Article 17, section 1 of the Colorado state constitution declares that "The militia of the state shall consist of all able-bodied male residents of the state". The army wasn't there. We didn't expect them to be. The national guard wasn't there. We didn't expect them to be. The state guard that Colorado authorizes in Title 28 wasn't there. We didn't expect them to be. And the police weren't there. We didn't expect them to be. If you put any of those people at every movie showing we would be rightly concerned about a police state. But the militia, now the militia was supposed to be there. It was there. And it failed. It's legitimate to conduct a failure analysis and to possibly change the laws to enhance its effectiveness. Why did it fail? What could we have done differently so that it would have been more effective? That's a conversation that would satisfy Dionne's fuzzy request for "opening up" a discussion but one that would predictably horrify him. The existing laws provide for one group of people that you expect to be around in case of emergency consistent with avoiding a police state, the state militia as identified in the Colorado state constitution. Why did they fail? Go start your analysis there, if you have to do instant analysis before the funerals are done, if that's what you need to do to process the tragedy.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Posted @ Althouse
EJ Dionne's creepy call for gun control knocked me off my resolution to decently wait before wading in to the tragedy in Colorado. I read about it at Althouse. Here's my comment:
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Wonderful logic. If everyone was armed this would not have happened.
ReplyDeleteUhh he was heavily armored and loaded for bear. The citizens you expect to win a gunfight would have had a very hard time doing so. I would guess even more death and injury would occur in that case.
I play a lot of violent video games. Some are standard US Army training ones but others are very interesting. All strive for accuracy in implementing the game. I do not play COD style hero games. Anyway as a well equipped Stalker, my favorite game, with good body armor and useful weapons I would happily take on a theater full of pistol armed fools and expect to kill everybody and take very little to no damage.
Sure, have fun with your slowly sinking economy and your quite heavily armed population and your rather strange ideas about personal freedom. As always ... good luck with that.
A failure analysis is something you go into without pre-conceived notions if you can. If there are no ways of making things better, the failure analysis might indicate repealing Colorado's Article XVII as providing a false sense of security and replacing it with an alternate structure that would work better. Now sometimes it is impossible to do so but you really need to try keeping an open mind to unexpected alternatives, especially at the early stages.
ReplyDeleteNow PenGun you've always been chock full of preconceived notions. The actual response rate in a permissive CCL regime is generally under 5%, often under 2%. Let's say the movie theater was full and had 200 seats. That would have been a random number of between 2-10 armed people in the audience. Add to that the random brave, unarmed moviegoers who would mob the guy as he was distracted dealing with the armed ones (and who had no time to work up to making that sort of charge when the shooter had no distractions) and you would still have a mass shooting but probably with fewer casualties. We don't train for quick reaction mobs. Nobody does. Maybe that's because nobody's figured out how to do it. Maybe nobody's even asked the question. Thus the failure analysis
And let's be clear that nobody knows how to early identify all their crazies and some of them remain scarily efficient at creating mayhem in their madness. Canada has its own list as does the US of tragedies. This situation will, does, and has cropped up just about everywhere. The best you can do is to keep the casualty count down.
Great idea.
ReplyDeleteFrom the:Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery:
" A study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that the gun murder rate in the U.S. is at 19.5 percent, almost 20 times higher than the next 22 richest nations combined.
Among the world's 23 wealthiest countries, 80 percent of all gun deaths are American deaths and 87 percent of all kids killed by guns are American kids."
Maybe get over your obsession with guns. It's an overcompensation for several things including low self worth and fear of the unknown. Those fears are almost always imaginary. Very much along the line of the most recent Colorado shootings. A pure fantasy made real by a crazy person.
Maybe you want to do something a bit more than cut and paste some talking point. Usually journals don't talk about themselves in the 3rd person like that. So who are you actually quoting? The anti-gun crowd's lied enough that I'd want to actually read the research, if nothing else to know when the study was and maybe find out what they mean by the gun murder rate. The numbers don't look right.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing especially immoral about a gun death vs a bomb death or a knife death. If what is being complained about is merely a shift in method of murder, pardon me for being unimpressed. Dead is dead no matter how you arrive at that state.
Hey feel free to kill each other. I am just pointing out the obvious.
ReplyDeleteYou have a population which is heavily armed and it's not at all surprising that would produce a lot of death and misery.
It's always interesting to see your evaporating studies that might not be so solid once they're looked closely at. PenGun, you never change.
ReplyDeleteAs always, it is a pleasure to prick your delusions. It's too bad they always seem to come back.
Huh? "evaporating studies" means what?
ReplyDeleteIf your version of civilization needs the population to be armed with deadly force I want no part of it. My version and indeed most of the civilized world's version works well for me.
Funny enough, Canada is more pro-gun than it was a decade ago.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why? We live next door to your constant media barrage and a large part of Canada is within driving distance.
ReplyDeleteIt is my hope your economy will crash brutally and your influence over the world will wane.
Perhaps it was the liberal party making creepy political commercials attacking Canada's army for having arms and having housing in populated areas that was the sea change. Something happened up north to change attitudes. Mind numbed robots, you guys are not.
ReplyDeleteDon't give credit to the US for Canada's shift on arms. Canadians are quite grown up enough to have their own opinions.
So who are you hoping will replace the US and bear the burden of leadership? Russia? China? If nobody steps up, you get a G0 world and then look out.
http://wonkette.com/480625/why-wont-canada-let-this-michigan-man-just-cold-shoot-people-all-the-time-for-whatever#more-480625
ReplyDeleteHere is a prediction and you know I have a fairly good batting average. Your stock market is approaching the edge. This year will bring the event I have expected for a while now. Six months.
We don't need no leaders. In fact their end will be a huge boon to the world.