Saturday, February 4, 2012

More Evidence That Gun Control Fanaticism Is An Emotional Problem

Wisconsin has only recently adopted a concealed handgun permit law.  The February 3, 2012 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports on one of the first incidents involving a permitholder:
The customer, Nazir Al-Mujaahid of Milwaukee, held a news conference to discuss the incident. Al-Mujaahid, 35, called it nothing to brag about, but that "sometimes you have to do what you have to do."

Al-Mujaahid said he and his wife stopped at the store, at N. 76th St. and W. Villard Ave., for some last-minute dinner items. They'd never shopped at the store before, he said.

He said they had just walked in when he noticed the suspect approach the cashiers holding up a shotgun with the stock cut off and a bag, demanding money in a very agitated way. Fearing for the safety of himself, his wife and others in the store, he said, he unholstered his semi-automatic 9mm handgun, cocked it and kept it down at his side as he motioned another customer behind the robber to move away.

When the robber turned the shotgun toward him, Al-Mujaahid said, he fired six or seven shots from about 20 feet away. He said he hit the suspect in the leg and forehead. The robber then dropped the shotgun and bag, and fled the store.
This is one of those reminders that a handgun is mostly a threat: go away, or in a few hours, you will either bleed out, or have to explain to an emergency room how you ended up with bullet holes.  Al-Mujaahid hit the bad guy in the forehead with a 9mm, and the bad guy "fled the store."

The other part of the story that is unfortunate is that the store had a "no weapons" sign--meaning that they did not want anyone who was lawfully armed to enter the store.  Al-Mujaahid says that he did not see the sign.  Fortunately, there will be no prosecution.  The Milwaukee County District Attorney clearly believed that the shooter did the right thing:
"He disrupted an act that potentially exposed himself and others to great bodily harm," Chisholm said. Video footage from the store showed "he acted reasonably and in a controlled manner during the encounter," Chisholm said.
I do hope the store owner realizes that it was a good thing that Al-Mujaahid did not see the sign, and obviously the robber with the shotgun did not see the sign either!  Because if the robber had seen the sign, he obviously would have gone elsewhere!

Of course, because Wisconsin is awash in people that are emotionally irrational about guns, you get comments like this on the article:
We should not look at this guy as the great hero. What’s going to happen when the time comes someone innocent is hurt because someone wants to be a hero? What happen if the person hurt is one of your family members, your wife, your daughter, or your son? Will you give this cowboy the big hero’s welcome? What happen when the person that killed or hurt your child is let of free of charge because they just simple say “I did not see the sign”?

This is the first major breakdown of the conceal and carry law. This guy broke the law by carrying a guy into a store posted prohibiting guns and he was not charge.

This also sets a precedent for a get out of jail free card for the next person. This is not a victory for human rights, but a prelude to the wild Wild West days. The law is the law. The DA should step up and charge this guy and not apply laws based on the popularity vote. Two things happen here we should not be happy with. The law was broken and the DA did not do his job and secondly we opened a window for the innocence to get hurt. Only the people with small mind sts will see this guy as a hero.
Of course, the robber, who is carrying a shotgun with a cutoff stock, "demanding money in a very agitated way" is obviously not a hazard to anyone, right?

4 comments:

  1. No rational thought ever goes through an anti-gunner's mind.

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  2. I would not go that far. There are a lot of people who are anti-gun because they do not fully understand the question. So much of the popular coverage of the subject is defective (to be polite).

    Also, there are many people whose personal experiences have been bad. I used to work with a gal here in Idaho who was fiercely and emotionally anti-gun. Why? Because her father was a hunter and gun owner--and he spent a lot of time carrying a gun around, and using irresponsibly, because he was nearly always drunk, or at least headed that direction. She was utterly surprised to find that there were gun owners who were well-educated, calm, and intelligent. All she knew of gun owners was her father and his rather similar friends.

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  3. "There are a lot of people who are anti-gun because they do not fully understand the question."

    I will concede that is a true statement. The end result, however, is the same: those people are just as supportive of terminating our rights as the emotionally irrational, and as such are just as dangerous to our rights. This is a binary issue.

    Since at casual interface it is impossible to discern the non-EI anti-gun people who have assumed their position from ignorance from those truly EI, we have no choice but to regard them as the enemy until such time as proved otherwise.

    One of the advantages humans have over other mammals is the ability to become non-ignorant in parallel (read: in groups) rather than serially (read: one at a time) on complex issues.

    Serial education is tremendously expensive, and until gun rights proponents break through the one-at-a-time barrier we will remain at considerable disadvantage.

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  4. Then there are those like my sister in law, MS Nitro, who barely trusts herself to drive others, considers that everyone is as close to the brink of being homicidally angry as she is, that they can't be trusted with these new fangled weapons (kitchen knives on the other hand . . )unless anointed with the fairy dust of government approval. They're specially trained and certified like that cop in Ohio, you see.

    ReplyDelete