Mrs. Lanza

Today I am planning to shoot. I don’t know if the weather will cooperate. A highly reliable source tells me Ocala is usually dry in May, but we have had a week or so of rainy weather. It’s supposed to rain like crazy today, but right now it looks okay.

The Santa Fe High shooting is on my mind. I noticed something interesting about the weapons the shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, used. One of them is magical. On the day of the shooting, it was an AR-15 rifle. Later on, it turned into a sawed-off shotgun. After that, it turned into a Remington Model 870, which means it almost certainly was not sawn off.

The Model 870 is a pump gun with a tube magazine. On defense-oriented models, the tube is nearly as long as the barrel. Sawing one off would be pointless and stupid. You would end up with a magazine longer than the barrel. You would gain nearly nothing in maneuverability, and you would expose the magazine to hot gases on their way out of the gun. If the barrel were short enough, it might be possible for pellets to hit the barrel as the pattern opened up.

You can find sawed off 870’s on the web. The magazines are also short. What’s the point of that? A pump shotgun is already a poor home defense weapon because it holds few rounds and is very slow to reload. Why shorten the magazine and make things worse? The Model 870 will hold up to 7 rounds, which is pretty bad. A short version will only hold 5, which is terrible. Cut one down, and you get what? Three rounds? Come on.

My guess: the Santa Fe gun was a legal Model 870 with a pistol grip instead of a buttstock. Journalists are notoriously stupid (and dishonest) about guns, and whoever started the “sawed off” rumor probably didn’t realize “sawed off” only refers to barrels. A true sawed off shotgun has a barrel length below the legal limit. Shotguns also have a minimum legal overall length, but this is not what people think of when they talk about “sawed off” guns.

I am not a great fan of pistol-grip shotguns (except for the great fun you can have shooting watermelons with them). It’s not because you can’t control one. I have been told it’s impossible to control a 12-gauge without shouldering it, but I found that to be untrue in my own experience. I think it can be controlled, but control isn’t the same thing as aiming. The fact that you can keep a gun pointed more or less at an attacker doesn’t mean you’ll hit him. If you didn’t use the bead, you may have been pointing in the wrong direction when you started shooting, so you may be maintaining a bad point of aim as you continue to shoot.

Many people think you don’t have to aim a shotgun. Here is my take on that. I took a Saiga 12 to a gun range, and I fired buckshot at a target 50 feet away, from the hip. It was not hard to hold, and I used a laser, so aiming was not a problem. I made holes around the size of a silver dollar. When your pattern is that small, you need to aim. You can’t just point it in a general direction and expect some of the pellets to hit your burglar. In a bedroom, the pattern would probably be the size of a nickel.

Of course, this was a shotgun with a legal barrel, shooting a type of buckshot that stays pretty tight. Don’t ask me what happens when you saw it off.

It’s actually sad that people think shotguns don’t have to be aimed, because a person who believes that is likely to be killed in a gunfight.

I am not a gun expert, so I may be wrong, but these conclusions are what my common sense provides.

When the shooting happened, journalists were pretty excited. They told us all about the AR-15 Pagourtzis used. Then it turned into a sawed off shotgun, and things got quieter. As a participant on a gun forum put it, the killer used “the wrong gun.”

Are journalists busy retracting the AR-15 nonsense? I won’t check. You can do it if you can. I have my suspicions.

If Pagourtzis used a short Remington 870 and a .38 revolver (the current description of his armament), he had either 10 or 11 rounds in his weapons, maximum, when he started shooting. A .38 can hold either 5 or 6 rounds. Let’s assume the worst: 11 rounds loaded. So he had only 11 rounds to work with, in weapons which are very slow to reload, and he still shot 23 people. Moreover, in spite of not having the supposedly godlike power of the AR-15 on his side, he killed nearly half of his victims.

Shotgun wounds can be extremely damaging. The .38, on the other hand, is not a great caliber for killing. These days, it’s used by old women and people with arthritis. The velocity is low, and the wound channel is not big. Even the 9mm semiauto, which has more energy and whole lot more magazine capacity, is a lot better.

Pagourtzis proved the man, not the weapon, makes the difference. At least when shooting tightly packed, unarmed victims in a gun-free zone.

Press coverage has been relatively muted. RELATIVELY. Obviously, a highly successful mass murderer armed with primitive firearms of types that existed over a hundred years ago does not fit in with the “AR-15 = ‘assault weapon'” mythology. Journalists jumped at the bait, and then they pulled back and decided to reserve their real hysteria for the next AR-15 crime.

Journalists want to go after the low-hanging fruit first, and the AR-15 hangs even lower than the AK-47, which does most of the same things, only much better (face it). They want our revolvers and shotguns, but right now the big focus is on black rifles, which have to be more dangerous, because they look mean.

Journalists have largely ignored another school shooting that took place yesterday. Two people were shot, one fatally, at the Clayton County Schools Performing Arts Center in Jonesboro, Georgia. The shooting took place at a graduation ceremony, following an argument. The graduates were students from the Perry Learning Center, also in Jonesboro. Basically, you can say it happened in Atlanta. That’s the metro area involved.

Why is the Georgia shooting not important? For one thing, no AR-15; not even an imaginary one that later turns into a shotgun. For another…black people. The Perry Learning Center is a black school. Go online and look at the center’s photos.

