Self Defense........Your Right To Survive

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

This is the most thought provoking analysis of the national failure to protect children and the most logical suggestions for thwarting future attacks I have seen

 Really good guidance! ........From a West Point Professor

 

Our real problem is denial. From Lt. Col. Dave Grossman 

By Doug Wyllie

 

"How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America

in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50

years... How many? Zero. That's right. Not one single kid has been

killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a

century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?"

So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave

Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology

professor, and without a doubt the world's foremost expert on human

aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace

Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large

community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.

Grossman's talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law

enforcement, such as the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot

wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others.

But violence among and against children was how the day began, and so

I'll focus on that issue here.

"In 1999," Grossman said, "school violence claimed what at the time was

an all time record number of kids' lives. In that year there were 35

dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the

school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say,

'That's the year Columbine happened, that's an anomaly.' Well, in 2004

we had a new all time record - 48 dead in the schools from violence. How

many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let's assign some grades. Put your

teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give

the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An 'A,' right? Reluctantly,

reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an 'A,' right? Danged

firefighters, they sleep 'till they're hungry and eat 'till they're

tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence?

Come on, what's our grade? Needs improvement, right?"

Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student

"Why can't we be like little Johnny Firefighter?" Grossman asked as he

prowled the stage. "He's our A+ student!"

He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall

like thunder, "Denial, denial, denial!"

Grossman commanded, "Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They're hard to spot - they're painted black - but they're there.

While you're looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You

know that that stuff was selected because it's fire-retardant. Now look

over there above the door - you see that fire exit sign? That's not just

any fire exit sign - that's a 'battery-backup-when-the-world-ends- it-will-still-be-lit' fire exit sign."

Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall,

Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed,

"Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they're what?!

Fireproof or fire retardant. There is not one stinking thing in this

room that will burn!"

Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, "But you've

still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants

outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these

fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this

fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single

kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!

"But you try to prepare for violence - the thing much more likely to

kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to

kill our kids in schools - and people think you're paranoid. They think

you're crazy. ...They're in denial."

Teaching the Teachers

The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to

overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first

overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school

administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers,

although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public,

must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep

that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must

train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are

intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what

they can do in the event of an attack.

"Come with me to the library at Columbine High School," Grossman said.

"The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.

"But the thing most likely to kill her kids - the thing hundreds of

times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn't have a clue what

to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian's office but she

didn't know that. So she did the worst thing possible - she tried to

secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide

in the library - a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It's

an aquarium, it's a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl.

What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish

bowl."

Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a

fraction of the money they'd spent preparing for fire doing lockdown

drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers

they face, the outcome that day may have been different.

Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, "If somebody had spent five

minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have

been saved at Columbine?"

Arming Campus Cops is Elementary

" Never call an unarmed man 'security'," Grossman said.

"Call him 'run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up' but never

call an unarmed man security.

"Imagine if someone said, 'I want a trained fire professional on site. I

want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No

fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge,

the uniform - that will keep us safe - but we have no need for fire

extinguishers.' Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane,

delusional, legally liable, to say, 'I want a trained security

professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform,

and I want a security badge, but I don't want a gun.' It's not the hat,

the uniform, or the badge. It's the tools in the hands of a trained

professional that keeps us safe.

"Our problem is not money," said Grossman. "It is denial."

Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important

things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or

next-to-nothing.

Grossman's Five D's

Let's contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman's

"Five D's." While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area

below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.

1. Denial - Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said

Grossman.

2. Deter - Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer

assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school

drops to almost zero

3. Detect - We're talking about plain old fashioned police work here.

The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn't

happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is

paramount.

4. Delay - Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.

a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry.

Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target.

b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with)

the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what

it looks like when you do your response.

5. Destroy - Police officers and agencies should consider the following:

a. Carry off duty . No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire

extinguisher in his trunk that he's crazy or paranoid.

b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle . One chief of police,

upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, "If an active killer

strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per

second."

c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America . Any

infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue

under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent

job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the

function.

d. Have a "go-to-war bag " filled with lots of loaded magazines and

supplies for tactical combat casualty care.

e. Use helicopters . Somewhere in your county you probably have one or

more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast

guard rotors.

f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have

available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your

active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put

well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300

pounds per square inch.

g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal

take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing

is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather

than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.

Coming Soon: External Threats

Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that

had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also

must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered

children in their own religion - they have killed wantonly, mercilessly,

and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you

think they'd think of killing our kids?

"Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know

what they're going to do next? No! But one thing they've done in every

country they've messed with is killing kids in schools," Grossman said.

