Last Thursday night, February 7, I saw an interesting news story that could have been an NRA ad if the KCBS local reporter had recognized the irony. The reporter was in Big Bear, CA, reporting on the first day of the Chris Dorner manhunt. I’ve been to Big Bear many times since I was a kid. It is an eclectic collection of mostly unoccupied vacation homes peopled by those that enjoy the country life as opposed to the city. That includes a fair share of gun owning outdoorsman living side by side with granola eating green college graduates from LA living rent free in Mom’s empty vacation cabin with their girlfriends.
The reporter was interviewing a couple who I would guess fall in to the latter category. A twenty something couple arm in arm in front of their cabin answering questions as the first flakes of snow signaled the impending Snow Storm that was bearing down on them.
The reporter asked how they felt being alone in their remote cabin with a crazed spree killer on the loose in the area and presumably searching for a cabin to invade.
The young man looked first into the eyes of his trusting girlfriend and he said, “Well, we’re kind of nervous. He’s already killed 3 people and shot or attacked 4 others. I wouldn’t want to be sleeping outdoors on a night like this, so I could see why he might break into some place”
The Reporter said, “Yes, we are expecting over a foot of snow and you told me before you don’t have many neighbors here because these are vacation homes”.
He said, “Thats right, so we will be kind of alone on this road throughout the storm”.
At this point I was thinking, if Dorner would have been watching TV, this guy might as well have held up a sign saying, “Please come and break into my house and kill my girlfriend and I and no one will now until the spring thaw”. The other thing that struck me is this guy’s voice began to tremble as he began to utter the words that he had only been thinking up to that point, and the sound of his predicament, even to him, sounded not only irresponsible and stupid, but like something from a Stephen King novel.
The Reporter asked, have you two thought about going back down the mountain to be safe. He apparently had, but it seems only when it was too late. He then said,
“I think we are going to be OK. Dorner has a lot of other cabins to choose from so hopefully he won’t break into ours. My truck is not working, the storm is coming and we have kind of spotty cell service here, so we’re kind of stuck. (Stammering and voice quivering)...Umm, I guess, um, if he did break in, I would send my girlfriend to the back of the house and then I could turn over the coffee table in the front room to hide behind and just hope for the best,...um,...because we don’t have any weapons, which I guess is kind of stupid, considering the circumstance”.
This young guy and his old lady could have been doing a Public Service announcement for the NRA. Just looking at him, you imagine he must have voted for Obama and probably a week before was a staunch supporter of gun control. Take guns away from those school shooters and spree killers before another child dies!
But now its his life in danger. And the bad guy is the predator and he is hunting in your area.... and your plan to save yourself and protect your girl who is clinging a little less tightly around your waist now, is to run away from the banging door and push her screaming in to the back bedroom, then to pick up the cell and feverishly dial 911, only to see an out of service area message.
Then throwing it to the ground as Dorner’s arm begins to reach through the crack groping for the door knob, you jump outside the back door and try to start the truck, but the engine just cranks over and won’t start. Then as you run back to the house, you look in all directions through the blinding blizzard hoping to see a light on in one of the other cabins, but there are none and no one will hear your screams and even if you did get out, you can’t run very far or very fast in the deep cold snow. So you go back inside where your girlfriend is now screaming and wondering why she ever trusted you to protect her, and you find the coffee table that you had planned to turn over and hide behind. So you lay it on its side and lay down as the door finally opens. You realize now, as you said before, this is pretty stupid, because Dorner walks in with an assault rifle that he purchased legally as a member of law enforcement, a 9MM Glock in his holster, body armor, and combat fatigues. He walks over to the coffee table, and then walks around it to find you cowering in the fetal position. He asks if anyone else is in the home and if you have any weapons. You say, no weapons and yes, you will find my girlfriend in bed in the back of the house. Sounds like a great plan Granola man. Use the coffee table to combat evil monsters.