Most murders in America are committed by black people, and journalists want to keep that quiet, even though most victims of black killers are black. Although they were arrested yesterday, we still don’t have photos of the suspects. When they turn up, at least one of them will be black. In all likelihood, the suspects and victims are all black. Four or more people are involved, and it would not be easy to come up with four white people at an event associated with this school.

No AR-15, no white or Asian shooter…nothing to see here.

Big-time school shooters tend to be white. People who shoot up social gatherings tend to be black. That’s just how things are.

When black people commit sensational crimes of violence, very often, suspect photos take a long time appear. Not true with white criminals. When you Google “graduation shooting georgia suspects,” you get no photos of the suspects, but you do get photos of white Dimitrios Pagourtzis, who wasn’t even there.

On the day of the Santa Fe shooting, I went to town wearing a Smith & Wesson shirt. I was not trying to make a point. I didn’t think about it until the day was over. It just happened to be the shirt I grabbed when I got dressed.

I’m glad I wore it, though, because when you’re right, it’s important not to act like you’re doing something wrong. Conservatives are right about our civil right to own and carry firearms. You shouldn’t hide your beliefs just because an evil person somewhere far away uses firearms to do something very bad.

I used to go to a gun show in Fort Lauderdale. They held it at a building called the War Memorial Auditorium. That gun show is gone now. They have to hold it somewhere else. After the Parkland shooting, near Fort Lauderdale, the organizers of the show agreed to cancel one event out of respect for the victims and their families. Now the people in charge of the auditorium won’t let them return. Is this because the organizers put the idea in their heads with their ridiculous display of submission and false guilt? Could be.

It was the wrong thing to do. If we’re right about 2A before a mass shooting, we’re right while it’s going on, and we’re right the next day. It’s not smart to act like we’re meeting to sell pornography or use heroin. Who will stand up for you, when you won’t even stand up for yourself?

I didn’t shoot up a school. I never will. I’m not the problem. I won’t pretend to be the problem just to make deluded, hostile people like me. Gun-grabbers have already decided to dislike and persecute me. Nothing I can do will change that, but acting guilty can certainly motivate them to keep swinging.

All that being said, it’s time 2A people started pushing people to secure their guns VOLUNTARILY VOLUNTARILY VOLUNTARILY. I use repetition to underscore the point that I am NOT SUGGESTING WE NEED NEW LAWS. In order AVOID NEW LAWS, we should be pressuring each other to keep guns away from nuts and incompetents.

Adam Lanza had a head the size of a grapefruit, his eyes were about half an inch apart, he had full-blown Asperger’s plus unknown personality problems, he had threatened to kill his mother and students at his school, and his mom bought him weapons and stored an AR-15…in a $200 gun “safe” a determined person could open with a spoon. Then she stored it in a computer room next to his bedroom.

I’ll just say it. The Second Amendment is not for everyone. Some people should voluntarily keep guns out of their houses. This woman’s son was very smart, and he was an angry mental defective. When it comes to gun ownership and the Lanzas, the danger to others clearly outweighed the necessity of keeping one family safe. At the very least, she should have had a real gun safe IN HER OWN BEDROOM. Lanza opened her glorified medicine cabinet, entered her bedroom, and put 4 rounds in her skull, long after he had threatened to kill her. There is no way to excuse her irresponsibility.

Why would anyone think shooting was good therapy for an Asperger’s patient who had screaming fits and threatened to kill people?

Shooting is not for everyone. That’s a fact. Ask Chris Kyle’s widow.

You don’t have to do a thing simply because you can.

Nikolas Cruz was another head case. The cops visited him many times before he killed. He put scary things on social media. His guns were taken away. His dad gave them back! Indefensible. What possible excuse could he have had? The danger was clear.

It appears that Pagourtzis was a known nutbar. He went to school every day dressed like a killer from a video game. How could his parents have thought he should be trusted with guns?

Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers, had a web page where he wrote about killing people. He and his pal Dylan Klebold got guns through private sales, from idiots who didn’t care about their ages.

We pressure each other to stand up for 2A. We pressure each other to vote GOP. We pressure each other to support the NRA. How about devoting a little time to talk to each other about keeping guns away from our crazy relations? A lot of behaviors and beliefs draw heavy criticism in the 2A ranks. We police each other all the time. Somehow, we don’t find time to talk to each other about securing our weapons.

That looks bad. It also invites legislation. If you don’t look after your own house, liberals will come do it for you.

There are lots of people out there who have access to guns in spite of clear signs that they shouldn’t. Parents, siblings, and spouses live in denial. It’s better to have uncomfortable conversations now than to read about our crazy acquaintances on the news.

We worry that the government will pass laws enabling leftist stormtroopers to come in and take guns away from every person who has ever been depressed or suffered from PTSD. Then we fail to deal with individuals we know are dangerous. A person’s personal acquaintances are much better qualified to assess his mental issues than a government goon in a Crown Vic. Why aren’t we trying harder?

Smart people don’t wait for their enemies to address their failings. They get out in front, take over the issues, and decide where the goalposts go. We need to take the gun security issue away from socialists, Wiccans, and ignorant snowflakes.

Will we do it? I doubt it. The NRA would be the obvious organization to put in the lead role, but they would probably see the effort as suicidal.

Anyway, I am going to try to shoot today. If not today, this week. Let’s make hay while the sun shines.