Everyone here is very nice.
Except, apparently, people in Charlotte are so accustomed to going about armed, that they need to be asked to leave their weapons outside of the convention center. I wonder who among these nice computer security conference attendees would be packing a 9mm or perhaps something larger, so they could kill me if they wanted to. How comforting.
As a speaker, I think I should be allowed to wear a wakizashi, at least. It’s mean to make me defenseless when I am in a city full of people who are apparently prepared to do me violence at any moment.
I’m really defenseless. I don’t even have a tactical fiberglass and polymer knife that can go through X-ray machines. (By the way, the tactical knife I ordered did arrive. As did the vintage 1980s Ginsu knife set. Eventually I will build a cutting stand and do some comparison cutting between those two examples of pure tactical yumminess. Oh, wait – I’m not defenseless: I have a great attorney!
Insert joke about smoking guns.
Down south here we make jokes about people who bring a wakizashi to a gun fight.
At their funerals, even.
That sign is a testament to weakness and insecurity. IMHO most of the people who feel a “need” to be armed are simply insecure and/or lack the imagination to understand both the reality and options available.
Standard logic is: ‘He has a gun. I need a gun’. Overlooking the reality that not only does he have a gun, but the gun is out, loaded, locked and he has mind and body keyed up and ready to commit murder. You, on the other hand, have your gun in your waistband holster, under your jacket, chamber empty, safety on, and your mindset is slowly shifting from worrying about a possible case of the squirts coming up, that bloated feeling, that iffy burrito you ate for lunch to something between screaming terror, a morbid fear of dying, and the felt need to DO something. A felt need that can get you into trouble.
Odds are that if someone starts shooting and you evacuate the area you live. If you fumble for your gun and any shooter, or armed citizen, or cop, sees you you likely get shot. No, this is not how it goes in the movies, In the movies the hero has a supernatural understanding of which person is the evil one. All the ‘good’ guys know who the good guys are. The shooter is handily distracted at just the right time for the hero to get his gun out and he smoothly and nearly instantaneously shifts his mindset from contemplating an overripe banana to complete tactical awareness and a keen readiness to use lethal force in a measured and circumspect manner. Life doesn’t work that way.
The material preparedness aspect is easy. Anyone can buy a gun, a knife, a kit, whatever. These are security blankets. They make a person feel in control. The danger is that you feel in control in a situation when you are not. Not because you aren’t packing heat. but rather you are not mentally and physically prepared. You also don’t know what is going on. You are working in the dark.
Professionals train for this sort of situation all their lives and, yet, more often that not, in the critical instant it doesn’t work simply because practicing close-quarter-battle at a range has a couple of hours of lead time where you get your head screwed on right and your body at that perfect place where you are keyed up but still loose. In real life it is going to go down so fast that you mostly won’t be mentally or physically ready. Sure, you can adopt the popular attitude of “being prepared to kill everyone around you”. Which, by definition, makes you a sociopath. But, in reality, even this is a put-on. It is like standing on one foot. You can do it for a time but eventually you are going to go back to using both feet. Easy enough to say to yourself that you are prepared, even when you are not. In my limited experience people who say they always ready, aren’t. When tested without warning they are no more mentally prepared than anyone else. Looking sharp and prepared is, for most, just a well practiced rigid posture that keeps them mentally and physically tired, if not exhausted.
The best way to deal with most situations, even if you are armed, is to leave a quickly as possible. Walk quickly and calmly away from any problem. If someone shoots at you they will have to hit a moving target. Most people with guns are poor shots when under pressure. Worse when the targets are moving.
One thing that always helps is to know where all the exits are. Walking into a convention center spend a minute or two finding all the exits. Yes, this is boring. Safety is boring. Being safe is an endless tale of dramatic events that don’t happen. Things went south and you quickly left and were one of the first out simply because you knew where the exits are. You miss out on a story you can tell to the grand kids. But you also didn’t get shot and don’t have the hospital bills or funeral expenses.
If and when leaving doesn’t work out and you are trapped keep your mind straight and as calm as you can. You are not defenseless. You don’t need to be a kung-fu expert to manage. A punch in the nose is what most worried Bruce Lee. He knew a square hit would make him nearly helpless for a bit. Boxing disguises this fact by limiting where and when you can hit and making sure a stunned boxer can easily and reflexively protect legal targets with their arms. MMA disguises this by outlawing powerful, and possibly lethal, moves like certain uses of elbows.
