at Killer's open, gentle, friendly face and tried to imagine him undercover hanging out with the seedy, bitter, unfriendly-looking people I'd seen coming out of that hotel.

"Was anyone hurt?" I asked.

"No, it just punched a hole in two walls and a dresser. They found the slug in the neighbor's sock drawer.”

Later I found out from the parking cop the other reason people called him Killer. He brought in the most revenue from traffic stops, sometimes hundreds of dollars per day in citations, each delivered with a smile.

"Open your door, unfasten the seatbelt, and get ready to get out," Killer said as he opened his door.

He walked with ease toward the car he had pulled over, looking to make sure the trunk was shut and locked. He peered in the back window to be sure no one was crouched down in the seat, then greeted the woman driving the car. I unfastened my seatbelt and got out of the car.

"Good afternoon. May I see your drivers license?"

"Good afternoon, officer. Did I do something wrong?"

*The driver is digging for her license. She has black hair, straight, to her shoulders. Her hair is flecked with grey. She's wearing a loosely knit sweater. She's thin like a librarian or college English teacher. Her plate number is VAL 647. I repeat the words from the phonetic alphabet I will need if I anything goes wrong and the driver decides to flee the scene: Victor Adam Lincoln 647. Victor Adam Lincoln 647.*

I shut my door and approached the car from the right side, stopping by the back right tire of the vehicle to observe.

"Did you know your registration has expired?" Killer asked her.

I hadn't ever been invited out of the patrol car on a stop before. Every sensory mechanism was on alert to tell me if something was wrong. The driver apologized in a torrent of words. Killer smiled, handed the license back through the car window and told the woman to visit the DMV to update her registration and to apply the stickers to the plates on her car as soon as possible.

He waived to the driver and we returned to the patrol car as she pulled back into traffic.
I fastened my seatbelt with the solid metal click of a 1980's seatbelt. Killer turned to me.

"What I meant when I said 'get ready to get out,' was, 'stay in the car but be prepared to run if anything happens.' You don't have a vest. I do." He was referring to the half-inch of Kevlar under his uniform that would catch a bullet, even if at the expense of cracking a rib.

"Where should I run?" I asked. I imagined Killer down and me taking two bullets in the back as I fled down the street.

"Run to a house and call 911," he said.

I imagined Killer approaching the woman with the expired plates only to hear a pop and see a puff of smoke drift calmly out of the window, Killer reeling back, his hand flailing at his holster. I imagine myself ignoring the order to run and instead unhooking the 12-gauge shotgun from its rest inside the car. I imagine leveling the gun against the door, pressing the butt of the gun into my shoulder, praying the first cartridge is a nice, light load rather than a deer slug, the recoil of which would send me backward just about as fast as it would send the ball of lead out the barrel. I imagine telling the woman to hold still, put her hands in the air. I imagine taking the radio handset and calling in the code 10-33 emergency, 10-52 ambulance needed, and because I can't remember the code for person with gun, 10-96 mental subject, the code we all laughed about, and because we laughed, we remembered. I imagine the woman crying with her hands in the air as Killer moans, sits up and pulls open his shirt to show the bullet flattened, like on TV, to his vest.

I don't imagine the PR nightmare that would result from this had the scenario ever been realized.

I have been reading Kenneth V. F. Blanchard’s Black Man with a Gun, a powerful book that counters the misperceptions surrounding African Americans and guns. Blanchard, as do I, calls for information based decision-making over myth. He is working to overcome Caucasian America’s misperceptions about African American gun ownership, and he is teaching African American communities about their rights.

Blanchard points out that African Americans have suffered from mistrust left over from slavery and years and years of residual oppression. In describing the founding of his Tenth Cavalry Gun Club Blanchard writes, “Our goal was to start chapters in all the states where there were a large number of African American firearms enthusiasts and provide them a club that fostered lawful and responsible gun ownership. This doesn’t seem like a big deal unless you realize that black people have been conditioned not to trust or openly admit gun ownership.”

For Blanchard, as for me, when people can learn about firearms, take firearms safety courses, and become confident in their skills, they develop self-confidence and independence, no matter what their heritage. To become confident in yourself and to become safe with a dangerous tool that has so many misperceptions and biases surrounding it is a wonderful thing.

Visit Ken’s website at http://www.blackmanwithagun.com and get your own copy at http://www.blackmanwithagun.com/site/recreading.asp?sec_id=140000845

Almost all gun owners can benefit from back-to-basics firearm safety. I watched a Navy Seal training showing seals learning to clear buildings. The trainers, you will notice, focus on moving slowly, knowing where their firearms are pointing, and knowing when they are firing a shot. There’s no cowboy shooting going on in this training. No one is saying “run faster, shoot more.”

