Sunday, January 30, 2005

 

Yes, it works.

For those who continue to insist that the value of armed private citizens is a foolish fiction and that increasing the number of police officers is the only reasonable response to crime , here is an answer, admittedly episodic and anecdotal but starkly persuasive nonetheless.

 

Bureaucracy-0, common sense-1

Clayton Cramer has a good story about the victory of common sense in the Country of Hall Monitors. Sometimes you just need to know when to talk and when to shut up.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

 

Firearms and Gunsite page

How have I missed this page? Lots of Gunsite related information and general firearms-related stuff. By all means take a look around but you might start here and here.

 

Oops!

Note: Need to keep a bridle on this academic enquiry thing. President Lawrence Summers of Harvard said he was trying to provoke enquiry but ended up horrifying some folks to the point of hyperventilation this week by suggesting that there might be something beyond the plumbing differentiating men and women. He knows better now. He might want to slip off campus to a secure location and read this and this. On second thought, maybe he'd better just lay low for a while. That reading stuff can get you in a heap of trouble.

 

A tragic study

The brutish murder of a young actress and playwright this week lends emphasis to our recent post on the subject of awareness and personal safety. Clayton Cramer noticed that the dramatic work of the victim emphasized the dark side of human nature. The incident demonstrates tellingly that just because you are not interested in trouble does not mean that trouble will not take an interest in you. The victims were just that--victims. They did not seek out a confrontation or provoke the attack in any way. From all indications they were as innocent as any of us, going about their own business in a peaceable way. Nothing in this post will suggest in any way that they contributed to the crime or are in any way to blame for what was done. However, as we have pointed out before, safety is proactive. The best safety program is one that avoids danger, rather than one that concentrates on how to deal with dangerous things. I think I remember a firearms instructor from Gunsite saying that the best way to win a fight is not to be there when it starts.
The victims did one thing right. They were traveling in a group. Two couples are certainly less vulnerable than a single person or a loner. A group of five young men out at the wee hours, though, should have sent up a flare of alarm. It is not probable they were on their way to a deacon's meeting. They were probably not dressed for church. Had the victims noticed the possible hazard, they might have slipped into another business or tarried with a larger crowd. We will never know.
One thing is certain. In New York City, the perpetrators were pretty sure that the victims had no means of self-defense. Standing defenseless before the criminals, the only reasonable thing to do was to give up what was demanded without resistance. As it turned out, even a verbal challenge was too much. In the last analysis, the victims may just have been severely unaware of the danger of the man that Walt Rauch, the firearms trainer, calls otherhuman, to indicate the profound difference between him and the people most of us live with. He is inured to pain and utterly focused on his own desires. He is untouched by the suffering brought on others by his behavior. He is as unfeeling as an anaconda eating a rabbit. The rabbit is just another piece of food. In Rauch's own words
The hardest thing to teach some people is often that there are real predators out there in human's clothing. Predators that make a wolverine seem pleasant and harmless. They hurt people because you have things they want, and sometimes just because they like the look in your eyes when you beg or scream. Go visit a prison, and look at the folks "running" the cell blocks. They tend to spend their time pumping iron, practicing methods of attack, and generally studying for their next field trip. Some will be paroled next week. Before they are caught again, they will likely prey on many, many people.

These kinds of attacks can and do happen anywhere and to anyone. It does appear that there are fewer such incidents where the victims can bite back. Look again at the prior post and the articles linked. Terry Givens in the article quoted summarizes the issues this way
If you should find yourself faced with a life-threatening attack by a criminal, as a typical normal person, you will be faced by three enormous difficulties. They are:
1. Recognizing the presence of the predator in time;
2. Realizing, internalizing, and accepting that THAT MAN, RIGHT THERE, is about to kill you for reasons you do not understand; if you don't stop him; and
3. Overcoming your reluctance to do lethal violence against a fellow human being.

