The we must ban guns meme is of course cranked up once again in the wake of California's terrorist attack.

I am willing to and in fact claim we must as a society have a public and open debate about what we should do in regards to terrorism, the Second Amendment, immigration and all other facets of what happened in California -- and in the other incidents across this land.

I have only one rule: All points of debate must be grounded in and resort to logic; those that do not must be discarded and those who refuse to debate on that basis must be ignored.

This is a serious time for serious people.  Getting shot or blown up is serious.  But our Constitutional Republic is also serious; it is a unique political experiment among the various governments of the world, and to dilute or worse lose it over an un-thinking overreaction not only risks destroying our way of life it is likely to make our lives more dangerous rather than less.

Now let's look at the alleged "reasonable" response that the NY Times ran this morning.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

False.  A right is immune from prior restraint.  The First Amendment is absolute.  This does not absolve you from responsibility should you exercise that right in a blatantly and grossly irresponsible manner.  This is the infamous "fire in a crowded theater" example so often cited.  But what is being intentionally mis-characterized is that you cannot be forced to wear a muzzle when entering a theater because you might utter the word "Fire" when there isn't one.

There is nothing wrong with punishing someone who falsely claims there is a fire in a crowded theater when there is not, just as there is nothing wrong with punishing someone who brandishes or otherwise uses a firearm for an impermissible purpose.

However, the mere possession of firearms is a right just as is free speech and until and unless it is misused and by doing so one harms others you cannot inhibit a right.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

Utter nonsense.

First, let's talk about the ammunition.  Here are two actual bullets next to each other just so nobody can claim that games are being played with scale to make one "scarier" than the other.  Incidentally, the picture is scaled to be of approximately actual size on most monitors.

One of them is the "evil" type that the NY Times is referring to, and is probably identical to the ones used by the San Bernardino shooters -- if it's not identical, it's damn close.

You probably would say that you'd ban the one on the right; it's bigger and scarier. You would probably also be shocked to discover that the bullet on the right is commonly used to hunt deer and, if it's not obvious by its size and mass, you definitely would prefer to be shot with the one the San Bernardino shooters used if someone is going to give you a choice!

Now let's talk about weapons for a minute.  The firearms used by the San Bernardino shooters are no more dangerous to the person or animal shot than any other.  In fact they're less dangerous than many other common rifles simply because the bullet they shoot is of .22 caliber -- less than a quarter of an inch across.  They are also autoloaders, which means that they fire one round for each depression of the trigger.  There are probably a hundred million said autoloading weapons in the United States today and they are not "weapons of war"; those typically have the capability of "select fire", which means they can shoot more than one bullet for each press of the trigger, the common settings available being three (a "burst") or until you let go (the latter is usually called a "machine gun" but the legal definition includes any weapon that fires more than one round per trigger press.)

It is currently unlawful for any civilian to posses a select-fire weapon manufactured after 1986, and for those made earlier you must first apply with the BATFE, submit a full set of fingerprints and a (relatively large) tax payment and then wait for them to approve the sale before you can take possession.  This typically takes six months to a year or more.

There are a decent number of select-fire weapons in civilians hands; people are willing to go to that much trouble to buy and keep them.  Due to their scarcity and legal restrictions they're very expensive and shooting one is extremely expensive as well simply because of the quantity of ammunition they consume (cartridges are not cheap!)  Of the lawfully-owned machine guns in civilian hands I believe the count used in a crime since that law was passed number two, with one being committed by a former police officer.  These actual "weapons of war" have never been involved in any amount of criminal activity that one can actually find in the statistics.

That doesn't mean machine guns haven't been used in crimes; they have. In fact the San Bernardino shooters were reported to have attempted to convert one of their civilian rifles to select fire (there was apparently evidence of that found in the weapon) but failed at doing so.  It is quite difficult to successfully do this, with success being defined as "it shoots bang-bang-bang when you pull the trigger and doesn't blow up in your face" -- a very real risk if you do it wrong.

Civilian semi-automatic 22 caliber weapons, including the type used by the shooters in San Bernardino, are extremely popular in America.  They're popular because they have myriad legal and proper uses, including depredation (that is, the taking of small invasive animals that damage crops and similar), target shooting and smaller-animal hunting.  They are in fact illegal to use in the hunting of deer and other larger animals in many states because they are not lethal enough to be reasonably certain of a humane kill and no sportsman wants to see an animal suffer unnecessarily.

