Again, "If You Aren't Ready to Kill, Don't Wear a Gun"
I hope that everyone who reads this will pause in his thoughts to think momentarily and - if you do that, pray - for the the people of Blacksburg, VA and Virginia Tech University. If for no other reason, and for just that long, it will make you a better person.
This, of course, will be about the latest tragedy brought about by our governmental, national, and societal unpreparedness, that of Virginia Tech and the man named Cho Seung-Hui. The fact of that matter would be bad enough, were it not for the fact of what it demonstrates and portends.
Thirty-three people died for reasons among which are the same reasons the infamous 9-11 disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and more were permitted, even caused, to occur. I said “unprepared,” and that’s certainly part of it; but there is more, much more. I propose to speak as an expert here, and aware the U.S. is beset everywhere and as never before with the blathering nonsense of supposed experts, I need first to present credentials.
First, it was I who first – 1958 – advocated and argued for the establishment of what would become known as SWAT teams. As my friends have heard me relate, the idea was met with angry scorn – an associate professor at the University of Iowa once termed it “lunacy” – and it wasn’t until a demented man named Whitman got up on the tower at the University of Texas and started shooting people that anyone was willing to bring it up again.
By co-incidence and my having been a Police Science and Criminology student of a professor named Stuart Holcomb at Iowa, I had reprised my paper only a few months before. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the sniper in the tower in Texas that anyone decided to listen.
Therein, you may have noticed, lies the first of many things which constitute our weakness, a weakness that may bring a swift end to our nation. Until a man with a Ph.D. had awarded his papal nihil obstat and imprimatur to the idea first dubbed – and that derisively – the Mongoose Tactic, it lay fallow. “Lunacy,” in other words.
Let me put this first of the several causes for our nationally spastic state another way: If Albert Einstein were to offer to teach physics in a U.S. High School today, he would not be permitted. Among the greatest physicists in history, he would not be “qualified” legally. The same is true of Thomas Edison and electricity, or Ted Williams on hitting a pitched baseball. While experts half-baked by scholastic degrees masquerade everywhere as the real thing, experts I have for years exposed in minutes, sometimes seconds, as charlatans with sheepskins, William Butler Hickok – better known as Wild Bill Hickok – wouldn’t be “qualified” to teach a Police Science course in Practical Pistol Shooting (formerly the name of a police training course comical in its irrelevance to what it purported to do).
How is it that on a university campus like that of Virginia Tech, with all those degreed great minds, things were obviously so poorly prepared? How is it that when Hurricane Katrina struck, the city of New Orleans, its intellectuals and “leaders” were caught totally unprepared? How about that monument to unpreparedness, the World Trade Center and its “Dog That Didn’t Bark?”
But I digress as I often do. Returning to the reasons anyone should listen to what I say on the subject, I note that I first became a student of defense against violence while still a boy and the victim of bullies. Don’t laugh – you will only demonstrate what I said a minute ago, that people ignorant of things have no way to know of their ignorance. In its essential character, the attack on Virginia Tech University was that of a bully upon his victim. Predators of all kinds, bullies, terrorists, and berserkers like Cho, all have something essential in common. They are – and whether their attack identifies them for the first time or the fiftieth (this is the U.S. you know – largely the only place where that sort of thing is possible) – attackers.
Nothing else matters. The attack must be stopped, and all considerations otherwise are pointless. More, they contribute to the unpreparedness that invariably becomes a force-multiplier for the assailant.
The first sentence of the paper I wrote for Lieutenant General Thomas Hickey and later for Professor Stuart Holcomb was, “The only way to deal with a man with a gun is with a man who is better with a gun.” “Better” means many things, beginning with the educational maturation necessary. Being a gunfighter is not a college course. A Ph.D. education wouldn’t get the prospective gunfighter over the first hurdle, which is the training necessary to produce the icy calm in the presence of lethal danger characteristic of men who fight well with firearms.
Seventy now, I won my first gunfight at twenty, and easily against three men, because they were not only poorly prepared – being only Soviet Spetsnaz soldiers – they were certain that they were gunfighters. All three were dead before the body of the first man killed had reached the ground. Why do I bother with the apparent boast? Because the reader will have already decided that speed and accuracy are the sine qua non of CQB – “Close Quarters Battle” - thus demonstrating yet another fault in the nation’s preparedness to do battle, that of flawed ideation and unreasonable expectations born of societal and cultural influences..
