The Truth About Guns

“This was the FIRST SHOT FIRED from a Brand new Vulcan 50cal using factory ammo,” generes posts at ar15.com. “The bolt lugs disintegrated, the charging handle sheared from the bolt, and the bolt exploded backwards and lodged into the guys neck area.” Well, that sucks. What’s interesting here (for me): the guy ‘effing and blinding as he shouts for a towel. And the calm voice repeatedly telling a bystander “I need you to stay back.” The contrast highlights two possible responses to a life-or-death situation: unbridled aggression or self-contained calm. Which is the correct response? Well that depends . . .

When an armed American can’t escape an attacker threatening death or grievous bodily harm, the tooled-up good guy shouldn’t think of the required response as “self-defense.” They should launch a sudden and vicious attack designed to stop an attacker from attacking. No holds barred. Chocks away. Let ‘er rip. Survival depends on speed, surprise and violence of action.

Not

I awoke the same way I had countless times before: in a cheap no-frills hotel located in a town I’d never heard of. As predicted, the wake-up call never came and my cell phone’s alarm saved me from over-sleeping. I briefly considered hitting the snooze button and dozing off for another few minutes, but then I remembered why I had driven all this way and only slept around four hours — today was the day I got to shoot stuff from a helicopter . . .

Dave Montana at HeliBacon had contacted me a few weeks prior and invited me out to see what they had to offer, and I just couldn’t refuse. Shooting stuff from a helicopter has always been on my bucket list, and while it wasn’t quite the M60 out of a UH-1 that I had imagined, a Robinson R44 was close enough. So the weekend after SHOT Show I drove out

“The Ninth Circuit’s decision in Peruta v. San Diego, released minutes ago, affirms the right of law-abiding citizens to carry handguns for lawful protection in public,” washingtonpost.com reports. “The Ninth Circuit, in a 2-1 opinion written by Judge O’Scannlain, ruled that Peruta was entitled to Summary Judgement, because the ‘good cause’ provision violates the Second Amendment. The Court ruled that the

Why would CBS News give so much airtime to a fringe group of extremists bent on denying Americans their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms? Because guns! To be fair, props to the “Tiffany Network” for giving Gun Owners of America jefe Larry Pratt five seconds of air time in a 1:15 infomercial for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and, laterally, its parent company Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Could this news package (and related Pratt-less online gun control story) be any more profoundly biased in favor of civilian disarmament? Perhaps someone should . . .

take Manhattan-raised CBS News president David Rhodes back to his father’s native Texas, avoiding his alma mater (

Two of my four daughters [not shown] shoot. One lives in The Land of Hope and Glory, a country where shooting sports and shooting smack are equally acceptable. The other is estranged. So I get to do the family shooting thing once a year with one of my girls. It’s a seriously enjoyable experience, unlike any other family activity. Watching her pleasure at mastering a gun, knowing that she’s gaining a skill that could save her life (and the life of her family), fills me with pride and pleasure.  But again, it’s a black swan event. So I have a question for those of you who are more family firearms fortunate than I: does the family that shoots together stay together? Is hunting more of a bonding experience than target practice, or is it all good?

“No one has lived long enough to describe the tiger in detail, but some things about her are known. She traverses great stretches of land in a day and is comfortable wandering deep into human territory,” nytimes,com reports. “After killing her first three or four people, she began to eat her victims — starting rump-first, one expert said, as she would a deer.” Makes sense to me: that’s where the meat is and a tiger’s gonna do what a tiger’s gonna do. The Times reports that more tigers are doing more of what tigers do in India as of late. Who could have predicted such a thing? Well .

“Seventeen counties will compete for $13 million as part of a new initiative to fight gun violence,” democratandchronicle.com reports. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo outlined in his budget address Jan. 21 that he

So there I was, sitting at a lunch counter at a funky retro-50′s diner on Congress Ave. The guy to my left was a Chinese national. The guy to my right was a transplanted New York lawyer. The lawyer was sharing tales of his Chinese travels. I was keeping myself to myself when the lawyer’s food started moving (see: above). The waitress said it was some kind of dried fish. Yeah re-animated dried fish. Anyway, a conversation started and the next thing I know the lawyer’s going all anti-gun. It was like a lightning round game show or, if you prefer, chasing chickens . . .

He argued that the “well-regulated militia” part of the Second Amendment establishes the right to keep and bear arm as a collective right, designed for common defense. Nothing to do with personal liberty. I reminded him that all of the rights in the Bill of Rights are individual rights, as per the Supreme Court’s Helle