Posts Tagged ‘Foundation for Economic Education’

Self-Defense Shooting Roundup

Wednesday, February 7th, 2024

It’s been a while since we did a self-defense shooting roundup, so let’s dig into some recent examples.

  • First, an impressive statistic: “More People Use a Gun in Self-Defense Each Year Than Die in Car Accidents.”

    The U.S. Department of Justice investigated firearm violence from 1993 through 2011. The report found, “In 2007–2011, about 1 percent of nonfatal violent crime victims used a firearm in self-defense.” Anti-gun zealots attempt to use this statistic to discredit the use of a gun as a viable means of self-defense, and by extension, to discredit gun ownership in general.

    But look deeper into the numbers. During that five-year period, the Department of Justice confirmed a total of 338,700 defensive gun uses in both violent attacks and property crimes where a victim was involved. That equals an average of 67,740 defensive gun uses every year. In other words, according to the Justice Department’s own statistics, 67,740 people a year don’t become victims because they own a gun. (I suspect that if more states allowed concealed carry to be widespread, the number of instances of defensive gun uses would be even higher.)

    Is it significant that at least 67,740 individuals use a gun in self-defense each year? Well, in 2016, 37,461 people died in motor vehicle accidents in the United States; in 2015, the number was 35,092 people. Mark Rosekind, administrator of the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA), called those road fatalities “an immediate crisis.” If the NHTSA administrator considers it a crisis that approximately 37,000 people are dying annually from car accidents, then saving nearly twice that many people each year through the use of firearms is simply stunning.

    In reality, the Department of Justice findings about defensive gun uses are very conservative. A 2013 study ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and conducted by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council found that:

    Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence… Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million…in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008… On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey…”

    The most comprehensive study ever conducted about defensive gun use in the United States was a 1995 survey published by criminologist Gary Kleck in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. This study reported between 2.1 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses every year.

  • In Midland, a home owner shot and killed a burglar.

    The City of Midland tells NewsWest 9 that a suspect burglarized a north Midland home Saturday morning and was killed by the homeowner who used self-defense.

    According to the Midland Police Department, at about 4:09 a.m. on Saturday, officers responded to the 1400 block of Daventry Place due to a “disturbance with weapons.”

    Upon arrival, officers found a man identified as 37-year-old George Samuel Butler located at the scene, deceased.

    MPD determined that Butler entered the residence “by force with a rifle,” and then the homeowner placed Butler in a choke hold some time during the burglary.

    Butler was killed by the homeowner in a case of self-defense, according to the city.

    (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)

  • A similar story from Bartlesville, Oklahoma (north of Tulsa).

    Bartlesville Police say a woman shot and killed a man who broke into her apartment.

    Police say the man was 23 years old and that the woman told police she didn’t know him.

    Neighbors say the thing that surprised them the most is they didn’t expect something like this to happen in broad daylight when families are getting ready for work and kids ready for school.

    Bartlesville Police say a woman called 911 this morning and said someone was breaking into her apartment, then said she’d shot the intruder.

    The piece is light on shooting details and heavy on neighbors “I never thought such a thing could happen here blah blah blah” reaction quotes, so I’m chopping it off there.

  • Phoenix:

    A Phoenix homeowner shot a strange man last week when the intruder forced his way into the residence last week.

    According to the Arizona Family, it was just after 8 p.m. that night when the intruder attempted to force entry into the home.

    Police reports say this was when the homeowner shot the man.

    The intruder, later identified as 24-year-old Isaiah Roggenbuck, ran away from the home. Police found him in a nearby part of the neighborhood.

    Reports from the Arizona Family claim that Roggenbuck was found near a marijuana dispensary.

    This is my shocked face.

    Roggenbuck was charged with criminal trespassing.

  • In Houston, somebody robbed a guy at a gas pump and was promptly shot and killed by another guy, who then took off.

    Good on you, red car guy. I think the victim showed poor situational awareness, and should have doused the perp, which tends to make any halfway sane thug think twice.

  • In Indianapolis, a homeowner wrestled the gun away from an intruder and shot him.

    A baller move, to be sure, but it’s far better to rely on your own gun…

  • LinkSwarm for April 5, 2019

    Friday, April 5th, 2019

    I’m knee deep in doing my taxes, so if you haven’t started working on your yearly tithe to Caesar, now would be a good time.

    On to the LinkSwarm:

  • “How bad does border have to be for Democrats to admit it’s an emergency?”

