Another heart-breaking\natrocity, blamed falsely on law-abiding gun owners: the massacre at the\ncountry-themed bar in Thousand Oaks, California, which had recently been named\none of the three safest cities in America. The perpetrator: an honorably\ndischarged Marine combat veteran who had been taught how to shoot people by the\ngovernment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And \u2013 why should\nthis incident be different? \u2013 perpetrated in a gun-free zone, a\/k\/a hunting\npreserve for psychopathic murderers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are told\nthere were half a dozen off duty cops in the bar when the shooting went down,\nand that none were carrying guns. It\nwould be unfair to blame them for that. \nCops are universally told not to carry their off-duty guns when they might\nbe under the influence of alcohol, and consuming alcohol is what most folks go\nto bars for. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The murderer\nshot down the unarmed security man first. \nHe was easy to spot, and \u201cunarmed security\u201d is really an oxymoron in a\ncase like this. The first armed good guy\nthrough the door, SWAT-trained hero Sergeant Ron Helus, was murdered before he\ncould engage: the coward apparently anticipated where responding officers would\nenter and was probably waiting for him in ambush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By contrast,\none or more unidentifiable patrons in the crowd, had they been competently\narmed, would have had the advantage of surprise and would almost certainly been\nable to neutralize the gunman before he could rack up anything like the death\ntoll he did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s the\nsolution? I\u2019m told that in California it\u2019s\nillegal to carry a gun in a bar, period. In the more enlightened jurisdictions,\nit is legal to do so if the licensed carrier is not consuming alcohol\nhimself. Which would naturally lend\nitself to a life-saving adaptation of the Designated Driver concept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was a\nyoung patrolman in the early 1970s, I quickly learned that if I wasn\u2019t\nanswering calls for service, it was no trick to arrest at least one drunk\ndriver a night, sometimes more. A decade\nlater, as a training sergeant for another police department, I found it harder\nto find drunk drivers on the road, even during \u201cprime time\u201d right after the\nbars had closed. Twenty years after that, <\/em>as a captain with a third agency\nand recently divorced, I would take Thanksgiving and Christmas shifts so another\ncop could have the holiday off with his family. In the old days, festive\nholidays were the most likely times to find drunk drivers on the road, but by\nthen I could look all day or evening for one and come up dry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why? Society\nhad wisely condemned drunk driving. \u201cFriends don\u2019t let friends drive drunk\u201d had\nbecome the mantra, and Designated Drivers had come into vogue. It has undoubtedly saved a great many lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I submit\nthat the time has come for the Designated Driver to be supplemented with the\nDesignated Defender in bars, very likely the same person. That is, one sober member of the happy group,\nlegal to carry and alert, armed and ready to interdict a monster like the one\nwho carried out the cowardly massacre in Thousand Oaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFriends don\u2019t\nlet friends drive drunk.\u201d Designated\nDriver!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFriends don\u2019t\nlet friends die helpless.\u201d Designated Defender!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Another heart-breaking atrocity, blamed falsely on law-abiding gun owners: the massacre at the country-themed bar in Thousand Oaks, California, which had recently been named one of the three safest cities in America. The perpetrator: an honorably discharged Marine combat veteran who had been taught how to shoot people by the government. And \u2013 why should […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5189","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5190,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5189\/revisions\/5190"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}