Much as I hate to admit it, some good has come out of reality TV shows like COPS, Jerry Springer and the courtroom shows like Judge Judy and Judge Joe Brown. Most of Middle America sees these shows and says, "Where do they GET these people? How do they FIND them? I don't know anybody like that." Incidents like this senseless murder tell us that there are lots of folks like that---and worse. You don't want to find them, and they may find you.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

 

A slow news day gone awry

WOWK TV this afternoon I think broke new ground for broadcast news. You have perhaps heard people say that you don't hear about the planes that don't crash. You do hear about the ones that do. Well, it appears that that principle no longer holds. From a little before 4 pm until about 4:30, A team of local broadcast specialists preempted regularly scheduled network programming to watch a plane crash not happen. The facts were explained early. A small national guard plane was circling a small airport in Harrison County, WV because its landing gear did not lower. It had landing gear in the rear but not the front of the aircraft. The plan was to circle the airport until fuel was low and then try a belly landing. Landing with low fuel would reduce the possibility of a fire. So there they were for half an hour repeating the details, repeating what they had been told in the last fifteen minutes about landing airplanes, crashes, and the various approaches the pilot might take. They didn't know any more about it than I do and I don't know anything about it. At about 4:30, the pilot landed the plane on its belly without much fanfare. It was tense but it had been done before. I do know that pilots train specifically and definitely for those times when things go wrong. It was not the first time the pilot had heard that these things happen. It was not the first time he thought about what to do. They executed the plan and the plan worked. Both people in the plane walked away. The plane will be repaired and fly again. There were emergency, fire and medical people faithfully standing by to do their jobs if needed, but not much was required. All in all, broadcasting this event was an exercise in fecklessness inconveniencing viewers to no purpose. They told us what hadn't happened yet. When it didn't happen, they told us nothing happened.

What would we do without them?

Of course we are delighted and relieved that no harm was done and no life or limb lost. Thanks to good training and cool-headed people an emergency was handled without catastrophe. The whole experience, however, highlights how some journalists for some reason think they must mediate EVERYTHING to the public--even what does not happen. Are we going to watch icy roads on TV now to see the possible collisions not happening in bad weather? How about having the news crew hang out at the local bars to catch the Saturday night fights that don't break out for film at 11? Are we now watching tv so we can know what didn't happen today? I would suggest remembering the well-known words of Charles Anderson Dana in the New York Sun in 1882
When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news.
Every day, lots of really bad things do not happen, and a lot of very ordinary misfortunes do happen. Dogs bite men. Everyday heros prevent accidents and avert tragedy as a matter of course every day. News on the contrary is the out-of-the-ordinary. News is the unusual. Look for it and report it. If you don't see any news, why not play cards or watch a movie? I don't want to know what didn't happen today.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

 

Safety

Recent crimes like the Walmart kidnapping and others highlight the hazards of crime and the peril of failing to be aware of the hazards of our surroundings. The crime is also notable because it happened in the workplace. Megan Holden was going to her car after work just like millions of us every day. The incident was recorded by cameras and a security guard talked to the kidnapper before the crime. Yet, all this security paraphernalia did not prevent the crime. Tyler, Texas is not Chicago or Philadelphia or Los Angeles. It's not rural, either, being a city just a bit larger than Huntington, WV. I visited Tyler in the 70's and remember a beautifully kept friendly city with the nickname, "The Rose Capitol of America". Whatever the source of the problem is, it wasn't the profound urban blight of a place like, say, Cleveland. Paradoxically, human nature with all its glory and misery is everywhere. You don't have to go to big cities to find criminal behavior. As a matter of fact, you may not have to look for it at all. It may find you. It found Megan Holden. How to respond appropriately in daily life without paranoia is the question. Here is an article about how one person dealt with the issue. Here is another, and another.