What the NY Times is talking about is the appearance of weapons.  That is, a gun that looks scary.  The idiocy of this sort of "regulation" has been tried and found wanting, specifically during the "assault weapons ban" of the Clinton Presidency.

That ban failed to produce any verifiable positive effect.  This should not surprise given that only about 2% of all crimes committed with firearms use these sorts of weapons in the first place.  Never mind the impossibility of "removing" them from America -- or anywhere else.  Note France flat-out bans civilian ownership of pistols, any automatic weapon and requires strict licensing of semi-automatic firearms of any sort.  All gun sales and transfers must be documented and are subject to license and registration there.

Of course this didn't bother the terrorists that shot up Paris despite them not having lawful firearms.  It did, however, prevent any of the Parisians there, who obey the law, from having a usable defensive firearm on their person so they could attempt to defend their own lives.

They were slaughtered, just as occurred in San Bernardino where again, nobody in the room was armed.

In fact despite Obama's and other claims the United States is not the "mass shooting" capital of the world. You've probably heard that enough that you take it as truth, but it isn't.  Adjusted for population we're somewhere between 8th and 10th depending on what you exclude (e.g. does some sort of civil insurrection count?)  But just in raw numbers, not adjusting for population, France has had more people killed in mass-shootings this year than has the United States during the entirety of Obama's Presidency and yet they have some of the strictest gun laws in the Western Hemisphere.

Indeed, it's quite idiotic for anyone to argue that we could actually ban guns and get rid of them in the hands of anyone other than law-abiding citizens when we have banned a huge number of drugs since the 1920s and yet you can buy damn near any illegal drug you want on virtually any street corner of any city in America.

And this is where we come back to logic and the truth.

There is evil in this world.

There always has been and there always will be.

The Second Amendment exists because in The Declaration the founders declared that you have a natural right to life; that is, you have a right to live simply because you are human.

No right is real unless you can defend it for yourself and those who you love (such as your children.)

The Second Amendment codifies a pre-existing right to defend your life, and the life of your loved ones, against any evil individual or group that would attempt to take life by unlawful means.  That right is absolute and thus so is the Second Amendment.  It is only when that right is abused by criminal action with said firearm(s) that one may be sanctioned.

The security of a free state does not only require that an invading army be able to be repelled.

Security also includes internal threats within a nation whether individual or collective.

The Security of a Free State was violated in San Bernardino just as certainly as it is when a thug breaks into your home in the middle of the night.

There are those who argue that we should have a list of prohibited guns, persons and the like. What those people are arguing is that those persons have no right to either their life or that of their loved ones.

Think about what you're saying if you hold those beliefs very, very carefully:

You are declaring some people to be so much lesser than you that they do not have the right to live and further, you are declaring that someone else gets to make and update that list -- which could quite-easily wind up with your name on it.  Further, you have managed to collectively get some fifty thousand gun laws on the books of this nation and every one of them, and thus every one of you, has directly contributed to the lack of security of a free state exhibited in San Bernardino and elsewhere.

If that is truly your position then you are not an American. It's that simple.

I understand the argument on the other side when it comes to persons who have committed a crime. However, the problem with a former criminal having guns does not come from them having committed a crime because a criminal by definition does not obey the law. Rather the problem lies in our refusal to keep dangerous people who we identify as dangerous by their criminal activity locked up until they're not dangerous any more. Since a criminal by definition doesn't give a damn about the law whether it's legal for him or her to buy and have a gun is immaterial; either he or she is not going to do something criminal with that gun (in which case they can only contribute to the Security of a Free State by owning one) or they're going to acquire said weapon anyway to commit their next criminal act. The only means by which we can deal with that problem is that once we identify someone as a criminal dangerous to others through our judicial process we do not let him or her out until he or she isn't dangerous any more. This is logic, not politics and if we wish to solve problems we must apply logic to them.

As an example of why so-called "gun control" doesn't work and can't Tashfeen Malik and Sayed Farook obviously did not give a damn about the law; they not only committed murder but they apparently constructed and amassed a number of bombs, every one of which was very illegal to make and possess.  In fact they had roughly four times as many bombs as they did guns. The only saving grace in that regard is that they were piss-poor bomb-makers and their instruments of destruction failed to explode.  Neither of these individuals appears to have been known to be dangerous beforehand, although again as usual we seem to be ignoring the negligence of our government, just as we did after 9/11, after Boston's bombing and in myriad other cases, a few of which I've documented such as the three-time jackass in central Florida who killed a Marshal that was attempting to serve papers on him.