The latest al Qaeda charter states that "children are noble targets" and

Osama bin Laden himself has said that "Russia is a preview for what we

will do to America."

What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this

context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 - the very day on

which children across that country merrily make their return to school

after the long summer break - radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya

took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the

three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more

than half of whom were children.

"If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help

them understand the terrorist's plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by

John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they're planning

to do to the United States," he said.

Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in

America. It would require every enlisted person and every officer in the

entire Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps combined to put just one

armed guard on every school bus in the country.

As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford

our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them

from fire . Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for

violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that

today.

Self Defense........Your Right To Survive

• Posted by RJ on March 17, 2013 at 6:01pm

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

Woman Defends Herself From Intruders: Best Part… She Wasn’t Arrested for Doing So

By Regis Giles / 23 March 2013

Yesterday, March 22, 2013, two teenagers decided to break into a home in Elm City, North Carolina, around 10:43 a.m.  What they didn’t realize was that this would cost them dearly.

The homeowner, a female of an unknown age, was hiding in the closet when 18-year-old Christopher Devonte Joseph approached her.  The local ABC news report stated that’s when the owner fired her gun and shot the 18-year-old.  Both suspects fled the scene, but Christopher was found 300 feet from the home and I imagine it’s because he was badly wounded.

“The other suspect, 16-year-old Michael Daquarius Bynum, fled into a wooded area and was eventually located and arrested. He’s being held on a $25,000 bond.”

At the end of the news story, I read that the homeowner “would not face any charges.”  Now as “no duh” as it may seem that she would not face charges, this woman could have very well been sued and even spent some prison time for defending her life.

Like in the case of 90-year-old San Francisco resident Jay Leone.  Mr. Leone’s attacker, Samuel Cutrufelli who shot Leone in the face after breaking into his home, sued the 90-year-old for “negligently shooting him”.

Or in the case of Dennis Fleming, 61-year-old New Hampshire resident, who fired a warning shot to hold up a burglar.  Fleming was arrested with the burglar and faced the same prison time (7 years) as the man who broke into his home and his neighbor’s home.

I applaud North Carolina’s law enforcement for upholding this woman’s constitutional right to defend her life and home.  It is a shame that we have come to a time in history where we applaud the obvious.

http://girlsjustwannahaveguns.com/2013/03/woman-defends-herself-fro...

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

The UN Small Arms Treaty Talks Are Getting Serious – Where’s The Outrage?

Posted on: March 18th, 2013

From March 18-28 the United Nations will again meet with an updated draft to try to finalize passage of its Small Arms Treaty. However it doesn’t seem to be a story, despite being less than 24 hours away. Conservative blogs and sites are as guilty as the Mainstream Media. Almost no one is speaking out against a Treaty that has the ability to change America, and the world as we know it, forever. To give credit where credit is due I will say that the NRA has not dropped this fight. It just seems that most everyone else views it as a non-story. As of this morning I found six total sources reporting the story within the last two days. I consider that unacceptable. Here is a quote from NRA opposes U.N. arms treaty, which was published earlier today in The Washington Post:

“The NRA is among the treaty’s most vocal opponents and a founder of the World Forum on Shooting Activities, an international coalition of gun rights activists and gun manufacturers who plan to speak against the treaty.

‘What we really object to is the inclusion of civilian firearms within the scope of the ATT,’ said Tom Mason, the group’s executive secretary and a lawyer who has represented the NRA at U.N. meetings for nearly two decades. ‘This is a treaty that really needs to address the transfer of large numbers of military weapons that leads to human rights abuses. We have submitted language that you can define what a civilian firearm is.’

Continue reading at freedomoutpost.com

Read more: http://patriotoutdoornews.com/5928/the-un-small-arms-treaty-talks-a...

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

SECOND AMENDMENT

Last Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved legislation to ban assault weapons, limit the size of magazines, and require universal background checks. Sen. Cruz, along with all the other Republicans on the committee, voted against this legislation, which is now headed for the Senate floor.

During the committee meeting, Sen. Cruz raised serious constitutional concerns with Congress infringing our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Here is a video of his remarks. 

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

South Central LA Tea Party Founder, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson spoke at a recent Glendale City Council hearing on banning gun shows from city property.

Countless Second Amendment advocates spoke eloquently and factually about how banning gun shows does nothing to make communities safer.

Defying logic and common sense the City Council and mayor voted 3-2 to ban future gun shows.

After the belligerent Glendale Mayor Frank Quintero shouted down a couple of the speakers, Rev. Jesse Peterson confronted the mayor and they had a very heated exchange.

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

Cam Edwards talks to Sheriff Terry Maketa - El Paso County, Colorado - For more information, go to: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/10/colorado-sheri...