The best system for understanding personal awareness issues is the color code taught by Jeff Cooper. Another article explains the issues more completely this way:
By learning to observe your environment, constantly evaluate it, and react appropriately to what you see, you can achieve a large degree of control over your fate. This requires you to learn to shift up and down a scale of readiness, just like shifting gears in a car, so that you can match your level of awareness/readiness with the current requirements of your situation. In a car, you shift gears based on the grade encountered or the speed desired. On the street, you must learn to "shift gears" mentally, to match the threat level encountered. There is a sliding scale of readiness, going from a state of being oblivious and unprepared to a condition of being ready to instantly do lethal violence if forced. One cannot live stuck at either end of this spectrum.
Specifically, the system allows us to move up and down in alertness states as our environment changes. We respond appropriately whatever our conditions.
If you try to live at the bottom of the scale, you will fall victim to an accident or to a criminal, eventually. It's just a matter of "when", not "if". On the other hand, you can't go through your daily routine with your hand hovering over your holstered pistol, ready to shoot if anything moves! What you must learn to do is escalate and de-escalate up and down this scale as the circumstances around you dictate. This is an easily learned system, and one that will help you be in the right frame of mind to deal with any conflict you encounter.


The women who told their experiences in the articles above saw their exposure to harm and determined to take control of their own security. They conquered ignorance by taking notice of hazards and conquered fear by taking responsible measures to ensure their own safety. The methods in the articles can keep us all safe without turning our lives into fearful exercises in paranoia. In fact, life can be more interesting when we notice more of what is happening about us.

Friday, January 21, 2005

 

Good for her

This is a good account of the experience of a young woman investigating the benefits of firearms. As she should have, she sought training, and studied the subject before proceeding. It is good for those who might teach one new to shooting to understand what a shock it can be for all that noise, flash and smoke to happen on the end of your own arm. It is a barrel of fun later on but at first it can be pretty rattling.
It was as if a bomb went off in my face. A flicker of flame burst from the barrel, followed by a curlicue of smoke and a whiff of gunpowder.

Firing a gun is portrayed on TV and in movies as a fluid and natural action, something that can easily be done with one hand and while running, driving or jumping out of a burning building.

For me it was violent and jarring. The recoil made me worry that the gun was going to jump out of my hands.

It is also of interest that she took the first step even before she knew it. The first step was deciding that her safety was her own job and not to be delegated or evaded. Once that step was taken, the rest was easy to figure out. She has a ways to go but has things under control without a doubt.
The class made it clearer than ever: Owning a gun is a huge responsibility. Not only do you have to know the law inside and out, not only do you have the cost of the gun itself and firing range time to keep skills current, but you have to keep close tabs on a firearm at all times.

Saturday, January 15, 2005

 

More religious humor

Some more religious humor from the Unitarian Universalists.

 

Evolution

One of the perennial issues of the Christian understanding of the world and science is the creation-evolution debate. Little progress can be expected as long as the discussion proceeds along the lines of the Scopes Trial. From my experience with religious people, most of them seem to accept both the elements of a scientific world view and divine creation without too much effort to harmonize the two poles. If this is compartmentalization it seems to work for a lot of people. Maybe they accept the Biblical account as myth without saying the word out loud, which annoys some of the clerics. This could work too on a practical level. In any event, sensible analysis is not as plentiful as it might be and Clayton Cramer offers a thoughtful contribution to the discussion here.

 

Krauthammer on Rathergate

I am as surprised as anyone to see Charles Krauthammer quoted on this blog, mostly because of his gun control views, although he has shown the restraint of common sense on occasion. He does give an interesting analysis of the Dan Rather memo affair. The Handle Institute is fair and balanced, pointing out good sense wherever and from whomever it appears. He is particularly of interest because if he is a partisan, it is probably for the Democrats albeit the conservative ones. (He wrote speeches for Walter Mondale.) What I think strikes me as positive about Mr. Krauthammer is that he appears to have an almost chivalrous sense of fairness and justice in, of all things, politics. In other words, he seems to think that even in political discourse one should speak the truth.
Then comes the coverup: 12 days of CBS stonewalling, with Dan Rather using his evening news platform to (a) call his critics "partisan political operatives," (b) claim falsely that the documents were authenticated by experts, and (c) claim that he had "solid sources," which turned out to be a rabid anti-Bush partisan with a history of, shall we say, prolific storytelling.

Now comes the twist: The independent investigation — clueless, uncomprehending and in its own innocent way disgraceful — pretends that this fiasco was in no way politically motivated.