Watching a gun being test fired on video by someone else is never what you want it to be. It is like golf. The camera is still, the thing happens, and it is over. The gun represents itself just as it is, as a mechanical object that functions in a repetitive way, the same each time if the shooter takes care.

If you want a shooting to be exciting, watch a movie – any movie. A B-grade horror flick is more exciting and dramatic than gun trials on video. Watching “US Guns of World War II” on the History channel is more action packed.

In a movie the actor animates the gun. Tears and anguish and aggression and rage well up and spill over the barrel aiming hate, fear, and loss at the target. When the shooter finally, in a fit of vengeance or passion lets the bullets fly, we can finally slide back from the edge of our seats with the realization that the emotion is resolved. (Unless, that is, we are watching the last minutes of the last episode of the Sopranos.)

Good firearm training is very present and very, how can I describe it, maybe, “boring.” Your trainer should ask you to slow down – to place your shots. Accuracy is more important than speed. Once, after a liberal frowned disapprovingly at me when I said I enjoy shooting guns, I described it in terms he could understand. He was interested in Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, something I have practiced myself.

“You know how some monks have used archery as a form of meditation?”

I also like archery a lot.

“Shooting guns is the same. To be accurate you have to be calm, very present, and you have to be in tune with your breath, the alignment of your sights, your muscle action, and you practice to be non-reactive.”

My friend was surprised. “Well, I never thought about it like that,” he said. “Just make sure you keep ‘em locked up.”

“Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t think of leaving them laying around.”

1977

My father is a pacifist. From the time I was old enough to know what a gun is I was taught that guns are for killing, and killing is wrong. Being an energetic child growing up in a conservative Christian household, I was eager to stretch my bounds. A finger pistol aimed at my brother could raise the temperature in my father’s boiler a hundred degrees. Even my mother could see that my father’s pacifism wouldn’t stand my invisible taunts. I was going to get spanked.

Toy guns were for me a kind of torture. Whenever I saw one I wanted it with all my heart and soul. One day at the Five and Dime, this was before I went to kindergarten, so I must have been four years old, I saw a set of plastic handcuffs and a cap gun for three dollars.

“Mom, I want this toy,” I said, fear and excitement welling up in my little heart.

“No, honey, what about these?” My mother asked, quickly grabbing a box of log house logs from the opposite shelf.

I paused, staring at the log house.

“I want this toy,” I reiterated.

“Why don’t we go home and think about it. It doesn’t look very sturdy. You don’t want to get gypped,” Mom said.

“I won’t get gypped,” I replied.

My mother steered us out of the toy section toward the front of the store, the package still firmly in my grip.

“I won’t get gypped. I won’t get gypped,” I chanted, marching along next to the shopping cart waving the toy gun just out of my mother’s reach.

She leaned forward and grabbed a cardboard corner of my prize as we reached the checkout line.

“I won’t get gypped,” I said louder, fastening my grip even more firmly to the bottom of the package.

The lady in line before us turned and gave us a disdainful look.

“Honey,” my mother said, “why don’t you pray for it when we get home?”

The cash register closed with the jingle of change.

“Thank you and come again,” the cashier said holding out a grey plastic sac to the woman in front of us. The woman snatched the bag and walked briskly from the store.

I let go of the package. “Jesus will give it to me if I pray?”

“Maybe.” My mother handed the package to the cashier. “We’re not getting this.”

My mother stacked the other items from her cart, sheets, a towel rack, four yards of cotton cloth and two patterns. She turned toward me and looked at me for a moment. The cashier was busily ringing up the items. “Honey, Jesus works in mysterious ways.”

That night when my father got home I was bouncing off of the walls.

“Dad, Dad!” I shouted, “I want to pray for a gun!”

"He saw a toy gun at the Five and Dime and to get him to let go of it I told him he should pray for it when he got home,” my mother said flatly.

“You did what?” my father said.

“I won’t get gypped! I won’t get gypped!” I climbed up on the armrest of the couch.

“Well what did you want me to do? It was either that or buy it for him right there.”

“Settle down,” my father said in my general direction. He turned back to my mother before changing his mind and coming for me.

“Come here.” My father sat down on the couch and pulled me off the armrest.

“You can pray to Jesus for anything, but that doesn’t mean you are going to get it.”

“Why,” I said.

“Jesus wants the best things for us, and sometimes what we want for ourselves isn’t the best thing. You wouldn’t want Jesus to give something to you that would hurt you, now would you?”

I was curled against his side with his arm around me. I squirmed a little, considering his logic.

“But Dad,” I said, “It’s a toy.”

