Nothing happens to us unless we permit it to.
If you let unhappiness and resentment, bitterness, jealousy and fear past your personal gate, you simply have to round them up and herd them right back out the doors again. That kind of visitor can rage and howl and perform outside, but simply cannot be allowed inside to track up the floor, behave badly and break the china. Inner peace means occasional intruder-hunts and as good gate-keeping as you can manage.
The corollary to this is: Friendships are the fire in the hearth.
I too am a lawyer. So, let’s be civil about lawyers, if you please. We also love our children, our spouses, our roses and our cats.
Oh, Kokipy-ji, I know! I’m a lawyer too! My (apparently fell flat) attempt to be funny was not so much the Shakespearean (mis)quote, but more a) dealing with a carload of lawyers at 2 in the morning is more that I’d be capable of (it would sure dissuade me from continued violence), and b) we don’t need to shoot each other – we have lawyers (which atevi don’t use in the same ways we do).
Oh, duh, I thought that was a direct response to my post – went back and caught the last couple on page 1. I see Joe outed me. Anything else you want to know about me? My LJ’s public.
The car full of lawyers was there to prevent my neighbors from doing anything stupid re the other cars. We were relieved when they showed up.
@kokipy. I am NOT a lawyer, but I still love my roses and my cats. I won’t step so far as to say I love my honey bees, since they have a tendency to be dispassionately unemotional. (Do bees feel anger? Maybe I should ask Dr. Tew at Ohio State the next time I see him.)
I meant nothing bad about the carful of lawyers, other than WoW, Xheralt, and I drove across country, discussing various things. “The time has come, the Warrior said, to speak of many things. Of ships and shoes and sealing was, of cabbages and kings. and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.”
Bwahahahahaha!!!!
heheh! now it just exercises your brain to drive on the “wrong” side! I have no trouble driving in Europe or the US, in a left or right hand drive car, so I think you US people should be able to manage too! why on earth did one lot drive on one side and the rest on the other, that’s what I want to know. I think it’s so funny that Japan adopted “our” side of the road … does anyone know why?
@joekc6nlx, you do realize that Wikipedia is your friend? I typed in ‘Luby’ and ‘Luby’s massacre’ was on the drop-down list. Most of what you need to know is in that article, although a timeline isn’t part of it. Another article, linked to the Wikipedia one, avers that police arrived quickly enough ‘to prevent more deaths’. He killed 22; there were an estimated 80 customers and 40 staff in the building. Given that survivors of the massacre say that Hennard was firing ‘as fast as he could pull the trigger’, and that he still had ammo left by the time the cops showed up, it probably was closer to five minutes for them to get there, and could have been much less.
Judging from these two articles, Hennard was a man who wanted to die and who wanted to take as many people with him as he could. He crashed his pick-up into the front window, then shot the first man who tried to help him. When the cops wounded him, he committed suicide. Most of his victims were women (he had been writing angry letters about women destroying his family in the weeks prior to the shooting). He did not shoot a mother of a four-year-old when she begged him to let her and her child go; he allowed them to leave.
I doubt that the presence of armed persons in the restaurant would have stopped him: he was looking to die. At best, their presence would have shortened the casualty list. I doubt very much, based on the facts of this case, that more guns would have eliminated all of the casualties.
At worst, Hennard would have planned better, and attacked an even more vulnerable target, such as a crowded sidewalk at a parade. Or he would have gone Texas Tower and sniped at people. Or maybe something else.
Carrying guns is not a sinecure for this sort of thing. It would be nice if it was, but no. If some whack-job with a hate-on really wants to take out a random number of his fellow human beings (and it is usually a he), then he’ll find a way. Hennard did it with a Glock-17. Suicide bombers do it with dynamite. Al-Qaeda did it with airplanes.
I’d rather find out why these crazies go nuts in this way, and stop *that*, than put guns in the hands of any number of people, some of whom will treat it as a serious responsibility, some of whom will not, and some of whom will treat it as that stick they’ve been looking for all their lives.
@Ruadhan, to an extent, I’ll agree Wikipedia is a resource, but not one I rely on for definitive answers.
You do realize that when someone applies for a concealed carry license, they undergo a background check. If there is any court determination that the applicant has a mental condition that would cause the court to consider them incompetent to carry a firearm, then the license is not issued and the reason for the denial is sent to the applicant in writing. Now, granted, that’ not going to stop anyone who’s determined to carry, just as a suspended drivers license isn’t going to prevent a habitual drunk driver from getting behind the wheel.
I agree that we need to figure out why these wackos do the things they do, but as you said, if the people who were forced by the law to leave their firearms in their cars, the body count might have been smaller. That sounds as though a larger body count is acceptable as long as the people in the restaurant aren’t in a position ot “accidentally shoot each other”. Suzanna Gratia Hupp was one of the customers at Luby’s, she was also one of the customers who was forced to leave her firearm in her car. she was forced to watch as Hennard shot and killed her parents. She, and the others in the restaurant were forced to watch as Hennard shot and killed. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I also have posed this question, but nobody seems to give me the answer, “When did I give up the right to defend myself?” This isn’t a playground fight where the teacher is watching and can immediately break it up, this is a killer on a rampage. You have also made my point where you say that if people had been armed, Hennard would have gone somewhere else. If he wanted to die, I doubt he’d have found a better place to commit “suicide bg third party” than a spot full of lawfully armed people. There’s a better term for it, but I’ve heard it called “suicide by cop”, so that the hard part of killing oneself is transferred to a police officer who now has to bear that guilt for the rest of his/her life. As I said above, if I had to pull the trigger in self-defense, I would still be devastated. I’m not a dispassionate machine, and neither are police officers. Bren, on the other hand, seems to be comfortable wit the fact that he’s shot and killed several people with an illegal weapon. Shooting other people is the province of the Assassins’ Guild. Granted, Ilisidi shoots their dinner on their first outing, but that’s hunting, it’s kabiu.