Then he investigates the plausibility of the claim.
Did Mapes and Rather devote a fraction of the resources they gave this story to a real scandal, such as the oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations, or contrary partisan political charges, such as those brought by the Swift boat vets against John Kerry? On the United Nations, no interest. On Kerry, what CBS did do was ad hominem investigative stories on the Swift boat veterans themselves, rather than an examination of the charges. Do you perceive a direction to these inclinations?
Furthermore, Krauthammer points out that the motivation may not be simple partisanship or a desire to cheat by disguising partisanship as unbiased reporting, showing the wisdom of the old principle of not attributing malice where incompetence will explain the behavior.
I do not attribute this to bad faith. I attribute it to (as Marx would say) false consciousness — contracted by living in the liberal media cocoons of New York, Washington and Los Angeles, in which any other worldview is simply and truly inconceivable. This myopia was most perfectly captured by Pauline Kael's famous remark after Nixon's 1972 landslide: "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don't know anybody who voted for him."

The rest of the article has some statistical information about media bias some people may find interesting. Whatever the motivation, Jefferson's words hold true, "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to tolerate it." Blogs are probably more reliable than mainstream media not because the bloggers are more virtuous but because they are all free to speak and garbage can be pointed out as garbage.

 

Where does it end? It doesn't.

In the never-ending drive to enforce standards of prudence and propriety the North Korean government is giving attention to that intolerable rebellion, personal untidiness.
The series is entitled Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.

While the campaign has been carried out primarily on television, reports have appeared in North Korean press and radio, urging tidy hairstyles and proper attire.

By all means. Do tell me again how the pleasant sunshine of socialism has delivered us from the repressively enforced religious and cultural standards of the former decadent regime. There is a clue in the article about the provenance of the program.
It is the strongest media campaign against men's sloppy appearances mounted in the reclusive and impoverished Communist state in recent years.

If we can't have enough to eat or decent housing, at least we can be well-groomed. It has to be easier to cut hair than to revive a failed economy.
Hair is a "very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state", argues Minju Choson, a government daily.

"No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one's personality will be downgraded."


Oh great. Now a haircut and a spiffy pair of shoes will raise the mental and moral state of the country and give you a better personality too.
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.

"People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says.


I wonder how long it will take socialists in the U. S. to take up the banner of good grooming.

 

Give yourself a break!

I always knew this was true. At least one study now says
that high-energy activities, such as pounding the treadmill at the gym, accelerates the ageing process and makes the body more susceptible to illness.

"A more relaxed way of life is important for your health," said Dr Axt-Gadermann. "If you lead a stressful life and exercise excessively, your body produces hormones which lead to high blood pressure and can damage your heart and arteries."

Somebody should have said this a long time ago. Why should we have to feel guilty for not exercising more when what a lot of people really need is a break.
Dr Axt and his daughter advise readers that gentle walking, their own preferred form of exercise, is sufficient to keep people in shape if combined with a sensible diet that is low in carbohydrates and high in protein.

"We try to put our own ideas into practice but this does not mean that we do nothing all day," said Dr Axt-Gadermann. "Laziness should not be to the extreme and work is an important part of life, but recreation and relaxation should not be underestimated."

I could have told them that.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

 

Religious humor

Parody for the religious. Other handy stuff on the blog too.

 

Caught in passing

Here are a couple of blogs I am going to watch. I haven't had time to read a lot but these may be worth some attention in the future.
First, there is Le Sabot Post-Moderne, a Christian blog, or clog from Kiev. There are a lot of links to other Christian blogs and sources for home-schooling and education in general. There is a nice photoblog from Ukraine here and a theological quote with a quote from Spurgeon here. I was drawn to the site chasing a reference to C. S. Lewis and his essay, The Necessity of Chivalry, which is apparently very much used by some in the education of boys. The link is here and worth reading not only for the reference to Lewis but also for a nice picture of Degas' The Little Dancer. Well, maybe I spent more time in passing than I thought!
The other is linked on the aforementioned. It is Calvinist Libertarians, which is of interest more for its mere existence than anything else. I didn't know there were such critters. Good for them! They also appear to have many links to religious and libertarian sources. Anybody who links to Samizdata must have something worthwhile to say.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

 

Silence is less often regretted than speech.