“Yes, but if you learn to use a toy gun you could hurt someone if you ever were to play with a real gun,” my Dad said.

“But I won’t play with a real gun.”

My dad frowned. His argument wasn’t getting through or divine right was on my side.

“You won’t point the toy gun at anyone will you?”

“No?” I said, a question in my voice.

My mom walked out of the room toward the kitchen.

“Now I don’t want you to use the word Gypped anymore. It’s an insult to Gypsies.” My father is and was truly concerned about human rights.

My mom came out of the kitchen. “Well, Honey, it’s not like we live in Transylvania or something. There aren’t any Gypsies in the midwest.”

“Why?” I asked, disregarding my mother.

“It implies that Gypsies are dishonest people.”

My father was teaching me an important lesson.

“Why aren’t they honest?”

That night I got down on my knees and thanked Jesus for the day, begged the Lord to give me a toy gun with handcuffs if he thought it would be good for me, and asked to go to heaven if I died.

The next day I got the gun. Shortly thereafter it broke.

In the Chronicle Review, a publication of The Chronicle of Higher Education, there's a brief opinion editorial by Alan Contreras, the administrator of the Office of Degree Authorization of the Oregon Student Assistance Commission about concealed carry. Contreras, as do I, has a concealed carry permit issued by his county's sheriff. In his editorial Contreras admits that he carries while on the job.

"Some of the people at the colleges and universities I visit as part of my job probably don't know that I carry a gun on their campuses. Now they do," he writes.*

I applaud Contreras' honesty and integrity in making an open statement about his right to carry. At my college, my colleagues know I have a concealed carry permit, and I am clear about my willingness to abide by my schools "no weapons on campus" (except for ceramic coffee mugs) policy, but I haven’t made an open statement to the larger educational community. There is some risk in being open about one's permit. While statistically in my county fewer than one percent of concealed carry permit holders ever have a gun confiscated for misuse, many non-gun owners perceive us as more dangerous than those around us.** While we abide within the law, there are many courts in our society including the court of opinion.

To win in the court of opinion I believe we need to have an ongoing and broad societal discussion about morals and ethics - rights, values and responsibilities - as they relate to use of force and power. As Contreras writes, "there is certainly something macabre about the idea, shown graphically in a cartoon shortly after the Virginia Tech shootings, that we should just let the good guys and bad guys shoot it out. Yet it is even worse to pretend that the good guys and bad guys should be treated as morally equivalent."

*Read Contreras' editorial in the June 15, 2007 edition of The Chronicle Review page B2.

**http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=32260

What is the purpose of the right to bear arms? In my opinion it is an extension of the right to self-defense which itself is an extension, or remedy in extreme circumstances, of the right to life. I don’t think that a component of the right to bear arms has to do with the “coolness” of weapons or with flippantly relating sex and violence to one another in an advertisement.

I believe it is important to critique images that promote the use of weapons for harm and especially images that imply harm to those who are often the victim of such harm.

This week Hawthorne Cutlery ran an ad in the Willamette Week that says “Give Dad what he really wants for Father’s Day.” The image behind the text shows five knives covering the pubic region of a naked young woman’s lower body. The knives are pointing upward toward her belly, as though they are thrusting up through her pubic region.

The image itself would be extremely disturbing, but with the added text the collage becomes even more disturbing. The image metaphorically expresses an extremely violent sexual act, but by saying “Give dad what he really wants,” as though what he really wants is sex (implied by the naked woman and by the implication of the phrase itself), the ad implies molestation. The image might be interpreted: “Instead of giving your father sex, give him a new knife that will then be turned against you in violence.”

The woman in the picture is the person I would hope can get self-defense training (through firearms training or other means, should she be uncomfortable with firearms) so that should a weapon be used against her, such as the knives depicted in this ad, she could act quickly and decisively to protect her body, her psyche and her life.

I believe the commercial was designed by unskilled designers and that it likely doesn’t express the intentions of the shop owner. If you go to their website http://www.hawthornecutlery.com/ you can see that they don’t have any other similar aesthetics. Most of the aesthetics are in a Japanese theme, which is admittedly quite a misogynist culture, but Japanese motifs themselves do not necessarily carry discriminatory cultural practices. In America these designs most often represent the kind of calm that Zen Buddhism promises.

Often the arts use weapons to help develop a story. A character is forced out of his or her usual lifestyle by hoodlums who chase and try to kill the main character, but he or she ultimately prevails through prowess, mental agility, strength or chance. This use of weapons and violence is part of a kind of cathartic storytelling, but it is myth. It is not related to the use of actual tools and weapons in every-day life. A story closes at the end, so the reader or viewer puts down the book or walks out of the theater with closure. One thing that is disturbing about the ad is that I think the designer is trying to draw on the myth and storytelling tradition, but the call to action the ad makes is for viewers to buy these particular knives. Rather than offering closure it calls the viewer to enter the world of the violent story rather than showing that the particular knife is a well-crafted tool for use by ordinary people.

