In response to the mass shooting in Orlando more LGBT folks are taking up arms.

Courtesy of The Guardian: 

Weapons sales and membership in a group calling on gays and lesbians to arm themselves in self-defense against homophobic attacks have surged since the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida last weekend. 

The group, the Pink Pistols, announced last week a tripling in acknowledged members in the five days since a gunman killed 49 people and injured 53 in an attack on Pulse in Orlando in the early hours of 12 June. 

The Pink Pistols, a gun club predominantly for LGBT members and their supporters, promotes “legal, safe and responsible use of firearms for self defense of the sexual minority community” according to its website. 

A senior Pink Pistols member said that if patrons had been armed at the Orlando nightclub they might have prevented the shooting or minimized loss of life.

Somewhere Wayne LaPierre is rubbing his hands together in glee. 

Simply put, more guns, mean more bullets, which mean more death.

What's it like in Canada this time of year again?

New study reveals that simply having a gun does NOT make you safer.

Courtesy of the Washington Post: 

In the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, the National Rifle Association proposed putting more guns in schools. After a racist shot up a Charleston prayer group, an NRA board member argued for more guns in church. And now predictably, politicians and gun rights advocates are calling for guns in movie theaters after a loner killed two people at a theater in Louisiana. 

The notion that more guns are always the solution to gun crime is taken seriously in this country. But the research shows that more guns lead to more gun homicides -- not less. And that guns are rarely used in self-defense. 

Now a new study from researchers at Mount St. Mary's University sheds some light on why people don't use guns in self-defense very often. As it turns out, knowing when and how to apply lethal force in a potentially life-or-death situation is really difficult. The study was commissioned by the National Gun Victims Action Council, an advocacy group devoted to enacting "sensible gun laws" that "find common ground between legal gun owners and non-gun owners that minimizes gun violence in our culture." 

The study found that proper training and education are key to successfully using a firearm in self-defense: "carrying a gun in public does not provide self-defense unless the carrier is properly trained and maintains their skill level," the authors wrote in a statement.

I think this study only reinforces what should be an obvious recognition that guns are not a magical charm which provides protection simply by having it in your possession.

I would further argue that even trips to the shooting range will not adequately prepare a person to use a gun in a real life situation where they are frightened and under duress.

As we have seen even police officers quite often miss their target when firing at an assailant, fail to access their guns when needed, and panic when fired upon.

Once again in my opinion guns are one of the worst things to rely on for personal protection.

New study debunks claim that most gun owners only use them for self defense.

Courtesy of The Hill:  

A new study attempts to debunk the claim that gun owners rely on their firearms for self-defense. 

The left-leaning Violence Policy Center released a study Wednesday that finds people are much more likely to use a gun to kill someone without cause than to protect themselves. 

According to the study, gun owners committed 259 justifiable homicides compared to 8,342 criminal homicides in 2012, the most recent year data was available. 

That means gun owners are 32 times more likely to kill someone without cause than to act in self-defense, the study reasoned.

Nothing about that statistic surprises me. 

You may tell yourself you are buying that gun to protect yourself and your family, but the reality is your are buying it for the sense of power that it provides.

And the idea of wanting to feel powerful when you are angry, or scared, or frustrated, is very seductive. And all a gun owner has to do is grab their gun when they are in a heightened emotional state, to change their lives, and their victim's life, forever.

Thanks to Stand Your Ground law Florida man who shot and killed a one time friend who was unarmed and walking away will not be charged.

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

In early July, 20-year-old Colt Thriemer shot dead a one-time friend in a Wal-Mart parking lot, saying he feared for his life. Witnesses gathered for a truck meet that night say victim Thomas James Brown, 21, was walking away toward his car when Thriemer fired ten shots. Some say Brown had threatened to kill Thriemer over the course of several weeks. The story as told by prosecutors in a detailed legal memo suggests drug transactions, addiction, and monetary debts all played a role in the scenario leading up to Brown’s death. 

But these facts will never play out in a trial, because prosecutors have decided not to charge Thriemer citing Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. 

“The Stand Your Ground statute makes no exception from the immunity because Brown may have been walking away from Thriemer at the time the deadly force was used,” the memo from the State Attorney’s office states. “The Stand Your Ground law does not require Thriemer to wait until Brown in fact retrieved a gun before he fired. Under the current state of the law and the facts of this case, Thriemer was legally allowed to use deadly force based on a reasonable belief that his life was in danger and that he was about to become the victim of an armed robbery.”

I cannot get over how this law simply allows you to murder somebody simply because you "thought" they might come after you at some point. 

