The still unfolding events surrounding the murderous rampage that has allegedly been carried out by Christopher Jordan Dorner, a former LAPD officer who has vowed to take revenge for his 2009 job loss by killing other officers and their families, while tragic, provide a teachable moment.
The notion advanced by the National Rifle Association (NRA) that safety can be insured if law abiding citizens simply take up arms or by adding armed police inside our schools is nothing more than dangerous nonsense.
In this instance, as two people who had nothing to do with Dorner’s rampage were mistakenly shot at dozens of times by police officers wrapped up in the manhunt, we saw what can happen when fear is added to the equation…
Fear + guns = tragic, oft fatal consequences
At 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning, Feb. 7, Torrance police officers mistook the blue Toyota Tacoma pickup truck depicted in the photo (above) as Dorner’s gray Nissan Titan
As the truck slowly rolled down a quiet residential street, at least seven officers recklessly opened fire, not only striking the truck, but nearby homes, cars and trees. The Torrance police officers, whom LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck said were operating under “incredible tension,” fired without warning or commands, injuring the two occupants of the truck, 71 year-old Emma Hernandez and her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, who were in the process of delivering Los Angeles Times newspapers.
“How do you mistake two Hispanic women, one who is 71, for a large black male?” said Richard Goo, 62, who counted five bullet holes in the entryway to his house.
Obviously, they didn’t. Fearing for their own safety, the mere sight of the slow-moving truck was enough to trigger the barrage of, according to the LA Times, “between 20 and 30 rounds…Neighbors, however, suggested there were more shots fired.”
Long before serving in Vietnam, I learned the potential for fatal consequences when gun ownership and fear are combined.
The year was 1959. I was eleven years old. So was my friend, Louis, who lived in a house on the next block with his mother and younger sister. His father, who was serving in the U.S. military overseas, was rarely home.
During the sweltering summers in the San Fernando Valley, Louis sometimes liked to sleep on his back porch. His mother, made nervous by the fact that her husband was usually away, kept a loaded gun in their house.
One night, she awakened to the sound of someone moving on the porch. She grabbed the gun and opened fire. It wasn’t until after Louis fell that she realized she had killed her son.
Gun ownership claimed two victims that night: Louis and a grieving mother left to live out her life knowing that she had taken her son’s life.
A gun is not a shield
Dorner allegedly exchanged fire with an armed LAPD officer who was fortunate that the bullet fired by Dorner’s rifle merely grazed his head. Two other Riverside officers were also armed, but that didn’t prevent both of them from being shot while sitting at a red light inside their patrol car. Tragically, one of those two officers died.
Almost daily, we are bombarded by stories of gun-related homicides, including numerous instances of mass murder. Yet, stories of armed citizens preventing these tragic events by way of guns used in self-defense are almost as scarce as hen’s teeth.
What we do see, in events like these, is the danger that can arise for everyone within range when bullets fly and nerves are shattered. The chaos of battle and the palpable fear that comes with it can impair the judgment of even highly trained law enforcement personnel — a danger that is enhanced, not reduced by widespread, civilian possession of firearms.
The financial incentive behind the “more guns make us safe” canard of the NRA — the propaganda arm of the weapons industry — is understandable. The fact that so many Americans have permitted these shameless propagandists to manipulate their fear is not.
Courage does not come from buying firearms. It can be found only in those who stand boldly against the insanity of a heavily armed America and against those who choose to willfully misinterpret the 2nd Amendment.
Bravo, Earnest. Thank you for this powerful statement exposing the myth of safety in gun ownership.
Tragic story indeed.
But, please tie in (somewhere) how the police firing on two innocent women exposes a fallacy in the NRA’s “Guns make us safer” claim. Maybe I missed something??? Because the police being armed is what the second amendment (well armed militia) is all about IMO. Are you proposing that we disarm the police?
You should write the story, it was quite interesting, and then try to write a sensible headline. The purpose of the headline is to pique interest. But I think the story is supposed to expound on that interest.