    Is there any number of illegal border crossings into the United States that would strike Democrats as an emergency?

    As they resisted President Trump’s efforts to stem the flow of illegal migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, many Democrats made the point that fewer migrants are coming today than years ago, during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies. The implication was that today’s situation cannot be an emergency, because it used to be worse.

    That doesn’t make sense, of course. One could argue that crossings were an unaddressed emergency back then, and that today’s figures, although lower, also qualify as an emergency.

    But now, the border numbers are surging back to the bad old days. It appears that Customs and Border Protection apprehended more than 100,000 people in March (the precise figure has not yet been released), a pace that could mean more than 1,000,000 apprehensions this year.

    For some perspective: According to Border Patrol statistics, U.S. authorities caught 1,643,679 people trying to cross the border illegally from Mexico in fiscal 2000. In 2001 the number was 1,235,718. In 2002 it was 929,809. In 2003 it was 905,065. In 2004 it topped the million mark again, with 1,139,282. In 2005 it was 1,171,396. In 2006 it was 1,071,972.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “March Madness: Report Shows 196,000 New Jobs, Unemployment Rate at 3.8%.”
  • Dems Have Vastly More to Fear from Full Mueller Report than GOP“:

    The full text of the Mueller report is a booby-trap for the Democrats. And many of them not named Schiff must know or suspect it….The natural question will then be — what was all this for? Cui bono? A full airing of the report, what Nadler claims he wants, will instead “open the door,” as they say in court, more than ever for an investigation of why this probe was launched in the first place, by whom and for what reason. The results of that investigation will be quite scary, if not humiliating, for Democrats because they will lead close to, if not over, their highest doorstep — the portals of the Oval Office during the previous administration.

    Snip.

    Besides whatever Barr decides to do, several other vectors are pointing at the Democrats and their DOJ/FBI/media allies. One is obviously hearings from the Senate Judiciary Committee under chairman Lindsey Graham. The second is the investigation into the provenance of the Russia probe and the attendant FISA court decisions (Steele dossier, etc.) to spy on U.S. citizens by inspector general Michael Horowitz. He is supposed to be working in concert with John Huber, a U.S. attorney appointed by Jeff Sessions ages ago with the power to carry out in the courts the results of Horowitz’s discoveries and who has since been silent.

  • “The Top 5 Investigations Obstructed by the Obama Administration.” And you know that EmailGate, Iran and Fast and Furious are on there. Honestly, this list could have been twice as long… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • How the fake Russian collusion narrative was carried out, and why people should have been skeptical of it:

    I noticed that the Russia narrative was increasingly being clung to as an explanation for the media’s failures to understand the country they purport to cover. I pushed back against the idea that the American people had been duped by “fake news” (which then meant something else entirely, we might remember) or “Russia” when they voted for Trump, even if such a vote was obviously unfathomable to most media figures.

    The Russia strategy Clinton had deployed was being picked up by Obama’s intelligence agencies and spread far and wide by American media, and it annoyed Trump. When he’d dismiss the fevered theories that Russian meddling was the reason Hillary Clinton had failed to visit the upper Midwest, intelligence analysts responded by threatening him with leaks.

  • “Why Aren’t Democrats Winning the Hispanic Vote 80-20 or 90-10?” The assumption seems to be that Hispanic votes are a birthright for the Democratic Party, and their media partisans are perplexed that they’re not. “While many Democrats expected Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, especially the family separation debacle, to produce a decisive shift to the left among Hispanics, that has not proved to be the case.” Why would Hispanic American citizens be any less worried about illegal alien crime or taking jobs than any other American group? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hey, remember when all those top Virginia Democrats were called on to resign? “Two of the three officials, Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, wore blackface decades ago. The third, Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax, has been accused of two instances of sexual assault.” Well, they haven’t and they’re not. Evidently the press finally realized that each of them had (D)s after their name…
  • Chinese woman carrying malware arrested at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s frequent vacation home in Florida.
  • “Pence Issues Turkey Ultimatum: ‘Choose Between Remaining NATO Member Or Buying Russian S-400.’ I don’t think Erdogan’s Turkey should be kicked out of NATO for buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles, they should be kicked out of NATO for running a repressive jihadist scumbag regime. And we shouldn’t be selling them F-35s in any case.
  • Trump Is Turning NATO Into a Viable Military Force.” “The Trump administration has made great strides in recent months to transform the cash-strapped and perpetually ailing North Atlantic Treaty Organization into a viable global military force that has the capabilities to confront Russia and other rogue regimes allied with terror forces.”
  • Some interesting maps showing American land use. (Hat tip: Gregory Benford on Facebook.)
  • 34% at Trump’s Michigan rally were Democrats.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Sell something to a Clifornian on Amazon or eBay? The California taxman is coming for you. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “The executive orders of Presidents can be undone by future presidents. Except Lightbringer MclegTingle. His word is sacred law!”
  • “Seattle residents are losing patience with the city’s out-of-control homelessness problem.”