I do believe it is worth sending the shop owner an email to indicate that the designer that put together the image is being offensive rather than edgy.

Here's the ad:

(image linked from ID website)

When I first saw that Taser was coming out with a new model and one that didn't look "gunonic," to quote Parker Posey's character in The House of Yes, I knew it would make the rounds in the design magazines. There's an article (that I'll take issue with later) in ID magazine that you can actually read for free online.

Check it out then come back and post your critiques here!

http://www.idonline.com/features/feature.asp?id=1592

I wish you all a safe, restful and peaceful father's day.

My wife and I (we don't have any kids and we live far from our parents) are going out to the range to shoot her (relatively) new pistol. She's in the learning process. When she was deciding what to get, pearl pink grips were a priority. It's a cute gun and fun to shoot.

So, the other day I mentioned that the new Taser C2 is making the rounds, and I also mentioned that I have some critiques of the article.

First, the author points out that “Weapons systems need not be [pretty].” While this is true, if there is one thing that contemporary defensive systems must be, and something that a reviewer of industrial design should at least mention, they must be ergonomic. As someone who shot guns as a teenager in the 80’s but who took a long hiatus though my college years, the first thing that I noticed about new handguns when I started shooting again was how comfortable they were in my hand.

In 2002 when I first started shooting again, and when I started writing many of the short narrative essays I’ve posted on this website, I went to The Place to Shoot, an indoor pistol range in Portland, Oregon. The first gun I shot was the Sig p226, a 9mm handgun developed in Europe. The gun was infinitely more comfortable than other guns I had shot in the past. In fact, during the past ten or fifteen years, Europe has made the most innovative and most ergonomic guns on the market. Americans just caught up to the Europeans with the launch last year of the Smith and Wesson M&P pistol series, which to date is the most comfortable gun I’ve shot.

So, while they don’t have to be pretty, and I would say just as much design goes into making the business end of a handgun look fierce as car designers put into the face of a sportscar, they do have to be functional and comfortable for the user (including grip comfort and firearm overall weight).

“Pointability” is another issue that comes up when reviewers write about defensive use of handguns. If an attacker pops out of the bushes and whacks you over the head with a crowbar, you, a defensive handgunner or defensive Taser(er? – is Taserer a word?) has to draw your weapon quickly while seeing stars and effectively point it at your attacker before popping your popcorn. Most attacks (even with guns) happen in less than 10 feet from the victim of the attack, and most defenders have to shoot without being able to take aim, so pointability is a matter of life or death. (More on this later).

So, to review the Taser C2 as compared to a handgun (as the reviewer Mark Lamster does), we should look at a number of categories:

Weight - 7 oz for the new C2 as compared to 21.9 oz (unloaded) for the Smith and Wesson M&P compact in .40S&W caliber. In terms of lugability Taser definitely wins on this one, although if I’ve got to punch my attacker with the weapon should I miss I’d rather have a bit more heft.

Grip ergonomics– C2 invariably un-gunonic. It looks like the new Taser is pointed more like a remote control than a handgun. This might be very good for general defensive purposes in our society where only hippies and Quakers don’t know how to use a remote (and we all know they are just pretending for the purpose of being superior). Whether the grip is generally comfortable is undetermined as I haven’t used one. The Smith & Wesson has three grip inserts so that it is adaptable to small, medium and large hands. I’ve tried the medium and large grips and enjoy both, although right now I prefer the large.

Pointability – for me the Smith and Wesson points comfortably. The Taser C2 would take some getting used to, which might be a problem as each cartridge costs $25 bucks. I could shoot 80 target rounds with a pistol for each practice shot of a Taser C2. The question is, with such little practice, would a civilian (to whom the C2 is marketed) have what it takes to operate the Taser controls in a life or death struggle?

Human factors – industrial designers take into account a huge number of factors in assessing their target market’s willingness to adopt a new product. It’s my guess that they found their primary audience to be women, on the basis that in surveys they likely found that men are more likely to opt for a concealed carry permit and a firearm should they seek a self-defense tool. They probably also found that among women and the men that would opt for a Taser, that the gunlike shape of the early Taser designs is a negative in making a purchase decision about the product and that these buyers would opt for a variant on pepper spray, even though most sprays limit the target area to the face. The tools that this audience might be most likely to use could include cell phones, remotes, ipods and PDAs. This would set the design agenda for the team.