If the Times had bothered to count bullet holes in the truck they would be sure that more than 30 shots were fired. 😉
Speaking of guns…Nanci Pelosi fully supports the First Amendment Right to have a gun.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/02/10/pelosi_confuses_first_amendment_and_second_amendment.html
WingnutSteve said @ 2:
I’ll take a shot at this one.
Ernie’s argument detailing how guns — certainly in this case, and in the case of his childhood friend who was killed by his own mom — do not make us safer is quite clear.
Now, if the headline had been “Mistaken Response to Ex-Cop’s Rampage Exposes Fallacy in Second Amendment”, or something, you might have a case to make here. In this case, however, Ernie is not arguing against the 2nd Amendment, but rather, the silly “guns make us safer” argument.
I know you’re always looking for something to bicker with Ernie about, but I think your hair trigger response may have widely missed your intended target this time.
But the point he’s trying to make has nothing to do with the killer on the loose, or the child who was shot by his mother. It’s that the police gunning down a couple of innocent women i.e. the mistaken response to the rampage, exposes a fallacy in the NRA logic. NRA logic, dogma, or any other nonsense has absolutely nothing to do with police action as far as I know. It has everything to do with personal ownership of guns.
Nancy Pelosi said something about…
So if bullets are speech that must mean that guns are people!
… it’s all becoming clear to me now…
This is a pretty simple one, Steve. If “guns make us safer”, as the NRA argues, and yet people (even trained police) who are under stress and/or fear using guns to defend themselves results in innocent people getting shot at and killed, then guns don’t make us safer. In the cases discussed in Ernie’s story above, the use of guns led to a woman killing her own son, and a trained police force nearly killing two woman in a blue truck, rather than a black man in a gray truck, in a hail of bullets.
But, other than those two deadly and near-deadly examples of gun use by both trained and untrained individuals alike, of course, “guns make us safer”.
You really missed the mark on this one WingnutSteve.
But if you are looking for an alternative, equally accurate title, you can find it in the comment Julie R. Butler provided @1.
“Exposing the myth of safety in gun ownership”
Q: What’s the difference between a jellyfish and a lawyer?
A: One’s a spineless, poisonous blob. The other is a form of sea life.
Oh, by the way. If you’re prepared to state that a failed police action is a hit against the NRA policy, then you must also be prepared to state that the millions of safely and successfully conducted armed police actions are positives regarding the NRA policy.
As Teflon St Ron was wont to say (a lot): mistakes were made ( and nobody could have seen them coming).
In this situation, the cops were just doing what the good guys with guns do: shoot first (and unload as many rounds as possible), a bad guy has a gun somewhere.
Evidently there is a new type of suicide-by-cop in LA town.
That would be if you want to commit suicide drive around in a truck that looks like Dorner’s.
If you want a quicker result, put on a mask that makes you look like him, and perhaps a bumper sticker that says “I hate cops.”
That should do the trick.
Steve,
It’s as if you stick your head into a redolent fifty pound cheese ball and then start screaming with attitude,”I don’t see no fucking cheese! And I don’t smell it either! And where are the mice??!!! If my head was so stuck in cheese, I’d surely see mice!!!”
You’re not gonna understand this one, Steve. You’re not gonna understand it cuz you don’t want to understand it. Better to forget about it, leave the rest of us alone, and go take a nice comforting nap with your assault weapons under your pillow. Just please make sure the safety’s on. Don’t want to have to put up with you coming back from the dead bitching and moaning about how you didn’t blow your own fucking head off.
Nice going, WingnutSteve @10.
Unable to provide anything remotely resembling a coherent refutation of the core issue presented by this article, you’ve resorted to ad hominem.
While Brad has a rule against personal attacks, I, for one, am glad you resorted to it. I find it entertaining to watch a disingenuous ideologue self implode.
Oh relax ya knucklehead, it’s a friggin’ joke!
