Concert coordinators should have a couple sharp shooters paid and waiting in the shadows if this is the way it's gonna be.
I'm all for armed marksmen at every venue.
I'm all for armed marksmen at every venue.
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Lessons Learned From Vegas
- Thread starter Leveraction44
- Start date
Any jihadist or home-grown terrorist of any race or religion here in the USA can buy three items to make it really easy to rack up a huge casualty count when firing into a densely packed crowd:
1-- A semi-auto firearm of the AR or AK platform.
2-- A high capacity magazine or three, or even drum magazines (75 to 120 round capacity).
3-- A bump fire stock, binary trigger, tri-burst trigger, HellFire trigger, BMF activator trigger crank, etc.
That's about it. Any citizen or green hard holder (permanent resident) in the USA can buy these things legally at age 18. If the person can't pass the background check to buy a gun from an FFL dealer, that person can buy in a private-party sale. A person living in some state with its own state-level assault weapons ban can drive to another state and (illegally, but probably successfully) buy these items from some other private party sellers in that state that doesn't have such strict gun laws.
Imagine such a gunman, if alone, positioned himself where he could not be flanked or attacked from the rear. He only has contact with the world from in front of him, and that's his area of fire. He doesn't have to be 32 stories up and 500 yards away. He could be 25 yards away, firing from a window of a room he's rented, or just burglarized for the occasion. It could be a ground floor room, or second story. No need to be high up.
Or, imagine TWO gunmen (like the 2 guys in the Los Angeles / North Hollywood bank robbery / shootout in 1997.
Imagine the bad guys were body armor, class IIIA or IV. (stops incoming rifle rounds form police carbines).
Or, imagine they conceal their weapons (could be AK or AR pistols with 9" barrels), mix in with the crowd, and then, at the right moment, pull their guns and go back-to-back, shooting everybody around them (back-to-back means no good Samaritan is likely to be able to approach them unobserved).
Yeah, it could happen again, with a bad guy just spraying the crowd with bullets rather than aiming at individual people (all other mass shootings that I know of involved the bad guys choosing particular people to aim at, at least for much of the time of the shooting.)
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
Nothing we can reasonably do is very likely to let us intervene successfully and quickly. We aren't going to be walking around in public with Class 4 body armor and carrying scoped .30 battle rifles ourselves, are we?
But, in general, here's what I think:
1-- Avoid being part of a big crowd that is enclosed in what would be an effective "kill box" unless there is good security screening in and around such a venue.
2-- Carry a full sized handgun and be prepared to hit a bad guy from 100 yards away, or take a 25-yard head shot on an adversary who is behind cover or has body armor. For me, this would mean packing something like my Springfield XD9 with its 5" barrel and using 16-round mags, not my little .38 snubby that holds 5 rounds and gives me Frisbee sized groups.
3-- Know where hard cover is, and know where concealment is, everywhere you go.
Remember what is "cover" against handgun bullets may only be "concealment" that won't stop a rifle bullet if the bad guy sends some your way.
4-- Get right with the Lord, and acknowledge that here on Earth things are only temporary under the best of circumstances. Eternity is the big picture.
1-- A semi-auto firearm of the AR or AK platform.
2-- A high capacity magazine or three, or even drum magazines (75 to 120 round capacity).
3-- A bump fire stock, binary trigger, tri-burst trigger, HellFire trigger, BMF activator trigger crank, etc.
That's about it. Any citizen or green hard holder (permanent resident) in the USA can buy these things legally at age 18. If the person can't pass the background check to buy a gun from an FFL dealer, that person can buy in a private-party sale. A person living in some state with its own state-level assault weapons ban can drive to another state and (illegally, but probably successfully) buy these items from some other private party sellers in that state that doesn't have such strict gun laws.
Imagine such a gunman, if alone, positioned himself where he could not be flanked or attacked from the rear. He only has contact with the world from in front of him, and that's his area of fire. He doesn't have to be 32 stories up and 500 yards away. He could be 25 yards away, firing from a window of a room he's rented, or just burglarized for the occasion. It could be a ground floor room, or second story. No need to be high up.
Or, imagine TWO gunmen (like the 2 guys in the Los Angeles / North Hollywood bank robbery / shootout in 1997.
Imagine the bad guys were body armor, class IIIA or IV. (stops incoming rifle rounds form police carbines).
Or, imagine they conceal their weapons (could be AK or AR pistols with 9" barrels), mix in with the crowd, and then, at the right moment, pull their guns and go back-to-back, shooting everybody around them (back-to-back means no good Samaritan is likely to be able to approach them unobserved).
Yeah, it could happen again, with a bad guy just spraying the crowd with bullets rather than aiming at individual people (all other mass shootings that I know of involved the bad guys choosing particular people to aim at, at least for much of the time of the shooting.)
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
Nothing we can reasonably do is very likely to let us intervene successfully and quickly. We aren't going to be walking around in public with Class 4 body armor and carrying scoped .30 battle rifles ourselves, are we?
But, in general, here's what I think:
1-- Avoid being part of a big crowd that is enclosed in what would be an effective "kill box" unless there is good security screening in and around such a venue.
2-- Carry a full sized handgun and be prepared to hit a bad guy from 100 yards away, or take a 25-yard head shot on an adversary who is behind cover or has body armor. For me, this would mean packing something like my Springfield XD9 with its 5" barrel and using 16-round mags, not my little .38 snubby that holds 5 rounds and gives me Frisbee sized groups.
3-- Know where hard cover is, and know where concealment is, everywhere you go.
Remember what is "cover" against handgun bullets may only be "concealment" that won't stop a rifle bullet if the bad guy sends some your way.
4-- Get right with the Lord, and acknowledge that here on Earth things are only temporary under the best of circumstances. Eternity is the big picture.
Now, just to play Devil's advocate here, how would you screen those "armed marksmen" to be reasonably sure that one of THEM isn't a nutcase with an extremist political or religious agenda, or a beef against one of the teams playing that game, an unhealthy obsession with the star of that music performance, etc?
I'd want some really good vetting on a guy before I issue him a scoped rifle and let him climb into a sniper's nest above the concert I'm attending.
How did I know someone was gonna say that?
Yeah I'm sure there'd be a few hundred retired military marksman or very trusted civilian marksmen chomping at the bit for such a job.
Hell all You need is a trusted deer hunting buddy to man the rifle.
Anyone is better than no one at all.
I'm sure there a million reasons why a liberal would object to such an undertaking and gaggles of lawyers contemplating repercussions of the "what if's."
I don't have enough sense to be scared and at my age everyone is scared of me LOL..
for us the ,just the guys who love guns and shooting! it stopped the silencer movement, i really thought is was going to pass, but not now no way no how. sorry for all that were hurt by LV/ AND STAND UP FOR OUR FLAG.
You seem to walk on the edge of sanity and be perfectly at ease with it. This can be a little disconcerting for some people and quite entertaining for the rest of us.
After a year in the Jungle, surviving TET, being shot twice & Blown up, nothing scares me anymore, not even my Wife LOL
Not even your wife??? I am going to have to call BS on that one!
Great post.
A few years ago while walking around our property at night my son (who was about 7 at the time) asked me "Daddy, are there bad things walking around our property at night?". I stopped him in his tracks, knelt down close so I could look him in the face and said "Yes son there are bad things walking around in the dark.....IT'S US.....and anybody else out there who intends us harm better hope and pray they never cross out paths." I meant then and mean it even more now. Life it too short, a vapor in the wind, to live afraid.
