Victim disarmament: the gift that keeps on killing

Lots of folks remember the big shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. They should. The Army paid for the medical education of Nidal Malik Hasan, a radical Muslim born in this country of Palestinian immigrants. Hasan volunteered, of course. The Army even promoted him to major and gave him the responsibility of caring for his fellow soldiers. Instead he went to work one day and shot more than 40 of them, all unarmed, killing 13.

It’s not like nobody knew this guy was trouble. According to The Washington Post, Hasan made a presentation during his final year of residency at Walter Reed Army Hospital called “The Quranic World View as It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military,” which was not well received. He suggested the Department of Defense should allow “Muslims Soldiers” (sic) to muster out as conscientious objectors to “decrease adverse events,” which he listed to include refusal to deploy, espionage, and killing of fellow soldiers.

(Who knew?! Who could have guessed?!)

This guy had traded e-mails with radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. The FBI knew it. Retired Colonel Terry Lee, who had worked with Hasan, told Fox News that Hasan made “outlandish” statements against the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, that “the Muslims should stand up and fight against the aggressor,” meaning the United States.

Come on. I’m all for severely reduced foreign deployments, but we went into Afghanistan because they harbored bin Laden, who was rich enough to cause trouble because the British and Americans showed the Arabs how to drill for oil. Other than making them rich, the main sins of the oppressor appear to be introducing bluejeans and Kentucky Fried Chicken and allowing women to drive.

Hasan claimed people had it in for him because he was Muslim. In fact, today’s Politically Correct Army brass bent over backward to ignore all these warning signs, rather than stand accused of being “anti-Muslim”! After all, you wouldn’t have kicked someone out of one of our nuclear facilities, back in the 1950s or ‘60s, just because he had a Russian accent and kept talking about how the Workers of the World should stand up against American imperialism, would you?

The Army wouldn’t even charge Hasan with “terrorism.” Maybe they think all 40 of those guys were having affairs with the killer’s wife. Oh, wait: no wife!

At any rate, they finally did manage to get one thing right: Hasan has been convicted of multiple counts of murder. Maybe, just maybe, before he dies of old age, someone will march him outside and shoot him. One suspects Vinegar Joe Stillwell would have dealt with the matter more expeditiously.

But meantime, the Army continued to ignore the bigger underlying problem. Fort Hood is an Army base, right? So why were all of Hasan’s victims unarmed?

Now, it’s happened again. On April 2 of this year, 34-year-old Puerto Rican national Ivan Lopez, an Iraq War veteran with four children, grew upset that he was having trouble getting “family leave,” so he drove around the huge Texas base with a .45-caliber pistol, shooting 20 people, killing four, including a couple of sergeants.

It was later revealed that Specialist Lopez, who was in uniform at the time, wasn’t authorized to carry a concealed firearm.

Hey! Another “gun ban” gets the job done!

Finally, someone seems to have gotten the picture. “Stockman blames gun control for Fort Hood shooting, renews push to let troops go armed,” read the headline in the Dallas Morning News.

In the wake of the April 2 shootings, Texas Congressman “Steve Stockman today blamed gun control advocates and renewed a call to end gun bans at military bases. ‘Only the most out-of-touch radical would try to disarm soldiers,’ said the Clear Lake Republican. ‘It’s time to repeal this deadly anti-gun law before it creates another mass killing. This is another tragedy created by anti-gun activists.’

Stockman introduced the Safe Military Bases Act last September, after a mass shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., that left 12 people plus the gunman dead. The bill would strike down laws passed in the 1990s that prohibit most service members from carrying weapons on base.”

Gee, who was in charge in Washington during the 1990s? I’m trying to remember.

If active duty members of the armed forces aren’t qualified to carry firearms for their own defense — while ATF SWAT teams and BLM cow-counters and FDA chicken inspectors are — I don’t think we have to ask why our wars keep going so badly.

Gun control: The gift that keeps on killing.

‘GUNS DO NOT MAKE US SAFER’

Meantime, Lauren Fox of U.S. News & World Report filed a piece July 8 on the growing battle over “open carry” in retail stores.