Gun control advocates will say, how likely is the average American going to end up in a situation like this where they might need a gun for self defense? The couple that actually did get tied up for 3 days don’t care about the odds now and the response is much more likely than having a kindergartener shot in his classroom in Connecticut.
Like many Liberal issues, if the example that demonstrates the veracity of the conservative argument only occurs once in a generation, then the argument is met with, “That will never happen”. So Liberals say, War is never the answer unless maybe America is attacked, but we have Nuclear weapons, so that will never happen, or if it does, we will all be dead. Sounds simple. So when the Twin Towers come tumbling down, war suddenly sounds like the answer, but having just had 40 years of fried brain cells blown, you must have a narrative to get back to your previous upside down logic, so you invent Trutherism, and the world is at peace again. In your mind.
There is no guarantee the Granola man or the tied up couple would have been able to surprise Dorner with a shotgun blast to the face had they been armed and trained, but there is no guarantee the cops will save you and no one said you have to use your gun to put a bullet in the intruders head if you feel like that is the right choice. Maybe a warning shot would have caused Dorner to move on. No guarantees of anything, but it gives you some degree of control over your right to live.
When he uttered those words: “ ...because we don’t have any weapons, which I guess is kind of stupid, considering the circumstance”. We may have just witnessed the moment a gun control advocate considered the value of a first time visit to your friendly neighborhood gun store. He wasn’t a gullible victim of scare tactics by the notorious gun lobby. He just had a brush with reality.
One of the premises for gun control by elites that live in gated communities with armed guards is that if we are threatened with violence, we can rely on government to save us by calling 911.
In my lifetime, aside from blackouts, floods, storms and other situations where rescue is hampered, I have experienced two occurrences of mob action on such a large scale that the protective capabilities of the Law Enforcement community were so overloaded, that they became completely unavailable.
One of those occasions was the Watts riots along with a string of other riots that summer in the 1960s and the other was the Rodney King Riots in 1992. In both cases, Law Enforcement would not respond to emergency calls. In that case, a gun was the only thing that would available to keep you alive, if you were threatened.
During the Rodney King riots in 1992, our extended family gathered our weapons and took an inventory of our ammo and our arsenal, because when a family member did not come home that night, and many people didn’t have cell phones then, we had to develop a plan to keep everyone safe and make sure we were all accounted for. A plan that was more than a coffee table.
911, gave a busy signal that night and for 3 days. Government failed. The Korean store owners who took refuge on the second story roof of their strip mall were not exercising their rights to hunt for deer or shoot ducks. They had in many cases legal AR15 style home defense weapons. From the top of that roof, as they were taking fire from better armed criminals who wanted to get close enough to torch their business and incinerate them with their property, they would not survive if they had fired from that distance with a shotgun. Nor would a handgun be very effective at that range. The Bushmaster, AR15 or what the media calls an assault rifle was the only thing that kept them from burning up or getting shot. And it should be noted, when the shooting started the cops told the Koreans to defend themselves and then fled. If anything the LAPD was not forceful enough in their response.
For what its worth, when Rodney King’s name was introduced to the national lexicon in 1991, Christopher Dorner was 11, so after reading his manifesto and his obsession with the King Riots and his claim the LAPD hasn’t changed,...everything he knows as an adult about the riots is what he has been told by others, presumably by the leftwing media whom he clearly holds in high esteem, from CNN to Charlie Sheen.
We didn’t use the guns that night in 1992 after all. The family member that had gone missing escaped from the riot zone be weaving through blocked intersections and burning tires by circling around the worst areas and arriving home 7 hours late, at midnight.
Someone said that night as we loaded our guns, If I only need to load my gun for the protection of my life or someone in my family just once in 30 years, that’s 30 more years of life and it makes it worth being a gun owner. Its times like this you understand why our founders gave us that right.
I was stunned by that news story last Thursday and I thank god Dorner has been stopped, but I think that young unarmed man in that cabin has a new perspective on guns being used for protection and I imagine his girlfriend does too.
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