Lamster has an interesting discussion of the ethics of the aesthetics of the weapon at the end of his article, but my feeling is that this is a little misguided. He writes, “There's a rub, though: A friendly design that appeals to buyers may be too sexy to intimidate potential attackers. When it comes to deterrence, it's hard to beat that ugly pistol.”

When it comes to deterrence the fact that we have the legal right to carry defensive weapons is itself the deterrence. The idea is that criminals will assess the risk of potential harm to themselves and compare it to the potential gain from assailing a victim and decide. If the potential victim could be carrying a gun or Taser the stakes are rather higher than if the law doesn’t allow law abiding citizens to protect themselves. Studies, discussed in Samuel Walker's Sense and Nonsense about Crime and Drugs, have shown that criminals are not the most logical bunch. Often they are more likely to overestimate gain and underestimate risk, and many report that they never set out to commit a crime on the day they harmed someone. Deterrence, while it makes sense to law abiding citizens doesn’t have much impact on criminals.

When reading reviews of high-design mountain bikes I have never read a review that left out the mountain to focus solely on the bike. I’ve never read a review of a kayak that ignored white-water rapids. What interests me is that defensive tools are rarely discussed in relation to their environment: the realm of conflict.

Most attacks also happen in a matter of seconds, and they often happen when the victim is least expecting it. The attacker will look for someone who isn’t paying attention so that they can catch the person off guard. Should a victim need to draw a Taser or a gun for defense they will often need to draw and fire in fewer than three seconds. Rich Daniel at FFKG demonstrates the dynamics of an attack in his video Legitimate Training with Airsoft showing that an attacker can move from 20 feet away to beating a victim in three seconds or less.

In that amount of time aesthetic issues are aside. The question is, can the potential victim haul ass away from the attacker, then hit the attacker with the single shot available from a Taser C2?

Lamster also worries about the distance a Taser shot will travel. "That [using a laser sight to get the attention of an attacker] may work for law enforcement officers on shows like Cops, but the average citizen isn't prepared for confrontation. The C2's range extends only 15 feet. That's awfully close quarters. What happens if you miss?"

In confrontations, unless the attacker has a gun, if the attacker is 15 feet away you're going to have a lot of explaining to do as to why you zapped them. Unfortunately for the design world, you don't get to go zapping people because you don't like their shoes. Life and limb is the rule by which defensive actions are judged. If you aren't under threat of imminent harm, leave the tazer, or the gun for that matter, concealed where it belongs. Otherwise you become the offender.

I think it is great that design magazines are taking a look at the design of defensive tools, but I wish they would also look more closely at the dynamics of confrontation as they review the designs created to respond within the realm of physical conflict.

Check it out.

1988

Squeaks was a Police Explorer from the Dubuque troop. She and I met at the National Revolver Championships held at Camp Dodge, Iowa. Several Police Explorer troops from around the state had been invited to the military base on which the annual competition was held to help out with simple things - organize tables for events and tell people where to go.

Squeaks was cute in a rough and tumble sort of way. The apples of her cheeks were round and plump. She had a cute button nose and her hair was a tangled mess, like a fifteen-year-old Janis Joplin. I was about a year younger than her, thin and gangly, an unlikely pick when boys outnumbered girls fifteen to one in every troop. She had the largest roundest breasts of any girl I had held hands with up to that time.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We weren't invited to the army base for romance - no one ever is.

When we first got there we took a tour of the grounds. We dropped off our bags in one of the barracks where we would sleep, and then jumped back in officer Holmes' minivan and drove down to the ranges. We passed the rifle range with its targets laid out at 50 and 100-yard increments for at least 400 yards. The rat-tat-tat of someone shooting an m16 with three round bursts enthralled us and we pressed our faces to the window as we passed.

Beyond the rifle range were the pistol ranges, blocked out with shooting lines at 10, 15, and 25-yard distances. In all, two hundred or more people could shoot at one time on the base, which would be filled with officers shooting all morning and afternoon for two days. More than ten thousand rounds would be fired during the competition, some in un-timed competitions for accuracy and others timed, placing the pressure of speed against the zone of accuracy.

Officer Holmes pulled up behind a couple of other cars parked on the grass by the third range down. We got out of the car a little stiff from being crammed together so tightly for the past hour on the road. Holmes waved to a short round man with a blue ball cap and dark sunglasses who was chewing gum and smoking.

The man took the cigarette out of his mouth, and waved. Several Explorers were sitting under an overhang to keep out of the sun while a couple of others examined the dune heaped up behind the targets at the end of the range to see if they could dig out any old slugs.

"Hey, y'all. Come over here and meet post 865," the man with the cigarette hollered at the explorers down range.