“Last week, after a month of demonstrations, Target became the latest business to request shoppers leave their guns at home in an effort to maintain a ‘family-friendly shopping and work experience.’” The retail giant joined such firms as Starbucks, Chipotle, Wendy’s and Jack in the Box that have “taken a stand against ‘open carry’ gun advocates who want to underscore their right to bear arms by carrying guns in stores and other public places.”

Yet “Target’s position on firearms in their stores is merely a suggestion, not a policy they plan to enforce,” Ms. Fox adds. “Customers who enter the store with guns will not be asked to leave if they are following local laws.”

“While this is not a ban on legally possessed firearms in its stores, we will continue to honor our months-long policy of not taking long arms into Target stores or any other business,” a spokesman for Open Carry Texas wrote on that group’s web site. “Engaging in the businesses of interfering with or making a scene at private corporations is something to which Open Carry Texas has never lowered itself, a practice we will maintain.” The group’s statement did not mention handguns, which under Texas law must be concealed in public.

“I am not really sure what they are trying to do,” comments Allison Anderman, a staff attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a group that pushes to enable future genocides by demanding even more gun bans. “People are forgetting that the rest of the country does not want to live in a society where we walk around with guns. Most of society recognizes the truth that guns do not make us safer.”

Actually, Allison, guns DO make us safer. If you don’t believe it, go convince the police they’ll be safer once they give up their guns, and let us know how you do.

What’s that? “Police have to go out on the streets where there are violent criminals every day”? Yes they do. Just like the rest of us. In fact, given that the average purse-snatcher is more likely to try and knock down an elderly lady than a uniformed cop, which has the GREATER need for a self-defense handgun?

Go read about “Bitches with Guns” at www.aware.org/resources/women-guns-articles/12-lyn-bates/107-bitches-with-guns, Allison. Explain to me how Maryann Watkins would have been “safer” without a gun.

Also, please ask the Jews and Romani (Gypsies) of central Europe whether they found they ended up “safer” by giving up their guns as required by local “gun control” laws is the 1920s and ‘30s. Oh, wait. They’re pretty much all dead, aren’t they? Dead, but much “safer,” darn it!

BUT SOME CIVILIANS ARE MORE EQUAL

Many retailers have banned firearms — supposedly — for years. “At Buffalo Wild Wings, Whole Foods . . . and Costco Wholesale, to name a few, it is not merely a request; it is the rule,” U.S. News reports. “On its website, the membership-only club Costco states that it ‘does not believe that it is necessary for firearms to be brought into its warehouse stores.’”

The pro-gun website Second Amendment Check has a 40-business long boycott list where they urge their members not to shop. That list includes Costco, Whole Foods, IKEA, Cinemark, AMC Theatres, Hooters, Toys R Us, The New York Times Company and others.

Good idea.

U.S. Bankcorp, the parent company for U.S. Bank, sent a letter to a customer in 2013 alerting him that guns were not allowed on the property. “Please refrain from bringing any weapon onto U.S. Bank premises in the future,” stated the letter, which got posted online. “Further action will be taken if a U.S. Bank employee observes or learns that you or any other customer is in possession of a weapon on U.S. Bank premises.”

Notice anything consistent about these statements from outfits like Costco and U.S. Bank?

They’re lies. These firms have not banned firearms from their premises. The next time you see police entering one of these firms to investigate a holdup or other crime, watch to see if those officers carefully leave their duty weapons in their cars. Of course they won’t, nor will they be asked to. What the CEOs of these firms mean is that they welcome all the firepower any agent of the government wishes to haul inside; it’s only us shuffling, drooling peasants who are barred from self-defense.

I’ll even tell you when this will end.

First, since stores are private property, I believe owners have a right to set any restrictions they want on who can enter. Shirts, shoes, guns, they get to decide. The main opposition to this common-sense notion, of course, is the federal government itself. It’s the federal courts that stripped business owners of this property right, in their well-intentioned search for a way to ban discrimination based on race, by saying owners have no such right if they’re operating a “public accommodation,” which magically covers just about everything. So let me see, would it be “discriminatory” if they tried to strip non-police civilians of a constitutional right they happily allow police civilians to exercise? . . . Oh, never mind.