And David, you’re rambling. Incoherently.
You can add the Empire State Building shooting from last year to this list. Shooter shot (and killed?) one person. Responding NYPD wounded another 11 attempting to shoot the shooter.
Why Steve,
I’m flattered that you’ve added something I’ve written to the litany of perfectly comprehensible things you seem completely incapable of comprehending.
Fabulous, WingnutSteve @16. I note that your resort to an ad hominem attack on me reflects an instance in which a disingenuous ideologue has self-imploded, and you respond by calling me “a knucklehead.”
Archie Bunker step aside. This guy’s really funny!
David, I can only guess that you are as close minded as Ernie is on this topic, and we all know his feelings on the NRA. He’s made that quite clear. And there are numerous reasons to criticize them, hell they likely would offer the counterpoint argument to a nuclear disarmament debate. I just don’t happen to think a mistake by the police, a huge mistake is one of those reason. Seems to me the police were at fault….
Lighten up a bit Ernie. I admire the passion you obviously have, and the effort you put into what you do. Anybody who does that is deserving of praise, and you definitely have earned it. So bravo Zulu to you ernie! I didn’t mean anything by the lawyer joke, or by the knucklehead jab.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need a cup of tea STAT.
Steve @ 20,
Yes, exactly, that’s the only thing you can imagine, on that and some many other topics.
BIOYA
(sorry about the “bioya”. I was late in attempting to delete it.)(anger issues)
If I had a dollar for every time I wished I’d deleted something five seconds after hitting submit I could take the wife out for a nice night on the town. Hell, maybe even a weekend!
Anyone else notice that Wingnut Steve is not so much engaging in discussion as he is filibustering the comments page? He might as well be typing in the contents of the phone book. I suppose he feels that every minute he can tie up Ernest and Brad with responding to his nonsense is one less minute they have to work on their next relevant post. Oh well.
My sincere apologies Brad and Ernie. I had no idea me leaving a few harmless comments was keeping you tied up and preventing you from accomplishing important stuff.
Both your friend’s mom and the LAPD officers who fired at the newspaper delivery ladies violated one of the most basic rules of firearms safety, i.e. don’t shoot until you identify the target. The LAPD officers who were involved should lose their jobs.
What I don’t understand is why you think that because some people (including police officers) act like idiots with firearms, that justifies denying them to everyone else. Do you feel the same way about sharp objects or vehicles?
While you may not see it reported as frequently as it should be, firearms deter criminals. Do a little reading on hot burglaries in the UK vs the US and then get back to me.
John Jay(aka mr strawman),
Could you get back to US on where anyone here has ever advocated denying guns to everyone? We await your apology for attributing(with attitude)shit to others that they have never shat.
John Jay @27:
Aside from the fact that “firearms safety” appears to be an oxymoron, Jay, I think you’ve missed the point entirely.
No one receives a greater level of firearms training than police officers, but fear and extreme stress can overcome the “basic rule” you describe even when it has been drummed into an individual over and over again, as it is for all law enforcement and military service personnel.
Next, John Jay states:
Setting aside the inconvenient truth that ready access to firearms, given the giant gun show and internet loopholes to background checks, make it easy for criminals to acquire firearms that are used to carry out crimes, both you and WingnutSteve gloss over a core point I made in the article:
Can you identify even a single mass killing that was stopped by a private citizen with a gun (as opposed to mass killings that ended when the shooter was taken out by trained law enforcement personnel)?
As to motor vehicles, which, unlike guns, are not designed to take human lives, there are laws governing who can drive them and how they are driven. Those motor vehicle codes are far stricter than U.S. laws governing access to and use of firearms. I don’t see motor vehicle owners screaming about losing their freedoms because the government regulates their use. Have you?
Finally, both you and Steve have erected a straw man (“taking guns away”) argument that goes beyond the core point of this piece — the erroneous NRA claim that more guns = greater safety.