In this case there are allegations that Malik at least misled the government about where she lived when she applied for her Visa to enter the US.  It appears probable that she not only was the radical intent on jihad and stoked its fire she may have come to the United States for the explicit purpose of committing jihad and her "marriage" may have been nothing more than a vehicle to accomplish that.  That we do not yet know and may never find out with certainty, but the timelines and acts involved certainly appear to support such a belief.

Who will be held accountable for that?  Nobody. They never are, just like we've never held anyone accountable for the hundreds if not thousands of guns our government knowingly trafficked to drug lords in Mexico (including at least one that was used to kill a border agent), the former Florida Governor Bush (now Presidential contender) who gave Driver Licenses to people here in the state who were neither citizens or permanent residents (who continued on to kill 3,000 Americans in part facilitated by that state-issued ID), and of course the Boston Bombers who we had explicit warning on from foreign governments and ignored same.

But leave that aside, because even if we closed all those loopholes, even if we punished everyone involved in all of these "oversights" or even went to the degree of charging them as accessories before the fact to terrorism (which in my view we ought to do) it doesn't matter because you can't detect them all.

In short not all evil presents itself before you in a way you can determine before the fact. Most of the time it does, but not always.

And this, inevitably, comes back to the Second Amendment.

You see, at San Bernardino they had a nice "gun free" zone -- an office party for government employees at which nobody was armed -- except, of course, the two shooters.  The assault wound up being terminated before everyone was murdered only because one of the shooters either got unlucky with a ricochet or was a crappy shot and hit a fire sprinkler, setting off the fire alarm, and then their lack of skill at bomb-making kept others from death as their IEDs failed to explode despite the remote for them allegedly being found in their rented SUV.

There is of course no guarantee that if some or all of the people at that party had been armed the outcome would have been different.  It might have meant nothing.  But then again when faced with evil it is not a question of guarantees, it is a question of time before an effective response can take place.

Watch an MMA fight or boxing match for one 2-minute round.  That's the minimum amount of time you can expect to pass before the police can show up if something bad happens right here, right now wherever you are.

Contemplate the pounding that you would take from mere fists during that intervening time; as an untrained individual would you be alive?  Now consider that the person doing the pounding isn't using fists, they have acquired a gun -- whether legally or not.

What is the only thing you can do to improve your odds?

There is only one thing you can do and you know damn well what it is.  Carry a gun yourself as a means of attempting to deter evil should the quite unlikely but possible gravest extreme arise.

If you do not support and are not willing to stand and demand a literal, word-for-word recognition of the Second Amendment as written it is your responsibility to explain why in the comments, using only arguments that can be validly addressed and either confirmed or refuted through logic.

Good luck.

There are few more self-destructive things a human can undertake than denying provable facts.

Only a few things qualify as "provable facts", and it is important to separate out hypothesis, theory and opinion from fact.  Mathematics and physics are two areas of discipline that have massive amounts of their subject matter within the realm of provable facts.

Honest people call the parts of these disciplines that are within the ability to prove laws. Unlike laws made by men that are often ignored these are simply inviolate -- period.  The laws of thermodynamics prohibit a "free lunch", basically; they state that while energy may be transformed from one type to another, and other parts of physics make clear that matter and energy can also be transformed you never get out everything you put in; there is always loss to the environment that you can neither use or avoid.  Newton's laws of motion tell us how momentum, mass, force and velocity interact; how energy, in short, is carried and dissipated in an object that moves or is contacted by one that is moving.

Likewise the laws of mathematics tell us that 2 + 2 = 4, that 2(x + 3) = 2x + 6, that the square root of 9 is 3 and more. These are called laws because every single time the same result will be obtained -- here, there, on Mars or somewhere in Interstellar space.

Here's the reality of money:

Money is only valuable because it is, in relative terms, scarce.  Money is really nothing more than a unit of accounting that's convenient in the physical world.

We could (and perhaps should) account for production in the physical world, and its value, in some invariant physical unit.  I happen to like BTUs (or Joules) of energy required to produce a thing or contained within a thing, because it is an invariant and therefore not subject to tampering.  Accounting for it under production rather than the recoverable (e.g. "stored") energy in a good or service means that improvements in productivity (e.g. discovery of a new, "cheaper" way to make gasoline, for example) makes the value of each unit (a gallon, for example) less and accessibility greater.  This is what productivity improvement is supposed to do -- it advances the common benefit to everyone because it makes useful goods and services more accessible to everyone.