To end this plethora of “no guns for you peasants” signs, all anyone who has a relative injured or killed by bad guys inside such a store has to do is find a good gun-rights attorney, and sue on the grounds the WILLFUL placement of such a sign prevented law-abiding gun owners from carrying their weapons into that establishment, where they could have been used to protect the innocent. Remember, the deaths or injuries were thus caused by the store owners, WILLFULLY.

When depriving us of our God-given and constitutional right to self-defense starts to cost these guys big money, they’ll see the light.

On the bright aside, U.S. news notes Wal-Mart “allows” customers to carry handguns in accordance with local laws. And in Rifle, Colorado, at a little burger joint called Shooters Grill, your waitress may be packing heat when you order your “Locked and Loaded Nachos.”

“It is kind of a way of life here,” restaurant owner Lauren Boebert told CNN.

Vin Suprynowicz is the author of “Send in the Waco Killers,” “The Ballad of Carl Drega,” and “The Black Arrow.” His next novel, “The Testament of James,” is due in the fall. A version of this column appears in the current issue of “Shotgun News.”

5 Comments to “Victim disarmament: the gift that keeps on killing”

  1. MamaLiberty Says:

    Finally found a “no guns” sign here in NE Wyoming. One of the two dentists in town. No problem at all. I know which one I’ll be going to if I ever need to see a dentist. Funny thing is, I’ve never seen anyone go into the other guy’s office. Never saw a car parked out front. You don’t suppose he died some time ago and nobody noticed… I may never know. 🙂

  2. Victim disarmament: The gift that keeps on killing | Pro 2nd Amendment Boycott – P2AB Says:

    […] https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=1991
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  3. Steve Browne Says:

    Nice article – one quibble.

    You said, “because the British and Americans showed the Arabs how to drill for oil.”

    I worked in Saudi Arabia and I “made my year” as expats say. What really happened was that for two-three generations Western expats have made a good faith effort to teach the Saudis how to take over maintaining the oil fields with notable lack of success.

    All meaningful work is done by expat workers. Americans, Canadians and Europeans do the teaching and managing. English-speaking Indians and Filipinos do clerical work and Third-worlders do the heavy lifting and live under conditions you wouldn’t have trouble calling slavery.

    There are Turks and Kurds who run small businesses like restaurants, with a nominal Saudi owner whose picture appears on the business license, but is never seen at the business.

  4. Robert Says:

    Vin, I always read your articles that are posted in Shotgun News and was surprised when visiting the R-J site that you had left. Thank you for your support of the Second Amendment and our Constitutional rights. Most people who read those first ten amendments posted by the founders do not know that they included those as “God given rights”, not ones allowed by the government. I worked at the R-J in the early 1990s but do not know if we crossed paths. I worked for Jim Wood in the accounting/business department then transferred to Display Advertising, my long time profession. I was a close friend of Dave Osborn and knew Emmett Jones from when we both worked for the Ontario Daily Report. I was working there when Donrey bought it in 1967 and met Don Reynolds at that time. I was also good friends with Jim Dimmitt our relationship going back to when we worked in the press-room at the Report during the 1960s. I am now 81 years old and retired but I still miss the newspaper business. Anyway good luck in your future ventures. By the way, I also wrote a short book about my job as publisher in Payson, AZ and got into it with the town fathers. There was corruption in the town hall and I was going to expose it. They got me fired and I lost everything but my self respect. It is titled CODE OF SILENCE and you can get it on the Amazon kindle site.

  5. A.D. Hopkins Says:

    Interesting that Costco is listed as a store that bans firearms within the store. I frequently go to the Costco on Pavilion Drive (same location where an armed citizen was gunned down by Metro Police after he was asked to leave for accidentally exposing a firearm. He allegedly pulled the same gun on arriving police officers before they shot him, though this is disputed.) Yet this Costco has not yet posted a sign announcing any such gun ban, as required by Nevada law, even though the failure to do so has already cost a life. I agree with Vin’s points including the one that a private business has the right to ban firearms, but if that’s their policy they should, as required by law, make it clear to customers.