A Harvard University School School of Public Health study reveals that, to the contrary, “where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearms homicide.”
Why are you and other gun enthusiasts so resistant to empirical data?
Just under two weeks ago a student at a Middle School in Atlanta was stopped by an armed security guard after shooting only one student. This was not widely reported by the “mainstream” media as they had just recently, following the Sandy Hook tragedy, lambasted the NRA for suggesting such a ridiculous thing as armed guards in schools.
This demonstrates the power of the media and how dangerous it is. Not so much in what they report but in what they choose to not report, or to downplay as insignificant. Google it, I didn’t find one story by the Obama controlled MSCNBCABCMSBNCFUCKERS
Plus, your “strawman” claim against me is a flat out LIE. One day you get your feelings hurt about a lawyer joke from a lawyer joke of the day website. The next you repay by lying? Whatever it takes huh?
WingnutSteve misfired again @ 30:
He was not “stopped by an armed security guard”. The kid had stopped himself! He had a disagreement with the student who was shot and then he stopped shooting. This was not a mass shooting, and these facts were accurately reported by the media outlets who covered them. Even the “MSCNBCABCMSBNCFUCKERS”. For example…
It was covered similarly in every mainstream outlet. Unlike Sandy Hook, which you misleadingly compare this to, only one student was shot, not fatally, during a disagreement, and the victim was a specific intended target, as opposed to a random entire classroom of 6 year olds.
And, yes, all the “MSCNBCABCMSBNCFUCKERS” reported that he was apprehended and disarmed by the security guard.
So, in short, WTF are you talking about?
How did I compare this to Sandy Hook? What the hell, is the truth just whatever the hell you decide to say it is?
It was mentioned in passing by those outlets. It was glossed over, and if you search for armed security at school disarms student you won’t find mainstream media reporting on it.
WNS @ #30,
Steve,
You continue to reveal yourself to be an astonishingly unreliable witness. Whether it’s in reporting your version of events from the outside world or in responding to your own misinterpretations of opposing opinions written here, you are more often than not incredibly wide of the mark.
Wonder when the taking-responsibility-republican in you will ever feel like taking any for such a marked tendency to get so many things so wrong.
WingnutSteve @ 33 asked:
…After forgetting that he had said, just three comments earlier @ 30 [emphasis added for the memory impaired]:
You’re welcome.
I said the media lambasted the NRA following the Sandy Hook tragedy for wanting to put armed guards in schools. I never compared this shooting to Sandy Hook.
This is getting to be deliciously funny.
I level a challenge @29 to John Jay and WingnutSteve:
WingnutSteve, without providing a link, responds:
Steve excuses his failure to provide the link by claiming:
Brad then links to four articles from the “MSCNBCABCMSBNCFUCKERS,” and other journalistic sources, which covered the incident. Those articles reveal that Steve’s comment was factually inaccurate and that it evaded the specificity of my question in the following respects:
a) This was not a mass shooting. It was a personal grudge in which one student shot another and then surrendered his weapon.
b) The individual whom Steve claims “stopped” the shooting did not meet the criteria of my question — “a private citizen with a gun.” To the contrary, he was an “off-duty Atlanta police officer working as a school resource officer.”
c) That police officer did not stop a mass shooting in progress, but, instead “disarmed and apprehended the suspect immediately after the shooting.”
Predictably, when confronted with the blatantly inaccurate information, our resident right-wing ideologue lacked either the courage or integrity to acknowledge his error.
You should feel good about it Ernie, its a bunch of mumbo jumbo distracting from the fact that a failed police action has nothing to do with NRA policy
You know, WingnutSteve, if it had been anyone else, I’d conclude from your comment @38 that you just don’t get it.
Given that your track record at this blog reveals that you lack even an ounce of integrity, I can only conclude that you choose to pretend that you don’t understand the core point of this article which, as Brad observed is “quite clear.”
You have not succeeded in fooling anyone here. You have succeeded in making an utter fool of yourself.