Tempted to say you and your “leaders” watch too many movies and too much TV, I won’t. But think about it as I continue here, anyway. In the movie “The Shootist,” John Wayne, in the role of J.S. Books, answers an admiring boy’s question with the remark, “It’s not who’s fastest, it’s not even who’s the best shot – it’s who’s willing.”
A few days ago, and before the horror at Virginia Tech, I entitled my essay, “If you don’t mean to kill, don’t fight with guns.” That was before Mr. Cho had done his hideous deed at Virginia Tech, and my essay was about the nation and the massacre its unpreparedness for war is causing in Iraq. Get the point?
No, probably not. Probably not, because you are an inhabitant and citizen of a nation become effeminate and unable to be decisive until the “issue” – look up and consider the original meaning of the word – has been discussed at length satisfying the distaff side of the populace. With much more, actually, to be discussed concerning the making of a gunfighter and those who will join the Fifth Profession (look that up, too – on the way to finding it, you’ll learn much of benefit to us all), I come to the heart of the matter in question here.
Let’s consider any incident like this one, that at Columbine High School or elsewhere – a sort of generic scenario. You’ll recognize this one as the news of
Virginia Tech unfolds (I’ve listened to so many of these, I know the effect of the de rigueur media orientation of the script for the edification of female viewers and their interests, coupled with the dictates of Operation Mockingbird and federally prescribed formatting).
In the archetypical scenario, the killer bully begins his rampage, the police are called, and begin arriving at the scene. That’s the one reported by the first caller or, even, subsequent callers. Like Civil Defense and other “best laid plans of mice and men,” the planning and training, supposed or otherwise, begins to unravel right there. As German General Helmuth Graf von Moltke once observed, “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” Worse, of course, the plan quickly begins to eviscerate the organization essential to confrontations with a killer – potential of otherwise – armed with a lethal weapon.
Female dominated societies, however, demand planning, planning for outcomes approved by the female character and mind.
Once arrived at the scene, the police do everything training and planning dictates, things like set up a cordon around the building, preparation for hostage negotiation, et cetera, in order to begin all the machinations society dominated now by feminist concepts and ideals demand. So trained, they do this whatever the situation.
I know what you’re thinking. Save it. While an insurance company investigator, I investigated literally dozens of these affairs, besides reviewing hundred of case histories and video recordings of police sieges and shoot-outs. An individual tends – and in a fashion that becomes in the psychologically unprepared and inadequately trained individual dominating – to do what he has trained to do. The most salient example of such in my experience is the Maryland Trooper who carefully saved the brass from his revolver during a gunfight with two or three (over the years, I’ve forgotten) shotgun-armed assailants, having stood each spent cartridge neatly on the bumper of the car he crouched behind as he removed it from his weapon; reloading and with three rounds back in the cylinder, he died from the point-blank shotgun blast of an attacker approaching him alongside the vehicle.
With death approaching and very near, he did resolutely what he had practiced to do – i.e., made a habit – for years.
In the Virginia Tech incident, officers arrived and set up their cordon as they listened to the shooting occurring in the building before them. As they assembled and “obtained intelligence” (i.e., learned what was happening). shooting inside Norris Hall continued.
Now, consider: Inside that building somebody with a gun was killing people. This has happened again and again over the years, even since organization in 1967 of the first SWAT teams. The police show up, and go through their organized and practiced operation. Inside the building while they are doing that, people are being killed. The officers can hear it, and unless in this instance they thought the shooter was target shooting with paper cups or the like, they knew what it meant.
There is a corollary to all this, one that, knowing the opprobrium it will incur, I wish I didn’t have to point out. If the men on Flight Ninety-Three on September 11, 2001 had reacted immediately it is highly unlikely that the plane would have crashed. Few, perhaps even no, innocent lives would have been lost.