Vigorous debate and the free exchange of ideas is of the essence of the American system. All of us should remember before we speak to examine our thoughts and motives and the effect of our words on everyone in the room. Perhaps we are saying that words are arrows impossible to recall and we need to think twice before sending them on their way. Some folks can't distinguish courage and boldness from callousness and meanness. An illustration here.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

 

Some things never change.

It is, alas, a continuing problem.

Monday, January 03, 2005

 

A real merry Christmas!

Some people really got a Santa visit. See here both the nice Christmas present received by somebody introduced to the pleasure of shooting and the picture of the WWII Ranger (the blogger's grandfather) with a folding-stock M1 carbine and what appears to be a Randall knife. The knife may be a Model 1, but I am not any kind of authority. She discovered one of the intangible pleasures of owning firearms, the connection with history one feels when holding an historic firearm. Maybe it's not all that intangible, because what happens is that you can hold and shoot the same firearm as the historic persons you are interested in. The Colt Peacemaker takes you back to the streets of Tombstone. The M1 Garand to D-Day. The Mosin-Nagant to the siege of Stalingrad. The side-by-side shotgun can put you on the seat of a stagecoach for a moment and give you a connection to the past more than you can get from reading and photos alone.
Details of the New-Year's Day shoot are here.

Saturday, January 01, 2005

 

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Those familiar with the literature on the natural right of self-defense and resistance to tyranny often see the quote:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Chapter 1 "Arrest")

TSO points us to an interview with Mr. Solzhenitsyn where he discusses the role of religious faith in modern culture. I found his view of Calvinism interesting.
Calvinism says that nothing depends on man, that faith is already predetermined. Also in its sharp protest against Catholicism, Protestantism rushed to discard together with ritual all the mysterious, the mythical and mystical aspects of the Faith. In that sense it has impoverished religion.

It would appear that one of the shortcomings of Protestantism in general is the atmosphere suggesting that all things can be completely and clearly explained from where we stand. Understanding myth and mystery gives us humility because they take for granted that we are powerless to explain finally the most important realities of life.
On the subject of change to reach the current culture, a professor in my past said, "We must look for norms within forms." In other word we must see more than what our forebears did, we must accurately perceive why they did what they did. Hence the quote:
A return to the forms of religion which perhaps existed a couple of centuries ago is absolutely impossible. On the contrary, in order to combat modern materialistic mores, as religion must, to fight nihilism and egotism, religion must also develop, must be flexible in its forms, and it must have a correlation with the cultural forms of the epoch. Religion always remains higher than everyday life. In order to make the elevation towards religion easier for people, religion must be able to alter its forms in relation to the consciousness of modern man.




 

Denny Crane

I can't help it. I like Boston Legal. I don't watch much tv at all but I try not to miss that one. This writer doesn't like the show, but he's a lawyer. He seems think the show will ruin the reputation of lawyers. He's too late. Perhaps he should remind himself that tv is entertainment not propaganda. It doesn't hurt a bit to have some romantic interest among attractive men and women. It doesn't hurt to have some psychos and sickos like they had on The Practice but leave out the lawyers taking themselves so, so seriously. It's even good to hear William Shatner singing somewhere beside the 100 Worst Albums of the 80's. We have been watching Law and Order too long, seeing criminal after criminal released on technicality after technicality. Truth and justice take a whipping daily on a whole family of crime and court programs. On Boston Legal we get to see justice served when Alan Shore outslimes the slime and wins the day for the good guy. There is nothing so hidden from some people as a tongue in a cheek. For others it just makes the gag that much better.
For tv as propaganda, see The West Wing, the left's vision of the mythical wise and good leader steering the ship of state for the peoples's own good. for tv as entertainment, I like Boston Legal. I can't help it.

 

Hope from the government?

If you ever wondered what would make a person turn their back on the whole idea, a gripping explanation is here.

 

Happy New Year!

We are not big drinkers here at the Handle Institute but this sounds good! British readers, please disregard.

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