I don’t want to bag on boxing or martial arts training, or shooting for fun or food, but while these are fun hobbies with real benefits they are not holy activities that are really widely useful in most emergency situation. The best trained and equipped pistol shooter in the world is largely helpless in a tight crowd. Or when the bad guy is hundreds of meters away and up on a building.
None of us are helpless. I used to demonstrate field expedient weapons. A couple of bars of soap, a few of handfuls of gravel, cans of soda, or a pool ball in a doubled sock are all potentially lethal. Any decent whack to the head gives you time to run. A stick pen held between the fingers and padded with a handkerchief is a very capable punch dagger. The old style Bic stick can reliably punch through half-inch plywood. If it comes down fighting for your life go all-in. Odds are you get only one chance. This is not the time to hesitate or half-assed moves.
The good news is that most attackers are not great shots, tactical geniuses, trained assassins, or very physically tough.
There is simply no need for people to carry most weapons. Stay aware. Know where the exits are. Leave when things go south. Stay calm. Use all the resources. Innovate. If you need to fight go all-in. Odds are that you will never need any of this. But knowing this may calm the mind enough that there is no need to waste a lot of money, time, or effort on fancy fighting techniques or guns to feel confident and relatively safe.
That door must be a blatant violation of the second amendment (and possibly free speech). Does the convention centre get sued a lot? Or maybe shot at and firebombed by patriots defending the constitution? At the very least the NRA must boycott them.
Re: Lorn (#3):
Possibly unfairly so but this assumption seems unreasonably optimistic. The twit who actually believes they need a gun for self-defence has probably thought this exact scenario through. Every so often the rest of us get to read about people like this, and how they decided they can handle chambered rounds or don’t need the safety catch.* They’re the good guy with a gun, they know what they’re doing and … oh %/§!*$ call an ambulance!
*In review I may have been unreasonably optimistic by assuming that people with guns know the basic safety precautions in the first place.
Heinlein: “An armed society is a polite society.”
(heh)
komarov at #4:
You are right but figured it might be covered under the ‘have a plan to kill everyone’ section. It isn’t a sustainable pose to adopt. Ready to go all the time is tiring and tough on everyone around you. Few people are comfortable with people looking at them that way.
And yes, you are right. A whole lot of people assume perfectly predictable ‘accidents’ are always the other guy. A friend used to say that he had guns for forty years and never had an accident. Then he blew a whole in the kitchen wall with a shotgun. Missed his wife by less than a foot. She told him it was divorce or all the guns had to get out of the house. He moved them all out into the workshop.
Now when he talks about accidents only happen to careless people people point out how he damn near killed his own wife through stupidity. He gets real sheepish. “When are you guys going to let it go?” My answer is “never”.
John Morales at #5:
A lot of people assume that everyone armed would make for a polite society. In my experience it is just the opposite. I had a friend get a concealed carry permit so he was always packing heat. The gun changed everything. He was far more aggressive and rude. Even drove his truck more aggressively. He was always calm behind the wheel but packing he turned into an ass. Got a ticket for “aggressive driving” for a bit more than $500.
Some people can carry and essentially forget they have the damn things. Others, IMHO it is mostly people with unresolved resentments, turn into monsters.
lorn, relax. I know it’s bullshit. An armed society is a worried society.
(Basically, I reckon that Marcus was already making that joke, given the juxtaposition)
I realize that some of this is joking. But I also realize that there are people dying because they live in an imaginary world where the answer to injustice, and rudeness, pretty much all ills, is more guns. Where people think themselves wise and informed thinking this and entire communities where it is accepted that one of the main problems is that not everyone is armed.
Within this same community it is taken as fact that negligence is always someone else. They don’t understand that if you have enough guns available to enough people something bad will happen.
Some within that community set up alerts for any forum traffic that uses key words related to guns. Most of the people on this forum seem open minded and unlikely to worship guns or deeply desire a heroic role involving shooting people. You good folk are not the primary audience. I know it is a Sisyphean task to hope the gun nuts will get it this time. I have had a couple of people IM me about how my piece resonated when others didn’t. Baby steps. But direct language, as boring and joyless as it may be to the smart people here, is one of the few ways to get through. Preppers and survivalists really take themselves seriously so jokes turn them off. If you want to reach them talk practical options. I don’t really take myself that seriously, I tend toward dark humor and sarcasm, but the body count is rising every year. It really bothers me that we can’t even talk about guns in a serious way. I have to try. Sorry if I ruin the fun.