I can hear the howls – “lunacy,” again. Well, having studied these matters all my life and perhaps in greater detail than anyone else, ever, I not only know that what I’ve just said is correct, I know what went on that day in that airliner. I know because it goes on everyday in the society and nation around me. Day after day, I hear it demanded by the feminist and humanist liberal, and broadcast by the media who sycophantly serves their deleterious and indecisive deliberation on every such issue. I know, therefore, that before the men who attacked the hijackers that day on Flight Ninety-Three would have launched their heroic counter-attack, they had – at least to the extent of their keeping out of the way and quiet - to obtain the cooperation of the rest of the passengers. If you know anything about the history of our society and nation over the past several decades, if you’ve listened to the news, you’re ahead of me. You know what all the women and some of the men on board that airliner would have done when confronted with the idea of attacking the hijackers, and you can imagine the dithering and deleterious discussion that would have been necessary.
You know what happened on board Flight Ninety-Three.
And knowing that, you know, too, the reason we find ourselves in the utterly asinine and feckless mess in which we find ourselves today in Iraq. If you’ve read elsewhere on the Mongoose Trick Opinion Page, you also know that “If you don’t mean to kill, don’t fight with guns.”
If you know all that, you also know the reason that today, with our Vice-President assuring us that when the war in Iraq has been concluded (not quite the way he put it – but there’s no way around the fact of it), and with “terrorism there following us home,” the border with Mexico remains open to illegal immigration. Our government, in short, has the decision-making ability of a brick.
There is yet another consideration to be made here, one that may elucidate even more. In incident after incident, police officers in this country have stood and shot unarmed, even innocent people (I wrote about the forty thousand such incidents, and that involving Dr. Sal Culosi a short time ago). The officers, trained to shoot until their would-be or imagined assailant is motionless or they are out of ammunition, do just that. Training, again. In other instances, often recorded by television before governmental crack-downs on such were put in place, police beat the hell out of “subjects” lying helpless on the ground, subjects often outnumbered by as many as six to one.
Training again; “beat him until he is no longer a threat,” in other words.
By contrast, during the seven years I worked as a uniformed police officer, and the seventeen years I worked as a professional bodyguard, I disarmed armed men several times (so many, as a matter of fact, that one police captain back home remarked one night that every time we happened to meet, I handed him a gun I had just taken from someone). I repeatedly overcame resisted arrest, several times against multiple persons, twice by professional football players and once by a bodybuilder biker, all of whom outweighed me by as much as ninety pounds. I never injured a single arrestee, and I never once used mace, pepper spray, or club, refusing, as a matter of fact, to carry any of the three.
None of these arrests would have been brought to the successful – and by “successful,” I mean that no one was injured - conclusion they were, had I proceeded the way law enforcement in the U.S. does or used the tactical doctrines our government and military uses in Iraq.
The difference? A skilled and properly matured expert in CQB is decisively unhesitating. To be decisive, the gunfighter must first know that he is capable of what he is about to do. He must be certain of what he is doing and the necessity for it. He must, in short know that he is morally right. And because of all this, the member of the Fifty Profession must make the decision himself. It cannot be made for him.
And, there you have it. The contract between bodyguard and his client is just that, a meeting of minds and agreement that includes the understanding that once what the contract envisions has occurred, the relationship of gunfighter and client changes completely, totally. Any deliberation resulting in hesitance will almost without exception cost lives, possibly that of the client.
Still, nevertheless, if I had a dollar for every time I was accused of precipitous and immature action by the public and its democratically and effeminately cautious governments, those who invariably want to discuss and reach consensus before acting, I could toast my successes over the decades with the best Scotch whisky known to man. In short, the first officer on scene at the Norris Building should have entered the building any way possible, by blasting though doors – even walls – with a vehicle. He should have done whatever was required to close with the individual now his enemy.
Police officers, you see, must be the public’s husband and bodyguard, and like any husband of wife and family, must be prepared to risk, even lose, their lives in order to protect their charges. The same is true of persons who seek and obtain higher public office. The “public servants” of government, police officers, bodyguards, and husbands, follow whether they know it or not, whether they like it or not, the Fifth Profession and the Samurai code of Bushido.
That’s the commitment; it has always been so, and anyone who isn’t willing to follow that code is honor bound to step aside, and find another profession. There’s the rub, isn’t it – “honor bound.”
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