Isn't this the same kind of thinking that got us into the Iraq War?

Look this guy who was shot, Thomas James Brown, sounds like a real POS. And there is a part of me who wants to say that he got what he deserved.

Except that he didn't deserve it.  At least not yet.

IF he were reaching for a gun in his pocket, then maybe.

IF he were actively beating on the defendant with a lead pipe, then maybe.

But he was walking away.

Seriously do you have any idea how many dead bodies I would have sent to the morgue if I killed every person who threatened to kill me or beat my ass? It would be dozens.

People say things in the heat of anger, but unless they are actively attempted to take your life you have NO right to end theirs.

"Only use as much force as absolutely necessary." I learned that as a boy of ten, yet these so-called adults cannot seem to figure it out.

The Rise of Women's Gun Culture.

Courtesy Rolling Stone:

Over the last decade, the percentage of armed women in America has risen quietly: according to Gallup, the numbers went from 13% in 2005 to 23% in 2011. By last year, that rise wasn't so quiet anymore. Women's interest sites declared "The Rise Of The Female Gun Nut." A Girl and a Gun-type shooting clubs, like Babes with Bullets and The Well Armed Woman, bloomed. And a staunchly, proudly masculine industry at least attempted to keep pace. Walk around a gun show these days, and you're more likely than not to find at least one table piled wide with .223-caliber AR-15 assault rifles rendered in hot pink. 

The movement, as of now, is very much fledgling. AG&AG, its de facto hub, nearly tripled attendance since last year's inaugural event, with local chapters from Marietta to Lehigh Valley to Cheyenne represented; still, that means just under 300 people, attendees and instructors all told. But one thing is for sure: here, across the basement-level conference rooms of the serene, sleepy Waco convention center, with these gun-happy ladies, the spirit is strong. 

You know I feel somewhat ambivalent about this.

On the one hand I have nothing against a woman wanting to protect herself against the possibility of attack. 

On the other hand this "gun culture" talk really bothers me. Just like it does when it pertains to males.

It is one thing if you view owning a gun as a necessary part of keeping safe, and quite another if you view as some crazy version of female empowerment, or a method of self expression.

Years ago I decided to teach women's self defense because I believed that women were more likely to become victims of domestic abuse or crime and I thought self confidence and a self defense skill set could help to keep them safe.

I also believed that women were less likely to use what I taught them to hurt others unnecessarily or to dominate them through threat of injury. Which was one of the reasons that I refused to teach men.

And for the most part that turned out to be correct.

For the most part.

But as I learned to my great frustration SOME women can be just as big of assholes as men.

Women are not all dainty, feminine, non-violent nurturers. Some of them have short tempers, violent tendencies, and a desire to dominate those that are weaker than they are.

Just like men.

So as much as I don't have anything against women, who are more often victimized than men, finding a way to protect themselves, I really think this kind of thing might attract the kind of woman who ABSOLUTELY should not walk around armed.

Just my point of view. 

The Powerful Pornography of the Gun Fetish.

Source

This is from an op-ed over at Truthout by William Rivers Pitt, that I thought was very spot on and worth sharing: 

Over the weekend, hundreds of gun-rights activists descended on the Alamo in Texas to lament how hard it is these days for gun-owners in America. The crowd was regaled by luminaries like Alex Jones, who dispensed his gibberish with the proud fervor of someone who has taken to heart the old adage, "There's a sucker born every minute," because he knows he's getting paid no matter what he says. "If it's a war they want," he roared again and again as the day wore on, "it's a war they'll get." 

Maybe I am desensitized at this point, but after another week of stories about dead children, I find myself most bothered by this thing at the Alamo, for it represents the distilled essence of the ongoing, blood-sodden catastrophe that is this nation's terminal fetish for guns in all forms. They really do think they are under siege, and see themselves standing post on the walls of their own fictional Alamo, facing down hordes of Obama-programmed FEMA soldiers who carry the banner of the UN and seek to take their guns before instituting Sharia Law across the land. 

Under siege? It would be funny if it wasn't so completely lethal. It is almost like a magic trick: a pack of dangerous, dim-witted blivets who drape themselves in camouflage and masturbate relentlessly to "Red Dawn" on a nightly basis sprawled on a pile of NRA leaflets while clutching an AR-15 in their other hand have figured out a way to become an untouchable class in American politics, even as the blood and brain matter of children swells past their ankles and up over their fatted calves. 