    Exhausted by a decade of rising disorder and property crime—now two-and-a-half times higher than Los Angeles’s and four times higher than New York City’s—Seattle voters may have reached the point of “compassion fatigue.” According to the Seattle Times, 53 percent of Seattle voters now support a “zero-tolerance policy” on homeless encampments; 62 percent believe that the problem is getting worse because the city “wastes money by being inefficient” and “is not accountable for how the money is spent,” and that “too many resources are spent on the wrong approaches to the problem.” The city council insists that new tax revenues are necessary, including a head tax on large employers, but only 7 percent of Seattle voters think that the city is “not spending enough to really solve the problem.” For a famously progressive city, this is a remarkable shift in public opinion.

    (Previously.)(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • How to spot “Ventriloquist Journalism“:

    Reporters have in mind a specific quote they’d like to have from you, and have developed great skill in teasing it out of people. Think of it as just one aspect of fake news. I had quite a bit of first-hand experience with this during my years in Washington, and I got good at spotting the technique and having the discipline not to give in to the usual reporter’s tricks. Often I’d get a call from a reporter wanting my comment on something the Bush Administration was doing, and the question, in substance, was usually: “Don’t you think the Bush Administration is doing the wrong thing?” (Though always more artfully put than that.) And when I didn’t give the answer the “reporter” was looking for, they’d keep asking the same question over and over again in different forms, because what they needed for their story was a way to say something like, “But even a conservative at the American Enterprise Institute thinks Bush is making a mistake. ‘Bush is making a mistake,’ said Steven Hayward. . .” Sometimes a reporter would keep me on the phone for 30 minutes or more, hoping I’d give in. I learned the discipline of never giving in to this trick, and what do you know? I was never quoted in any of the stories that “reporters” like this filed. Nor did any of the information or analysis I had about the issue make it into the story, because background information and perspective was not what the reporter was looking for.

  • Which congressional incumbents have or haven’t filed for reelection.
  • Conservative Brian Hagedorn wins election to Wisconsin Supreme Court.
  • Just in case it actually needed to be said, reparations for slavery are an incredibly stupid idea:

    Any attempt to discharge the moral crimes of the 18th and 19th centuries with monetary payments in the 21st century is doomed to fail. The logistical and definitional obstacles alone would be a nightmare. The majority of white Americans have no ancestral link to antebellum slavery — they are descendants of the millions of immigrants who came to the United States after slavery had been abolished. Of the remainder, few had any slaveholding forbears: Slavery was abolished in most Northeastern states within 15 years of the American Revolution, while in most of the West it never existed at all. Even in the South at the peak of its “slaveocracy,” at least 75 percent of whites never owned slaves.

    That’s just where the complications start. To whom would reparations be owed? Millions of black Americans are recent immigrants or the children of those immigrants, and have no family link to slavery. Are they entitled to compensation for what slaves endured? How about whites whose ancestors were slaves? Or blacks descended from slaveholders? What of the 1.8 million biracial people who identified themselves in the last Census as both black and white? Should they expect to collect reparations, or to pay them?