So let us assume that among everything in the economy there is 100,000 Joules of energy represented in a given period of time.  Yes, I know this is a ridiculously small number, but adding more zeros doesn't change anything other than scale, and 100,000 is a nice convenient number.

We will also assume that there is $100,000 -- that is, one hundred thousand dollars, in said economy.

It would be reasonable to assume that the average cost of transacting for one Joule of represented production of a good or service would be one dollar.  There would be items in the economy that are of relatively more value in terms of dollars-per-Joule, and some with less, but on average that would be the expected clearing price.

Now let's remember that money is fungible (that is, exchangeable) with credit (which is just another word for "debt"); that is, a promise to make something tomorrow.  They both are accepted in the economy as exactly the same thing, even though they demonstrably are not.

Now here's the problem: Bill and some others (e.g. the MMT charlatans) assert that the government can simply create money.

But that's not true.  The "creation" he refers to is in fact credit because the government did not first produce anything.

Consider what happens if you double the amount of "money" in the system from $100,000 to $200,000, given that 100,000 Joules of production takes place.

The average clearing price of a good or service produced with those Joules will double from $1 to $2. It cannot be otherwise because equations always balance; this is what the laws of mathematics tell us.

Now does it matter whether you borrow or "create" in this regard?  Only in one respect: The prospect of having to repay (potentially with interest) is a check and balance on borrowing that is utterly absent if you "create."

But in terms of the economic impact today, at the point in which you put the new "money" into the system the two acts are exactly identical. 

Both do immediate violence to the purchasing power of every unit of currency or credit that exists in the system at that instant in time.

It cannot be otherwise because the laws of mathematics, which state that equations always balance, are not suggestions!

As a consequence there is no possible way for the government to spend more than it takes in via taxes without distorting the economy and destroying the purchasing power of the people.

"Creating" is exactly the same thing as shaving coins -- it is counterfeiting and is economically indistinguishable at the moment of the act from borrowing by emitting unbacked credit.

Borrowing, in point of fact, other than the interest, actually has a benefit in that when the amount borrowed unbacked is repaid it is destroyed and thus the inflationary impact is reversed.  Of course in today's world we don't repay government debt ever and so that reversal never takes place, but that someone cheats doesn't mean that the underlying premise is wrong -- it just means you cheated.

Further, when rates are near zero there is no difference economically between "creating" and "borrowing"; it is only when rates rise that the difference shows up.  For this reason if "creating" would work we'd already have proof since we've "created" more than $8 trillion by the Federal Government alone since 2008 and yet there has been no strong, positive economic recovery impact.

The mathematical facts are that the only way to stop the destruction of purchasing power and thus economic damage is for the government at all levels to stop spending more than it takes in -- period.

Denying the laws of mathematics makes you either a fool or a charlatan.

Oh this is terribly rich -- and funny.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Two years ago, Augustus Sol Invictus walked from central Florida to the Mojave Desert and spent a week fasting and praying, at times thinking he wouldn't survive. In a pagan ritual to give thanks when he returned home, he killed a goat and drank its blood.

Now that he's a candidate for U.S. Senate, the story is coming back to bite him.

The chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida has resigned to call attention to Invictus' candidacy in hopes that other party leaders will denounce him. Adrian Wyllie, who was the Libertarian candidate for governor last year, says Invictus wants to lead a civil war, is trying to recruit neo-Nazis to the party and brutally and sadistically dismembered a goat.

It's an awkward situation for the small party that's trying to gain clout.

Hahahaha.... oh that's why Adrian resigned eh?  C'mon Adrian, cut the crap.

This is the well-justified comeuppance for a party that lost its view of what it really stood for quite some time ago.  I ought to know -- I was part of it for a while and resigned in disgust after the state party endorsed Gary Johnson for President, a man who wasn't very Libertarian and who famously stated nobody committed any crimes when it came to the financial crisis.

Oh really, nobody committed any crimes eh?  At the time I put forward a scrolling list of crimes.

Of course the so-called Libertarian Johnson did more than just that.  He also refused to engage on the medical monopoly issue, despite the fact that there are even more crimes found there!

It may be true that the Republicans and Democrats have no principles that matter; they simply run whatever puppet is convenient.  But the Libertarians try to claim they're different; sadly, they're not.