It is, perhaps, the most remarkable trick ever turned in modern American politics. A few bottles of Tylenol are poisoned in 1982 and kill seven people, and the country erupts, and Tylenol is scourged from every shelf in the land, and new safety measures are swiftly enacted. More than three hundred million guns kill tens of thousands of people on a yearly basis, however, with gun and ammunition sales going through the roof every time a mass slaughter happens, and the nation barely twitches. 

Somehow, these sad, sorry, pathetic, weak, soulless, gutless sacks of shame have not only insulated themselves and their deadly little hobby from the normal procedures of civilized society that take place when a mortal threat is exposed, but have giddily convinced themselves that they are, in fact, the real victims in all this. They can, and do, sell guns on Instagram and evade any and all background checks or other firearm laws, yet somehow they are being crushed under the bootheel of tyrannical governmental overreach.

There is more, and if you are interested I suggest that you click the link at the top to read it, however this part really spoke to me in that it lays out just how perverse this obsession with owning guns has become.

Now I personally don't really have an issue with a person owning one gun for protection and keeping it locked away in a safe location, or owning a rifle for hunting, and also keeping that safely locked away when not in use.

No my problem is with these assholes that own an arsenal of weapons, many of them designed for combat, who spend their days fantasizing about repelling an attack by the Iranians, North Koreans, or Obama led liberals, who they believe are about to tread on their sacred freedoms, seemingly unaware that most of those freedoms were taken from them by the previous administration right before their very eyes.

These people have traded away their actual manhood for a symbol of manliness, leaving them largely impotent in regards to dealing with aggression or personal safety unless they have a gun in their hand.

How else to explain the outpouring of support for George Zimmerman, who gunned down an unarmed teenager who was doing nothing wrong other than trying to get home in the rain?

I truly believe that if Zimmerman had beaten Trayvon Martin with a baseball bat, or a crowbar, and left him alive, that he would have been convicted. However the gun, an instrument solely designed to kill, has become such a symbol for freedom in this country, that it seems to defy justice. (Well unless you are a woman of course, then you get a twenty year sentence for firing a warning shot.)

Our entire perception of an appropriate response to potential violence has been skewed to the point that it almost seems that murder with a gun is more accepted these days rather than to injure to our attacker, or to fire a shot to dissuade them from continuing.

As I have shared before, I was trained in the martial arts by a very strict traditionalist.

And the guidelines that he taught me forty years ago, still resonate with me today.

It is better to walk away than to argue.
Better to argue than to injure.
Better to injure than to maim.
Better to maim than to kill.
And better to kill, than to allow innocents to suffer harm.

A simple lesson, but one that has never seemed more timely.

I just wish that these gun nuts had been exposed to similar instruction when they were young.

Medical examiner in Trayvon Martin case claims that prosecutors "purposefully threw the case in favor of George Zimmerman."

Courtesy of WFTV: 

On the stand, Dr. Bao changed his testimony about key statements he'd made and said he'd changed his mind about Martin only being alive for as many as three minutes after the shooting. 

"I believe he was alive one to 10 minutes after he was shot. His heart was beating until there was no blood left," Bao said. 

Dr. Bao is dropping another bombshell -- his attorney is preparing a $100 million lawsuit. 

Through his high-profile attorney, he claims the medical examiner, state attorney's office, and Sanford Police Department were all biased against Martin. 

"He says their general attitude was that he got what he deserved," Attorney Willie Gary told Channel 9. 

Gary said Dr. Bao was made to be a scapegoat and was wrongfully fired from the medical examiner's office. 

He said his client was prepared to offer proof that Martin was not the aggressor. 

"He was in essence told to zip his lips. 'Shut up. Don't say those things,'" Gary said. 

Gary said prosecutors never asked Dr. Bao a question crucial to their case. 

"He wanted a question that would have allowed him to explain to the jury with scientific evidence how there was no way Trayvon Martin could have been on top of George Zimmerman," Gary said.

"NO way that Trayvon Martin should have been on top of George Zimmerman." Holy shit!

Goddamn it I knew it!

Okay if this pans out and Dr. Bao has the evidence that he claims to have then the Marin family can sue the state of Florida for untold millions of dollars.

And I hope they do, and I also hope that George Zimmerman ends up sharing a prison cell with the biggest meanest inmate in the Florida justice system with "Trayvon Martin" tattooed on his 18 inch biceps.

(H/T to Politicususa.)

Sometimes the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good...ass whooping.

Not that this is the optimum way to respond to an armed robbery, but hey at least nobody had to die.

By the way I would just like to point out that the two men were well within their rights to use deadly force.  That is an appropriate response when somebody pulls a gun on you. The fact that they did not shows restraint. The kind of restraint not available when you use a gun.