Not everyone in this country can or should carry a firearm. Not everyone who carries a firearm should be, either, because there are those people who slip through the cracks of any system. It’s not confined to the U.S., Other countries, including European countries, have the same problems. Concealed carry holders are not vigilantes, we are not there to replace law enforcement.
If someone swings a fist at you, are you going to turn the other cheek and let them smack you again, or are you going to defend yourself? I’m not going to let someone beat on me while I stand there. If I can get away, I will do so, but if I’m cornered and cannot escape (such as inside a crowded restaurant), I’m going to do whatever I can to escape. If i can’t escape, then it’s time to take other action. But to just lie down on the floor and wait for the killer to come along and kill me? Um, no, that’s being the sheep, not the sheepdog. Even the sheepdog (me) expects help from the shepherd (the police), and knows it’s just a stopgap until the shepherd can get there to help.
Unfortunately, very few people who hold an anti-gun attitude ever read about the cases where people are attacked in their homes, viciously beaten with pistols, stabbed with knives, etc., and are able to defend themselves by using a lawfully possessed firearm in the defense of their persons. You can’t shoot an intruder just because he’s lifting your new plasma HDTV out the window, but if he’s coming at you with a knife, well, sayonara, buddy, he’s getting 2 bullets and then I’m heading for the bathroom to throw up, then I’m calling the sheriff.
Joe, it’s admirable that you defend your position (no pun intended) so passionately. But I know that you try to be a polite guy. We didn’t argue about this issue lo those thousands of miles because we both understood that the other disagreed, and that neither of us would “convert” the other to our POV.
As a matter of fact, speaking of lawyers, one of the hardest things to learn is that once you’ve made your point – STOP. Let your listeners or readers figure it out for themselves, hopefully while kitties gambol in the roses.
Point taken, WoW. No sense in me wearing out my keyboard…if I haven’t made my point by now, well, I should just stop. Did that on FB.
@joekc6nlx – Um, no, I’m not proving your point. I’m pointing out that your solution to crime, which is to have more folks out and about while armed, isn’t going to solve the problem of whack-jobs like Hennard. All it does is move the problem somewhere else, or force the whack-job to be more creative in his pursuit of bloodshed. For instance, in the Luby’s incident, if more people had been carrying, and Hennard knew that, he would either a: choose a softer target (such as a playground) or b: would stack the odds more in his favor–say, by wearing an armored vest. The addition of extra guns doesn’t really improve things.
Case in point: Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The RCMP attempts to arrest a man named James Radke. Radke escapes them, then returns to his farm some hours later and kills all four officers still on site. They shot him, but he ‘won’, and killed himself before other officers returned to relieve their coworkers. According to your theory, since all four men were both professionally trained and carrying, they should have done better. Doesn’t work that way; the bad guys learn, too. Radke was a career criminal, and on his own home turf; that, and surprise, allowed him to overcome the supposed advantage of his victims being armed.
You’re making a sweeping statement, saying that ‘very few people who hold an anti-gun attitude ever read about the cases where people are attacked in their homes,’ etc. You’re quite wrong, in my case: I’m definitely anti-gun, and I probably read this stuff more than you do (do NOT get me going on serial killers. I will natter your ear off.) The common thread I see in this stuff is that most criminals pick soft targets; targets which are hard, while chosen less often, are carefully managed until they are soft enough to deal with (Ted Bundy used to use a fake cast to put his victims at ease, until they turned their backs on him and he used it to bludgeon them.)
I could talk about the way a typical home break-in works, and the statistics regarding weapons use, and why using a gun against a knife-wielding bad guy could get you (but not me, since I’m female) a charge of manslaughter in some states, but I’ve rambled enough.
Incidently, Wikipedia has a comparable error rate to the online version of Encyclopedia Brittannica. I would never suggest you rely only on Wikipedia; I certainly didn’t.
Dang it. James Roszko. I should have hit Wikipedia before posting. Apologies.
See WoW’s post above. Ive made my point, I’m not going to keep banging away at it.
As for the side of the road question – After the Revolution the French changed from left to right as part of their attempt to eliminate all traces of the old regime. We then changed to demonstrate our solidarity with the French Revolution.
If you think about it, riding on the left if one is wearing a sword means that the sword arm is free to counter the guy coming the other way. If you look at the stairs in medieval towers the wind is such that the defenders have the advantage and any attacker has his weapon hampered by the wall.
Thats also why a Samauri’s wife walked a few steps behind him. It was not a good thing to be too close if he had to draw his sword in defence. It only later came to be thought of as submission of the woman to her husband, father, etc.