What Sol Invictus has done is thrown this in the party's face in such an outrageous and blatant fashion that it exceeded any thinking individual's tolerance.  But the seed of this disease in the Florida Libertarian Party goes back a hell of a long time, far longer in point of fact, it appears, than the 2012 campaign.

I left the party after attempting to put a stop to this crap by insisting that the party live to its principles and failing to carry the day in that regard.  Adrian himself got involved in his own little game of not really Libertarian, in my opinion, with his driver license screed in which he "refused" to renew his license over Real ID, instead of arguing that he had a right to travel and one cannot force licensing of a right.  There's actually case law precedent on this point, albeit very old case law, but to my knowledge it has never been cited and then overturned.

Instead Adrian did the politician thing and argued that it is "unjust" (e.g. unconstitutional) to be forced to positively identify oneself to obtain said "license."  As I pointed out to Adrian at the time this was a stupid line of attack because if one accepts that the government may license travel by the means common in the present day for non-commercial personal conveyance of one's person and effects, in other words that is not a right but a privilege that the government may grant (because it owns that right and thus may delegate it as it sees fit), then you lose instantly because there is a compelling state interest in being able to prove that only persons eligible to exercise said privilege are granted said license!

In short as I've argued many times a right cannot be subject to license or permit; the two are polar opposites.  You are granted a license or permit to do a thing otherwise prohibited.

The Libertarians have utterly failed in this regard in that their statement of principles and alleged party platform are clear yet they use mealy-mouth words such as "should" instead of "must" and "shall."  This in turn gives rise to the sort of twisted argument-by-expedience, and thus a refusal to demand that candidates adhere to the party principles or be disavowed.

It is a fact of law that one has only one means by which you can prevent someone from running on a given party ballot in this state, and that is to primary said person and beat them.  If you cannot manage to muster enough people, enough money and enough support to do that then anyone can show up on your ballot whether you like it or not, and that's exactly what happened.

The party got what it had coming to it in the form of Sol Invictus; sometimes it takes a while for the cosmic wheel of karma to come around, but it nearly always, given enough time, does.

Goodnight Gracie.

There are some very disturbing reports coming in about the Oregon shooting.

First off, it was clear within minutes that the shooter targeted Christians.  How many people in our political system have been outraged that Christians were targeted for execution while others were either shot in the leg or not shot at all?  I have heard exactly nothing from Obama or anyone else in political power in that regard.  Why not?

Second, you've heard my screeds over the years about The Second Amendment.  If you cannot argue facts and logic then get the hell off my lawn -- you're unwelcome around me.  In matters of life and death there is exactly zero room for any sort of "squishy", "touchy-feely" or "feel good emotionalism."

Let me be clear: If you resort to emotion when life or death are on the line you are going to die.

If you wish to entertain the debate here on firearms, gun control or anything of the sort then you are going to argue logic and facts.  Here they are:

• The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  You call the police when there is an active shooter and they show up with guns.  They don't willy-wally around; they look for a tactical solution and if they get one that works they shoot at the bad guy.  That's exactly what happened here.
  
  
• We cannot have cops everywhere, all the time.  We are not only incapable of paying for it nobody would want to live in such a world.  Even if a cop is just one minute away from anywhere in the United States (an utterly fanciful expectation even in a big city) a person with a bolt action rifle or single-shot pistol can shoot a dozen people (or more!) in that one minute.  As a result the faster any good guy with a gun can engage the bad guy with a gun the lower the risk is of everyone in the vicinity winding up dead -- and the more good guys with guns and the closer they are to the situation the better the odds are for you and everyone else.
  
  
• Virtually all (something like all but three) mass-shootings in the last couple of decades have taken place in "gun-free zones."  To those who want to further restrict firearms -- since there are literally over 100 million peaceful Americans that never have and never will commit a crime with a firearm, and that is an overwhelming majority of the population that owns guns, why don't we ban gun-free zones since virtually every single mass-shooting has taken place in one?  There's an obvious reason that these homicidal maniacs don't shoot up a cop shop -- everyone there is armed and will shoot back!  If our President -- or anyone on the left -- gave a good damn about human life they would both take down the "Nobody here that obeys the law is able to defend themselves, commit mass-murder here" signs.
  
  
• You have an unalienable right to life.  The Constitution does not grant you that right because the government never possessed it in the first place and you cannot grant that which you do not first possess. The Founders understood this and we know that because they declared it to be so in the Declaration of Independence; that's why such a right is not in the Constitution, but the recognition of same, in the gravest extreme, is found in the Second Amendment.
  