It doesn’t help that all the good progress made in 80 years is being rolled back by people who hold high moral lepers, grifters, and charlatans. Or that recovering won’t likely happen in my lifetime. Or that in the mean time millions will needlessly suffer to keep a handful of billionaires happy. I maintain a straight face to keep from screaming. I am not a happy camper.
Sorry, lorn. I live in Australia, so gun culture not an actual issue for me.
FWIW, your freedom of speech is pretty powerful — better than ours, even; this very blog would be dangerous in, say, China, and Marcus would there be in a re-education camp — at best. And so would we.
So, there’s that.
—
Also, “united states” is beginning to seem like a misnomer, though I kinda get (and sorta like) the degree of autonomy the states have. So, there’s that too.
Pierce R. Butler@#2:
Down south here we make jokes about people who bring a wakizashi to a gun fight.
At their funerals, even.
That’s a good one!
John Morales@#9:
this very blog would be dangerous in, say, China, and Marcus would there be in a re-education camp — at best. And so would we.
At best. I don’t think they bother trying to “re-educate” people any more; people are disposable.
lorn@#8:
I realize that some of this is joking. But I also realize that there are people dying because they live in an imaginary world where the answer to injustice, and rudeness, pretty much all ills, is more guns.
True, and well said.
There is a posting I want to write, someday, but I don’t have enough historical sources or supporting information to throw at it. But, basically, it’s the question “where does American’s love for guns come from?” Why did American farmers feel they needed to be armed and why do today’s camo-creeps feel that they “need” such weaponry? Well, it turns out that the US had two problems that more civilized European countries didn’t have: slaves and native Americans. In the ‘settler’ era, that Winchester rifle was necessary not to shoot the occasional horse with a broken leg, it was to shoot the occasional native American whose land they wanted. Or, in more brutal circumstances, to shoot the claim-jumping fellow American during the gold rush. It’s no coincidence that Iowa, Wyoming, and Montana are some of the states with the highest gun ownership. Then there’s the south. The south was terrified of slave insurrections. “Sam Colt made all men equal” (oh, the irony!) and also a 6-gun made it possible for a lazy slave-owning plantation boss to dominate a group of field hands. As the post-reconstruction US evolved from outright slavery to Jim Crow, the new ideology was – basically – “we need guns so black men won’t rape our white women.” The whole boogey man of home assault and self-defense never answers the question home assault by whom? America created a myth surrounding the use of its favored tool of internal oppression. USA!
lorn@#6:
You are right but figured it might be covered under the ‘have a plan to kill everyone’ section. It isn’t a sustainable pose to adopt. Ready to go all the time is tiring and tough on everyone around you.
A lot of “oops, shot the mailman.”
There’s another juxtaposition in the image that I found amusing, that none of you commented on. Therefore I am going to hammer on it a bit.
The no smoking warning is also part of the fun. Why do we ban smoking? Because it is bad for one’s health. As is carrying a gun. Those signs on the door are the intersection of two public health disasters: tobacco and guns.
I’m not able to assemble that into some kind of point, it’s just something about Americans that shows how thoroughly propagandized and marketed-to we are.
When Mr Jazz and I visited California in the 80s we were amused to see a notice on the entrance to a general sporting goods store that said “Warning this store sells products containing lead. Lead is dangerous to children and pregnant women”. Well yes, in the form of bullets it cerainly is dangerous.
From an outsider’s point of view all this is incomprehensible madness; it is inconceivable that so many would consider it a democratic right and ‘normal’ social behaviour.
What causes such paranoia that makes one believe to be in constant warfare with enemies within and without?
Canada had natives as well, and still has plenty of people outside of the cities and towns who consider a rifle a basic tool that you generally don’t leave home without. (We even have provision in our firearms laws for allowing hunting by children as young as fourteen, if that’s necessary for them to put food on the table.)
Yet I’ve never met anybody in Canada who thought it was a good idea to be armed in a city, nor have I ever met anybody who thought a pistol was useful for anything. There’s something else going on in the U.S. other than just wilderness and past desire to shoot the natives.
The one advantage of the goofus-self-punishment people is that in some cases they are no longer able to reproduce.