The kids dusted off their hands and walked back to the shade.

"How's it going, Doug?" officer Holmes said, shaking his hand.

Doug was a Staff Sergeant and in charge of the Dubuque Explorer troop.

"Good, good. How the hell are ya,'" Doug replied, looking past Holmes distractedly.

We went around the group and exchanged names. Two girls stood out in contrast to the crowd of gangly boys. Heather had joined our troup a month before and had mostly proven herself as one of the guys. She was great at directing traffic and she could hold her own when the teasing came around her way. The other was Squeaks. No one remembered her name after the meeting, but we all remembered her laugh. She was a real girl also, with a flirtatious distance from the boys and her long hair pulled up on top of her head in a messy knot to meet the requirements; no hair was to hang below the collar. The nickname was as far as teasing would go for her.

After introductions the other troop headed back to the armory to set up tables and chairs for training seminars that would kick off the event. I, along with the rest of Troop 865, cased the pistol ranges for any trash that might have been overlooked by the staff, but there was little to find. Some of the guys started a football game that quickly devolved into a game of catch due to the heat. We waited for the event to start.

To be continued.

I just saw this posted on the gun blogs. Garden and Gun magazine, dedicated to the new South - sophisticated men and women who care about the environment, tradition, home, and skeet shooting http://gardenandgun.com. What an interesting demographic! My mother is from Birmingham, my uncle and his partner grow beautiful gardens around their Southern home, and I like shooting, so I'm interested. I've noticed that overall people today are less interested in postmodern critiques and are more interested in a contemporary vision of America that brings the comfort of tradition and community to modern ideas like diversity and acceptance. I'm interested to see what this magazine has to say.

This isn't gun related, but I think it's really interesting. There's a powerful discussion this week on Oprah about racism and the denigration of African American women, and men in American culture. Oprah says, "The Don Imus controversy opened the door and we're walking through it."

Before the commercial break there was a wonderful discussion of how we saw the humanity of the women Imus insulted and how rare it is for us to see African American humanity in popular media.

I want to see our culture move toward a culture where we truly see one another's humanity and one another's rights. We are still in a society where bias and delusion are the lenses through which people see one another.

There is an interesting article in the New York Times about the changes in crime trends, specifically noting acts of violence and shootings. They point to inner city issues: "'honorific culture' akin to that of the Wild West" and a "growing hip-hop culture that puts an emphasis on street credibility for respect."

The article points to trends away from incarceration which mean there are more parolees out on the street that may continue to engage in criminal activity.

As a democrat and a liberal I approve of reducing incarceration trends, but I think we also have a responsibility to introduce other viable cultures rather than the 'honorific culture of the street.' If we create more legislation and penalties around firearms we will reverse the trend of incarceration and punitive judicial culture. What if we start up those high school shooting clubs that once existed in California (see my previous post) to introduce students to gun safety, self-defense law, and a solid reliable option to hip-hop culture?

Check out the NY Times article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/22/us/22oakland.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th

The Pro-Gun Progressive has been observing and reporting drug crime in his Maryland neighborhood. As many of you know, Maryland does not have the liberal shall-issue policies we have in Oregon, so residents have to wait until there is a documented threat against their life in order to receive a license to carry at all times.

http://progunprogressive.com/?p=524

“When you become a cop do you think you will carry a revolver or a pistol?” I asked.

Matthew lowered the Hardy Boys book he was reading, “I’ve been thinking I want to be a private eye instead of a cop.”

We were spending the afternoon reading in Matthew’s parent’s living room. We would spend hours reading and discussing mystery books, trying to see which one of us could figure out the mystery the fastest.

“I think I want to carry a Colt .45,” he said.

My book was laying on the table in front of me. I lifted the cover and let it drop.

“But the recoil is too powerful to maintain control if you want to shoot fast, and you only get seven shots. A nine millimeter carries like, ten or fifteen rounds,” I said.

It was a muggy hot summer afternoon not worth doing anything besides reading in front of oscillating fan on the couch.

“I would just make sure I hit the target,” Matthew said. “We should go swimming.”

“I can’t. I have my paper route,” I said. “Do you want to sleep over tonight? We can get movies at the library.”

“Yeah. Let me ask my Mom.”

I may be able to start my first category on grapplingwithguns.com. A lot of what I've been addressing has to do with myth versus reality. This is a difficult area to address in relations to any designed object, much less firearms.

