Guns undermine … community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.
Also corrosive of freedom, Firmin DeBrabander points out, since the sight of them frightens us, makes us anxious about what we say and do.
And get used to seeing just as many rifles and shotguns as handguns.
In Stillwater, about 65 miles north of Oklahoma City, the owner of the Stillwater Armory gun shop said the new [open carry] law has brought about a subtle change in buying habits. Customers with small handguns that are easy to conceal have been buying larger weapons, with longer barrels and with magazines that hold additional rounds, as they prepare to wear their guns unconcealed.
Open carry handguns, rifles, and shotguns are powerfully iconic of the cultural divide between Elizabeth Warren and Grover Norquist, between Americans who identify with an American community embodied in representative government, and Americans who are what DeBrabander calls “extreme individualists,” for whom any form of common life founded on some degree of mutual trust seems to be meaningless, threatening.
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UD‘s friend Alan Jacobs says the same thing.
But what troubles me most about … the general More Guns approach to social ills — is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian “war of every man against every man” in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now — but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly.
Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.)
Is this really the best we can do? It might be if we lived in, say, the world described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. But we don’t. Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe — or, really, “safe” — with cold steel strapped to one’s ribcage.
The writer has overlooked one other reason Lanza chose an elementary school.
Maybe he went to a school full of women and children (no men died) because he wanted the easiest, most vulnerable targets he could find. A skinny little guy withdrawn from and clearly terrified of the world, he began by shooting a sleeping woman, and went on from there.
Most powerful and damaging weaponry imaginable; most powerless people.
… a patron saint of the armed survivalists.
I had no idea she was one.
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Next up: Brace yourself for the drug story. If this story doesn’t have a drug angle, I’ll be very surprised.
Of course I’m talking about prescription drugs. I’m going to guess that toxicology reports will show both mother and son coked to the gills with mood-altering meds.
She had “at least a dozen” firearms [in her house] — mainly larger rifles,” [a friend of the shooter’s mother] said. He said [he] didn’t know anything about the pistols [also in the shooter’s possession].
… “Nancy was a responsible gun owner,” the friend said.
At least a dozen rifles in your house, all of them accessible to your insane twenty-year-old son. The very model of responsibility.
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Another responsible gun owner, this one harassed by the police.
The lone survivor of her class tricked the gunman by playing dead, the girl’s pastor told ABC News, before running out of the school covered in the blood of her classmates.
“She ran out of the school building covered from head to toe with blood…”
Pretending to be dead in the slaughterhouse of our latest massacre … Lifting yourself from the bloody pile and going home..
As I’ve said before, this is Babi Yar. “[Lanza] moved to a classroom where he systematically shot all those inside – 14 children whom the Courant reported were huddled and clutching each other in terror …” This is piles of bleeding bodies among which has now emerged our own Dina Pronicheva, the woman who survived Babi Yar in the same way — by playing dead.
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But America, with its massive, easily gotten arsenal of top of the line people-killers, has made Babi Yars much easier. One skinny little kid can butcher a village in seconds.
Adam Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high capacity magazines when he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six adults, Connecticut State Police said today.
After shooting at victims in two classrooms and a hallway with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, he put a bullet into his own head with a handgun.
Quick and easy. I trust our technicians are working on yet quicker, more powerful models.
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A shared fascination.
After fatally shooting his mother in the face, investigators say [Adam Lanza] took three of his mother’s legally-owned weapons that he used in the assault, including a Glock, a SIG Sauer, and a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle. In addition to those three weapons, cops also recovered a .45-caliber Henry repeating rifle, a .22-caliber Marlin rifle, and a .30-caliber Enfield rifle…
… According to the Post, Nancy Lanza was a gun enthusiast who often took her son shooting with her. “She’d take them to the range a lot … Nancy was an enthusiast — so much so that she wanted to pass it on to her kids,” said her former landscaper and “occasional drinking buddy” Dan Holmes. “She took her two sons to the gun ranges quite a bit to practice their aim. She was a really great shot from what she told me. Whenever I finished work and went inside to chit chat, she spoke often about her fascination with firearms. Nancy had an extensive gun collection and she was really quite proud of it.”
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Why would she have three powerful guns in the house when she knew her son was so deeply disturbed?
It sounds as though she had quite a lot more than three.
And “powerful” doesn’t say it. You use these guns when you’re pinned down in Helmand Province.
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It defies logic … that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer.
All those guns all over the house, and herself a very good shot. Yet when it came to it, Nancy Lanza was unable to defend herself from one of the most notorious mass murderers in American history stepping up to shoot her face off.
But then, she’d devoted herself to training and arming him.
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“She prepared for the worst,” [a relative of Lanza’s] told [a] newspaper. “I didn’t know that they [the guns] would be used on her.”
Yes. She was prepared for a firefight in Kunar Province.
As for this woman not knowing the guns would be used on her relative – try reading some statistics.
Did it occur to you – or anyone in the family – that a paranoid family member living alone in a hidden-from-the-road, closed-off house, with an insane twenty-year-old and a military arsenal in it, might be something to keep your eye on?
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Prepare for Nancy Lanza to become a patron saint of the armed survivalists.
I’m going to assume this woman – she’s only eighteen – has a psychiatric history. She seems to have taken breaking up with her boyfriend hard, since she loaded up her car with lots of weaponry and went to Elon, where he’s a student. Her parents notified the boyfriend, he notified Elon, they notified the police, and she was arrested as soon as they spotted her on campus.
How, though, does an unstable eighteen-year-old manage to load up on all those armaments?
… comforts me.
[UD thanks James.]
An American university is a refugee from drug violence.
The University of Texas at Brownsville, in shooting range of the protracted Matamoros gun battles, has shut down.
The university’s sports information director is the source of this post’s headline. During a soccer game, he and others suddenly realized that a war was happening close by. Evacuation ensued.
The campus has been closed at least twice before recently because of gunshots.
This gives you a sense of the layout.
“The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. … East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow… We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could do it, we could do it.”
Joe Miller’s answer to a question, at a public forum, about illegal immigration. Miller is running for the Senate from Alaska.
“Where there are deer, mountain lions [are] not far behind.”
A California Department of Fish and Game spokesperson explains why the animal was in an urban area.
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Deer are so numerous and so bold in UD‘s backyard — and front yard — that she’s begun throwing deck chairs in their direction. Only this seems to produce enough noise and violence to keep them in the back part of her woods. They are like grazing cows, quite domesticated, and indifferent to our presence.
Will there eventually be mountain lions in Garrett Park, UD‘s town?
One guy with a gun killed forty-four deer in one night on Vassar’s campus earlier this month. He was a sharpshooter hired by the school to reduce its rampaging herds.
In Big Buck Zone, hunters debate the merits of snipers.