  
• You are free to decide at any time to give up.  You are not free to demand that others give up, including giving up their right to protect their own lives.  Any infringement on the Second Amendment is a declaration of your disrespect for someone else's life and an indirect assault upon same.  The only means by which that is legitimate is if and when you are willing to die in the place of those who you demand be disarmed.  If you are not willing to take a bullet intended for me then you have no right to demand that I, in any situation that I find myself, be debarred the ability to effectively fight back against such an assault.
  
  
• A right cannot be conditioned upon a permit.  By definition a permit or license gives you the ability to do something otherwise prohibited.  If I have a right to defend my own life I need no permit to do so. 
  
  
• For the above reasons people at large have the right to own, possess and carry upon their person arms suitable for defensive use without any damn permits.  Period.

If you cannot argue these points from a perspective of logic then you have no basis to be here as a member with the privilege of commenting and having your state (e.g. what you've read, etc) between sessions.  In point of fact this is a perfect illustration of the difference between rights and privileges -- you have no right to be on this site on the Internet at all as it is private property, and therefore I may deny you entry as I wish.

Now let me leave you with one more thing to contemplate.

There are reports that the shooter reloaded during his rampage.  If these reports are true and he was in the room with a bunch of people who were about to become deceased then you need to hear this very clearly and must read this next sentence over and over until it sinks in:

Stop watching the damn movies and become educated now about firearms.

The instant that jackass dropped his magazine and thus announced he was out at the close range that exists in a classroom (30-50' or so maximum, right?) there was absolutely no reason on God's Green Earth why the persons there should not have immediately grabbed something (e.g. a chair!) and threw it at him and/or bum-rushed the shooter.

He was empty and thus at that point he was a thug with a club until he could reload.

Everyone reading this needs to spend some time in the deep, dark recesses of their mind and drill this singular fact far, far into your consciousness:

If you find yourself in a situation like this you must assume you are dead.  

Therefore, logic says that anything you do from that instant forward can only change things for the better.  Yes, you may fail.  One ex-military member reportedly did try to rush the shooter and was shot several times.  It is reported he is expected to survive.  His doing so likely prevented some number of other people from being shot as the shooter was occupied with shooting at him.  He is a hero but the point here is not to urge people to be heros -- it is to point out that once your life is under assault in this sort of fashion nothing you can do will make the situation worse; you can only improve your odds.

You won't hear this from the mainslime media nor from the so-called "pundits" and "experts" but it is true.  You do not know how many rounds or what other weapons the person threatening you has.  You only know that that person's very presence and presentation means that from an objective point of view you must assume you are dead and thus if you get any tactical advantage, no matter how small, you must take advantage of it immediately and without a second thought.

On United Flight 93 the passengers did exactly this, collectively.  They saved a tremendous number of lives by doing so.  They correctly surmised that they were all dead at the moment they learned the plane had been hijacked and was intended to be used as a bomb.  There was, for this reason, no downside to any action they might take -- they could only improve their odds and those of others, and decided to do so.

This was the correct decision.  It is the only logical decision and the only logical set of actions in a circumstance such as this.

Folks, firearms do not shoot themselves.  They do run out of ammunition. If they are not aimed, but rather wildly fired, they either miss or if they hit someone it is much less likely to cause serious injury or death than if they are deliberately aimed.  Bullets do not have a GPS embedded in them as you see in the movies and without deliberate, concentrated action most of the time they will miss. There is an infamous Youtube video of a bar fight in Toledo a number of years back in which many shots were fired at close range typical of the distance you'd find in a classroom.  Watch the video folks, and then realize this: Not one of those rounds hit anyone.

Therefore anything you can do that detracts from an active shooter's concentration and deliberation who is targeting you increases your odds of survival and that of everyone in the area with you.

If you are scared of firearms then do something about that.  Take a shooting lesson from an instructor or someone you trust that owns firearms.  Learn how they work and how to handle them safely without quivering in fear.  A gun is just a mechanical device and simpler than most that you use every day; it is vastly less-complex than a bicycle, lawn-mower or car.  Safe use and handling of firearms is not difficult to learn at all and every gun works essentially the same way.  Understanding this and having at least a passing level of comfort with it means that if you find yourself in a situation such as what occurred the other day and you are given a tactical break no matter how small you will have a clean opportunity to save not only your own life but that of everyone in the vicinity.

