As research has shown time and again, gun ownership reduces violent crime and saves innocent lives.   

Here are three excellent examples of guns saving lives:
1.   In May, a man entered a restaurant in Oklahoma and shot a mother and her daughter.  The bad guy was then shot and killed by an armed citizen.  We don't know why the shooter attacked or what the circumstances were when he was stopped by the armed citizen.  However, the most important detail of this story is that the two victims were expected to survive but the criminal did not.   

2.  Then, in June, Jordan Corter attempted to rape his friend's Mom during a sleepover.  He woke up her in the middle of the night and pushed her onto the bed.  This young man realized she wasn't an easy victim though when she pointed her gun at his head!  Thankfully, this confrontation ended with no shots fired.

3.  The most unbelievable story to me was of the carjacker shot and killed at Walmart in June in Washington state.  Tim Day went on a rampage attempting to steal several cars at gunpoint and firing shots inside of a Walmart.  Two armed citizens responded to the gunfire and finally put an end to the rampage by killing him.  Similar to the Taco Bell attempted robbery, I blogged about a while ago, the bad guy found himself outnumbered by good guys with guns!  I think these guys handled the situation perfectly.  David George, a paramedic and a pastor, put himself between his family and the the bad guy.  When he saw Mr. Day shoot (and paralyze) Mr. Fievez while trying to steal his car, he realized it was time to act.  I'm thankful these armed citizen put themselves in harm's way to stop an evil man from inflicting more terror and to save innocent lives.

#GunsSaveLives 
#MoreGunsLessCrime
#RVAtrain
#RVAready

I was shocked to see the viral video of the FBI agent who accidentally shot someone while dancing in a Denver night club.  This guys has moves but loses his gun while doing a back flip.  Then, he accidentally fires a shot while quickly grabbing the pistol off of the floor.  Thankfully, no one was killed by his shot.

Observations:
1. When carrying a gun, you should always be aware its presence.  This should obviously prevent you from attempting back flips or doing a ninja warrior course.  If you need to do acrobatics while carrying, you should get a level 2 retention holster.
2. This would have been a non-event if the officer had exercised trigger finger discipline.  The second rule of safe gun handling is to "ALWAYS Keep Your Finger Off of the Trigger Until Ready to Shoot."  A gun will only shoot if the trigger is pressed.  This was a stressful situation and the agent wanted to quickly cover-up his mistake.  Unfortunately, he grabbed the gun by the trigger instead of correctly picking it up with his finger off of the trigger.  
​3. I notice that the agent picked up the gun with his left hand but then holsters his gun with his right.  He appears to be a right handed shooter but used his left hand to grab the gun since it was on his left side.  One good take-away for all of us is to practice safe gun handling with our non-dominant hand.   

In my last entry, I wrote about a Maryland high school shooting that was stopped thanks to the bravery of a School Resource Officer who confronted the shooter.    This occurred right after the Parkland shooting and hardly received any media coverage.  

The same scenario happened again last month.  We all heard about the horrific shooting in Santa Fe, TX  where a 17 year old young man killed ten people and injured ten others at a high school.  Did you hear there was also a school shooting in Illinois last month?   I'm not surprised if you didn't - I had to find coverage via the British network BBC!   

I'm so tired of mass shootings and attempted mass shootings.  The excerpt below is how they should all end:

"Neither the officer nor any students were hurt in Wednesday morning's confrontation at Dixon High School.  The suspect was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries."

I'm so thankful that Mark Dallas was at Dixon High School that day and was brave enough to protect the lives of all the innocent people there.  Guns save lives.  

Did you hear about the school shooting in Maryland last week?  I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't - it didn't make the same splash with the news media that the one in Parkland, FL on Valentine's Day did.  Why wasn't it as widely reported?

This shooting doesn't fit the narrative of the anti-gun crowd because an armed School Resource Officer (SRO) stopped the shooter in less than minute.   As I mentioned in my previous post about the Parkland shooting, gun control doesn't stop mass shootings.   The bullets stopped flying when the shooter was confronted by a gun pointing at him.  We aren't sure if he killed himself or if the SRO shot him.  Its clear though that he was looking for easy victims and wasn't expecting a trained and violent response.