A couple of years ago I took a class at the Dharma Rain Zen center on Nagarjuna's The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. Nagarjuna walks through hundreds of things, identifying their "emptiness." In this case, emptiness means that, to paraphrase Thich Nhat Hanh, the thing is empty of "separate self." The thing is related and connected to all things. If we were to describe a revolver in Nagarjuna's terms we might ask, "What is a revolver?" We could describe its parts - it has a barrel, a frame, a grip, three or four screws, some springs, a hammer, a cylinder, an extractor, a thingy to stop the calendar so that the bullet is lined up with the barrel, a front and back sight, and, hopefully, a light coating of a high quality gun oil. If we have all of these things we may or may not have a gun. The parts could, as one architectural design student did, be formed into a sculpture in response to a design assignment. (Luckily the instructor didn't freak out when the girl turned in her project.) However, for legal purposes, we may as a society agree that if a person has all of these parts they do in fact have a gun. Imagine the happy felon arrested for illegally having a firearm arguing, "But your honor, it's not a gun, it's a pile of parts!"

Nagarjuna is making the point that in the universal sense, any object is nothing special - it is both it's universal sense (parts - minerals, metals, the heat and energy expended to create the form) and what we make of it in a conventional sense. A couch is a "couch" because we sit (or lounge) on it instead of use it for kindling in the fireplace. Universally a couch contains many kinds of potential, some good and some bad.

In many of my posts I've pointed out myths and delusions people use in their relationship with weapons, some of mine included. My posts about the Police Explorers show many of my youthful ideas about what policing is like, and I show my own fantasies giving way to realities. The comments made on advertising have pointed to how images can be slippery, implying harm through fantasy.

To me, this is where the discussion about guns gets interesting. People have heated up an ethical issue, but haven't dealt with it well in many instances. I'm looking forward to continued work with this area of the gun debate.

Oooh! Aaah! The Smith and Wesson M&P full-size in .40. (This one's not mine. Mine is the compact, and I'll post photos probably tomorrow.) Today I commented over at Will to Exist on an old post where he was asking for comparisons of the Springfield and Smith & Wesson M&P. Here's my $o.o2:

I have the Springfield service model (4 inch barrel) in 9mm and the M&P .40 compact (3.5 inch barrel and 10 rounds – 1 chambered 9 in the clip).

I love the M&P and I really really like the Springfield.

Where to start? How about starting in the guts. The rails are metal both front and back on the M&P whereas the back rails on the Springfield are polymer and part of the polymer frame. The tolerances on the M&P are much tighter, meaning that there is no extra movement to the slide. The Springfield will shift a little, changing the relationship of the barrel in the slide, if ever so slightly.

I'm accurate with both, but I feel more consistent with the M&P in .40 even though the barrel is shorter than the Springfield.

Personally, I've swapped out the medium size grip on the M&P frame for the large. The grip on the Springfield is a fixed size and feels a little small. I've got big hands and the larger grip extension on the M&P puts my trigger finger in a position that is perfectly aligned with the trigger and I'm less likely to pull any shot because of it.

Lastly, in terms of carry, the slide on the Springfield is larger than on most 9’s. You can see in the pictures over at Will to Exist that the height of the slide is greater on the Springfield. It’s got more weight than the slide on the M&P, so it’s a bit more nose heavy. The M&P sits nicely in the hand whether you’ve got a tight or loose grip on the gun.

The extractors are different. The Springfield has an internal extractor, making it more of a hassle to clean the slide when you’ve shot a lot. Carbon gets all over in the crevices. The M&P is a bit easier to scrub down after giving it a good workout.

I trust both for personal carry. I’ve had very few jams with the Springfield (thousands of rounds) and none (out of hundreds of rounds) with the M&P.

A gun blog friend, simonov over at guntards.net posted a clip of Paula Zahn talking about the statistics showing that pregnant women who are killed are often killed by guns. A lot of gun bloggers out there have been ripping into Paula, saying she’s using bad logic and blaming guns. My friend got into the debate as well and wrote:

"Now, aside from the preposterous notion that pregnant women are at particularly high risk for being crime victims,"

In a response on his forum I have to disagree on this one a little. In my studies of criminology I've found that women are more likely to be abused and murdered when they are pregnant. Apparently there are a lot of guys out there who like the extra push-ups part of the relationship, but are none to happy to find their spouse or girlfriend is going to bring forth a screaming little brat.

"Women are much more likely than men to be killed by an intimate partner. In 2000, intimate partner homicides accounted for 33.5 percent of the murders of women and less than four percent of the murders of men." Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, 1993-2001, February 2003

Also, most violent crime happens between people who know one another.

If you visit Guntards and watch the clip you’ll notice the criminal profiler, Pat Brown, moves away from guns and talks about the patterns of psychopaths. She says that psychopaths are drawn to weapons – gun collections or knife collections, and that it is an expression of their desire for power and control. If they lose control of someone in their life such as a spouse or partner, they may act in violence and use the tools they’ve been drawn to. I would point out, and I think that she would also, that there is not an inverse relationship. We can't count the guns in your closet to determine if you are a psycho. If we could we would just make guns legal for everyone and go from door to door with a calculator.