I have written a number of articles related to various violent rage-monster style attacks over the years in this column; Newtown, Aurora Colorado and others.  These attacks, including others such as the infamous Columbine High School shoot-em-up-fest, have a common pair of thematic elements:

• The assailants were all late adolescents or young adults.
  
  and
  
  
• They were all taking, or were just taking, a particular type of anti-depressant called an SSRI.

Correlation is not causation and the plural of anecdote is not data.  However, the lack of such rage-monster incidents among other age groups, when these drugs are prescribed across the spectrum of ages, is extremely curious -- and troubling.

Now we have data, in the form of two studies. The first deals with an infamous Glaxo study known as "329", which was related to the drug Paxil; the US brought criminal charges against GSK and ultimately a $3 billion fine for its marketing of the drug to children and adolescents -- an "off-label" use that cannot be marketed under US law and which GSK claimed was supported by "remarkable efficacy and safety" demonstrated by this particular study.

The problem lies in what was found when the study data was re-analyzed -- specifically:

But according to the RIAT team, the effect of paroxetine was not significantly different from placebo for any prespecified primary or secondary outcome measure.

In other words the drug did not work.

But it gets worse:

In the CSR, serious adverse events (defined as an event that “resulted in hospitalization, was associated with suicidal gestures, or was described by the treating physician as serious”) were reported in 11 patients in the paroxetine group, five in the imipramine group, and two in the placebo group.

In other words the rate of serious adverse events including suicidal gestures was more than five times higher in the group receiving the drug than those receiving placebo -- on a drug that didn't work.

Has this paper been retracted?  No.  Has anyone gone to jail for what certainly appears to be impossible to explain away as "accident" or even "ordinary negligence"?  No.  How many young people are dead as a result and why aren't the people responsible for this under indictment as accessories before the fact on negligent manslaughter charges?

But if you think that is bad then you're really going to like this -- which also bears on SSRIs:

From Swedish national registers we extracted information on 856,493 individuals who were prescribed SSRIs, and subsequent violent crimes during 2006 through 2009. We used stratified Cox regression analyses to compare the rate of violent crime while individuals were prescribed these medications with the rate in the same individuals while not receiving medication. Adjustments were made for other psychotropic medications. Information on all medications was extracted from the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register, with complete national data on all dispensed medications. Information on violent crime convictions was extracted from the Swedish national crime register. Using within-individual models, there was an overall association between SSRIs and violent crime convictions (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.19, 95% CI 1.08–1.32, p < 0.001, absolute risk = 1.0%). With age stratification, there was a significant association between SSRIs and violent crime convictions for individuals aged 15 to 24 y (HR = 1.43, 95% CI 1.19–1.73, p < 0.001, absolute risk = 3.0%). However, there were no significant associations in those aged 25–34 y (HR = 1.20, 95% CI 0.95–1.52, p = 0.125, absolute risk = 1.6%), in those aged 35–44 y (HR = 1.06, 95% CI 0.83–1.35, p = 0.666, absolute risk = 1.2%), or in those aged 45 y or older (HR = 1.07, 95% CI 0.84–1.35, p = 0.594, absolute risk = 0.3%).

Got that?

About 3% of the young people, that is, age 15-24, who were prescribed these drugs had a violent crime conviction that appears to be linked to them taking the drug -- a rate approximately double that of the next age cohort and double that of someone not consuming the drug at all.

There was no statistical increase, however, in older patients.

Considering the seriousness of violent offenses and the fact that this measures only convictions (and we know not everyone who does an evil thing gets caught or is convicted) this is an outrageous increase in risk, particularly when you combine it with the above study that appears to show that at least one of the drugs in this class is not effective in patients in this age group -- that is, it doesn't work.

So we have here a drug that appears, from these studies, to literally provide no benefit but it does create a material number of rage monsters.

Further, that the drug was worthless in terms of efficacy and was also dangerous was known long ago.

Oh, and it makes the companies that produce these drugs and the physicians that prescribe them billions of dollars too.

Exactly why aren't all of the executives associated with this and those who put together and published the original studies under indictment as accessories before the fact for those who have committed suicide -- or homicide -- while on drugs that appear to be worthless for the condition prescribed?

Come talk to me about how wonderful our medical and judicial systems are and why anyone in America should have respect for either of them when everyone involved in this crap has been brought to justice.