The George Zimmerman verdict. Justice denied for Trayvon Martin. Update!

I have refrained from posting about this trial while it was going on, and believe me I watched ALL of it, because I became too emotional, and knew I would end up writing a long and rambling post that I did not have time to write and you probably did not have time to read.

However now that it is over, ramble I must. Though I will try to keep it as short and on topic as I can.

You know I thought I was prepared for last night's verdict. But I was wrong.

It hit me hard, and also made me furious.

From the outset I found nothing defensible about Zimmerman's actions.

His muttered "These assholes always get away" was evidence of racial profiling in my opinion.

The fact that he left his vehicle in defiance of instruction, determined his intent to confront in my opinion.

And his use of a gun to end an altercation with a teenage boy determined his guilt in my opinion.

Open and shut case right?

 Nope.

A woman in Florida "stands her ground," fires gun in self defense but injures no one, and now faces twenty years in prison. Oh, did I mention she's black?

Marissa Alexander faces 20 years in prison for Standing Her Ground.

Her husband had a history of domestic abuse and even beat her while she was pregnant.

After yet another beating, Alexander fired a warning shot into the ceiling. That shot saved her life.

Prosecutor Angela Corey did not take into account that Marissa Alexander:

• Had a court injunction against her crazed husband, 
• Had Given Birth 9 Days Earlier,
• Was trained to use a weapon and earned a concealed weapons permit. 

She is currently sitting in the Pretrial Detention Facility in Jacksonville, FL, Duval county awaiting a sentence of up to 20 years.

Here is more courtesy of the blog Justice for Marissa:

Below are the facts of my concern with the incorrect way the law was applied and ultimately the injustice in my case. 

• The alleged victim, my husband, under sworn statement in November 2010, admitted he was the aggressor, threatened my life and was so enraged he didn’t know what he would do. 
• The alleged victim, my husband, was arrested for domestic violence two times, once for abuse against me. The attack against me was so violent; I ended up in the hospital. 
• Prior to my arrest, I told the office I was in fear for my life due to the prior violence against me. I also told the officer there was a domestic injunction in place to protect me against abuse from the alleged victim. This information was written in detail by the officer in my arrest report, but ignored for some unknown reason. 
• In July of 2011, a hearing was held, where I along with the alleged victims testified as it relates to the stand your ground law and its immunity from prosecution. 
• After the hearing, Judge Elizabeth Senterfitt denied my motion, citing that I could have exited the house thru the master bedroom window, front door, and/or sliding glass back door. The law specifically states: No duty to retreat. 
• My attorney entered a standing objection on the record to the ruling and we proceeded to trial. 
• During that time, Angela Corey, our State Attorney met with the alleged victims. I also along with my attorney met with Angela Corey, John Guy, and then prosecutor Christen Luikart. I justified my actions to them and the truth as I have told it has remained the same. 
• Knowing our prior domestic abuse history, Angela Corey was hard pressed for the minimum mandatory, which provisions allow for prosecution to wave those stipulations. I was not guilty, nor did I believe that was fair and just under the circumstances. She also allowed for those same provisions in the State vs. Vonda Parker, same charges different circumstances which did not include self-defense. 
• Florida uses a law commonly known as 10-20-life as a sentencing guideline when a felony takes place with the use of a weapon. Under this statute, my felony charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon without intent to harm carries a twenty year mandatory sentence. 
• Stand your ground law has been applied in multiple recent incidents, the following is just a couple of incidents. Carl Kroppman Jr was allowed to use this law to avoid being arrested/charged during a road rage incident on the Buckman Bridge in Jacksonville, FL in August of 2011. Marqualle Woolbright of Ocala, FL avoided murder charges due to the stand your ground law when he shoot and killed someone. 

I am a law abiding citizen and I take great pride in my liberty, rights, and privileges as one. I have vehemently proclaimed my innocence and my actions that day. The enigma I face since that fateful day I was charged through trial, does the law cover and apply to me too?

Now we have to remember that this is but one person's account of this incident, and we have not heard all of the evidence that the Florida justice system had at their disposal in making this determination of guilt. 

However having said that, considering that this woman was being brutally attacked by a man with a history of domestic abuse, was trained to use and licensed to carry a concealed handgun, and did NOT blow this man away, how is it that SHE is headed to prison for defending herself, while George Zimmerman, and man who chased a seventeen year old boy and shot him to death, was able to use the Stand your Ground law to walk free for almost a month and a half before being charged with second degree murder?

Part of me wonders if she would have received a lighter sentence if she had killed her husband instead of just warning him off. Is the Florida justice system really that backward?

Any thoughts?