The question is, does this say anything about guns? I think it does. I think it means that we need to have more programs to teach women how to defend themselves with firearms against attackers they might know. What about a prenatal defense fund that could sponsor women in how to shoot and that could offset the cost of a reliable handgun - say a Smith and Wesson M&P?

Siminov responded in the thread and asked, “If pregnant women really are at more risk, then what kind of men should they really avoid? Obviously guns can't be an indicator since the really dangerous men out there are already felons who are unable to legally possess them. Is there any indication in the statistics as to how many of these men who prey on pregnant women already have violent crime records?”

Like the profiler Pat Brown says in the interview, it is the obsessive control behaviors that women need to look out for in men. If a man is a true psychopath they may be very good at dissembling and present themselves as fun, friendly, gentle, and protective. My guess is that these behaviors flip once the person perceives that there has been an emotional investment made by their partner.

I would recommend to Paula and our readers take a different approach. The Police Explorer study guides downloadable at http://www.learning-for-life.org/exploring/lawenforcement/ call firearms “the great equalizer.” As my readers know, I was in the police explorers as a young teen, and these were the kinds of materials we learned. (Back then you couldn’t download the information, as there was no internet, but the group leaders gave us presentations on such information.)

The fact that such abuse happens means that we need to maintain strong social services, and this again is where a liberal argument comes into the debate. There need to be well-funded police departments, there need to be counseling services and battered women’s services, we need strong communities and families so that women know there are resources that can help them get out of bad relationships.

For me, one purpose of maintaining the right to bear arms is that those who are weaker need effective tools to defend themselves. Pepper spray doesn’t cut it. A single shot Taser with cartridges that cost $25 each (what kind of reasonable practice can you get with that) doesn’t cut it.

What I like about the interview is that Paula brings up guns as the “shock factor” for her show, but Pat Brown makes it clear that it is behavior that is the important thing. People who have control issues, who are manipulative and power obsessed will cause harm, regardless of what tools are available. What we need to do is to help train women to protect themselves.

Let's all email Paula and invite her to the range.

This is a photo by Oleg Folk. Check out his website at http://olegvolk.net/gallery/technology/arms/?g2_page=4

When I joined the Ames Police Explorers in eighth grade I had several reasons. First, after my parent’s divorced my mother wanted me to have strong male role models. This meant the Boy Scouts where the play of Cub Scouts turned to discipline and discipline turned to manhood.
I hated the repetition and mental bluntness of the Boy Scouts. Nationalistically reciting the pledge of allegiance, standing in neat rows and saluting, sitting through boring meetings in the stagnant air of the Kiwanis’s club and working for merit badges alone with no father to guide, only increased my awareness of the separation the activities were supposed to fix.

The Police Explorers were different. Here was an opportunity, I thought, to really help people. I could learn to be a stabilizing force in an unstable world. I could walk the line between the good guys and the bad guys, and not only that, but I could do it with a gun at my side, itself a symbol of security and enforcement to those who didn’t have the flaw of criminality tainting their person.

It was an easy solution in my mind, and it gave me an out with my mother. I could quit the Boy Scouts.

Last night a Portland man, Leroy Hudson, shot an intruder who was in the process of breaking into his home. The intruder was unarmed, but when confronted by the homeowner, the intruder moved toward him. The homeowner shot the intruder in the head. The intruder is now at a local hospital.

Oregon law only allows personal defense to protect life and limb. It will be interesting to watch this case to see if prosecutors pursue it.

The intruder is known to police, according to Koin news, and has a previous arrest record.

Read the story at Koin and at Oregon Live.

Just yesterday I saw Katu running a story at 4:30 on the laws about defense with a firearm in the home. I missed the report, but I wonder if they will recap it today.

I thought I'd post a link to some useful defensive training. Rich Daniel over at FFKG has three DVDs out that detail his live fire/airsoft training approach. He has people practice drill-based exercises on a live fire range has them practice simulations against live attackers using airsoft. Everything is at contact distance in the airsoft exercises, and the emphasis is placed on footwork, using punches, strikes and grappling where needed, and getting distance from your attacker so that your firearm can actually be an effective tool to end the fight.

Yes, I have to admit he's a friend of mine - I started going to their rental range, The Place to Shoot in 2002, but I've watched the videos and done the exercises, and I'm willing to bet my life on them. Now, if only I can convince him to give me THOUSANDS of dollars worth of free training I might be on par with all the other gun bloggers out there :)