  • “Disney Ordered To Pay Reparations To Longtime Star Wars Fans.”
  • Almost did a post on all the Unplanned Twitter shenanigans. Basically: Twitter briefly suspends, and then farks with, the Twitter account for a pro-life movie. If you followed it, Twitter would automatically unfollow the account. The shenanigans stopped when enough people noticed, with the result that not only did Unplanned land in the top five for box office that week, but now their Twitter account has far more followers than Planned Parenthood’s official Twitter account. This suggests that a half-century worth of preference falsification by the abortion industry and their media allies is finally falling apart.
  • UK asks EU for more time for Brexit. At this point it’s not even a farce, because a farce is supposed to be funny…
  • I don’t buy this “pro-Brexit forces are trying to sabotage trains” thing for a minute. Remember the mythical “Sons of the Gestapo” who supposedly derailed a train during the Clinton Administration’s militia panic and then were never heard from again?
  • “The Southern Poverty Law Center Is Everything That’s Wrong With Liberalism.” (Hat tip: Jim Geraghty.)
  • Usually whens someone pays $100,000 for a book, they’re getting a rare collectable. Unless it’s a thinly disguised bribe for Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • If you thought Joe Don Baker’s Mitchell was a bad cop, you haven’t met this one.
  • MS-13 member on Texas Ten Most Wanted list captured. Seven of the ten are listed as “White (Hispanic) Male” and an eighth is named “Jesus Alberto Villegas.” It doesn’t say (at least on that page) how many are illegal aliens. In other news, Texas has its own Top Ten Most Wanted List.
  • Spree shooters kill fewer Americans per year than dog attacks. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Meet Antonio Gramsci, the Godfather of Cultural Marxism.

    Gramsci argued that the Bolshevik Russian revolution of 1917 worked because the conditions were ripe for such a sudden upheaval. He described the Russian revolution as an example of a “war of movement” due to its sudden and complete overthrow of the existing governing structure of society. Gramsci reasoned that in Russia in 1917, “the state was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous.”

    As such, a direct attack on the current rulers could be effective because there existed no other significant structure or institutions of political influence that needed to be overcome.

    In Western societies, by contrast, Gramsci observed that the state is “only an outer ditch” behind which lies a robust and sturdy civil society.

    Gramsci believed that the conditions in Russia in 1917 that made revolution possible would not materialize in more advanced capitalist countries in the West. The strategy must be different and must include a mass democratic movement, an ideological struggle.

    His advocacy of a war of position instead of a war of movement was not a rebuke of revolution itself, just a differing tactic—a tactic that required the infiltration of influential organizations that make up civil society. Gramsci likened these organizations to the “trenches” in which the war of position would need to be fought.

    The massive structures of the modern democracies, both as state organizations, and as complexes of associations in civil society, constitute for the art of politics as it were the “trenches” and the permanent fortifications of the front in the war of position: they render merely “partial” the element of maneuver which before used the “the whole” of war, etc.

    Gramsci argued that a “frontal attack” on established institutions like governments in Western societies may face significant resistance and thus need greater preparation—with the main groundwork being the development of a collective will among the people and a takeover of leadership among civil society and key political positions.

    Snip.

    Gramsci, however, viewed civil society in Western societies to be a strong defensive system for the current State, which in turn existed to protect the interest of the capitalist class.

    “In the West, there was a proper relation between state and civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” he wrote. In short, in times when the state itself may have shown weakness to overthrow from opposing ideological forces, the institutions of civil society provided political reinforcement for the existing order.

    In his view, a new collective will is required to advance this war of position for the revolution. To him, it is vital to evaluate what can stand in the way of this will, i.e. certain influential social groups with the prevailing capitalist ideologies that could impede this progress.

    Gramsci spoke of organizations including churches, charities, the media, schools, universities and “economic corporate” power as organizations that needed to be invaded by socialist thinkers.

    The new dictatorship of the proletariat in the West, according to Gramsci, could only arise out of an active consensus of the working masses—led by those critical civil society organizations generating an ideological hegemony.

    As Gramsci described it, hegemony means “cultural, moral and ideological” leadership over allied and subordinate groups. The intellectuals, once ensconced, should attain leadership roles over these groups’ members by consent. They would achieve direction over the movement by persuasion rather than domination or coercion.

    The goal of the war of position is to shape a new collective will of the masses in order to weaken the defenses that civil society provides to the current capitalist state.

    Now I have an excuse to embed this:

  • “CNN Blames Ratings Slump On Lack Of News They Want To Report.” “It’s perfectly natural to see a little bit of a dip in ratings when your entire narrative is being destroyed and you’d rather just not talk about it,” Stelter added. “All part of the business.”
  • The story behind designing the best/worst major league baseball uniforms in history: the Houston Astros orange rainbow.
  • You know that whole “We’ve got to drop rote memorization and teach critical thinking!” thing? It’s not just bunk, it’s really old bunk. “Memorization and practice are still essential elements of learning and prepare students for the kind of higher level thinking we all claim to value.”
  • Have I ever shared The Worst Web Page In History with you before? If not, behold the abomination in all its glory! (Or rather, a snapshot of the page as it existed in 2005.) Bonus: it’s from a radical leftist! (Warning: Everything!)
  • AAFolds.