Why didn't gun control stop this crime?  Maryland has some of the toughest gun laws in the country.  The shooter was only  17 - he was not legally allowed to purchase or own the handgun he used.  Bad guys will always have guns or other weapons to cause carnage.  ​

After such a cold winter, I'm glad that warm weather is finally returning to Central Virginia.  I'm excited to get outside to my range and do some shooting.  Shooting is my favorite hobby.  I like to practice and sharpen my skills in many different disciplines with different firearms.  Of course, it is more than a hobby since I also have learned the skills (that I will hopefully never need) to defend my life and the lives of those important to me.  If you'd like to take the next step to learn shooting as a hobby or to learn to use a firearm for self-defense (or both!), this is the perfect time.   

Contact me to schedule your course.  

I've written before about the risk of shooting guns in the air to celebrate.  Those bullets will all fall back to earth and could hurt someone or something.  When we talk about the rules of safe gun handling during our courses, we always reinforce that a gun should always be pointed in a safe direction - one that can stop a bullet without damaging anyone or anything.  Unfortunately, there are many incidents every year of gun owners break that rule and negligently shooting their guns in the air.  

I didn't realize that this was a common occurrence in RVA too until I saw this Richmond Times Dispatch article .  The Richmond Police took 181 calls about celebratory gunfire on New Years Eve and New Years Day 2018 and got 11 reports of property damage. (including the window and frame shown above).   I'm thankful that no one was killed or injured.  I work in Downtown Richmond and I really like the whole downtown area.  However, based on this, I recommend staying away from Downtown on New Years Eve and New Years Day!

Contact me if you'd like to learn to safety own and operate a gun.

Does your church or place of worship have a plan for the physical security of its members?   We just added a new course for Church Security Teams that involves case study of high profile church shootings and some discussion of what can be learned from them.  Then, the course moves to the shooting range, covers the basic topics of self-defense with a handgun and finishes with a timed competency exam.  Learn more about this course here.

In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, several people have asked me what I think about bump stocks.  Even though I don't own any bump stocks, I oppose ALL gun control legislation because it doesn't prevent bad people from doing bad things. Gun control only prevents good people from protecting themselves.  Virginia Citizens Defense League wrote an excellent summary on this topic that I've included below.  Short and sweet!

VCDL OPPOSES ANY LAWS BANNING, CONTROLLING, OR RESTRICTING BUMP-FIRE ACCESSORIES.

One of the key principles that VCDL has always maintained is that gun control is worthless for stopping, or even lowering, crime.  Gun control only infringes on the rights, safety, and security of good people, while handing a major tactical advantage to criminals or empowering political tyrants who wish to dominate a society. 

As Chicago shows every day, gun control actually makes life more dangerous for the person being controlled.  In Chicago they have as many murders each and every month as there were in that highly unusual event in Las Vegas.  Yet, the gun controllers are as quiet as church mice about that, as it is proof positive that gun control fails to make anyone, except criminals, safer.

Gun control was established in the United States with the primary purpose of keeping one minority or another from having access to guns, thus allowing those populations to be controlled more easily by another group, be it whites controlling blacks or Irish controlling Italians.

Way too many people start their thinking with a false premise:  "No one needs a machine gun, so no one needs an accessory that will make a semi-automatic shoot almost as fast as a machine gun."

In a free society, that is an odd statement.  Being free is not about what someone NEEDS (especially something that some legislator or nameless bureaucrat determines you NEED), but about what someone WANTS. 

None of us NEED an automobile that can go faster than 30 miles an hour.  Heck, none of us NEED an automobile.  None of us NEED a television set, much less 2 or 3 of them.  None of us NEED indoor plumbing.  But we WANT all of those things and much, much more!

If I want a machine gun because it is fun to shoot or I believe it would be useful for self-defense or for any other lawful reason, then I should be able to own one without seeking government permission.  (People whose lives are deemed more valuable than ours are surrounded by men with machine guns - the government clearly sees the benefit of machine guns for defense.) 

There are plenty of laws to take care of ANY misuse of that machine gun that I might commit.

Banning, or further controlling or restricting, bump-fire accessories is just more useless, feel good, gun control.  No, thanks.


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VA-ALERT is a project of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, Inc.
(VCDL). VCDL is an all-volunteer, non-partisan grassroots organization
dedicated to defending the human rights of all Virginians. The Right to
Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental human right.

VCDL web page: http://www.vcdl.org [http://www.vcdl.org/]



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