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Opinion

Yo, Gun-Grabbers: Do These Facts Change Your Story At All?

The (now) four deputies who waited outside Parkland School until the shooting stopped should be dubbed “Broward’s Cowards”. They should be fired immediately and lose all their pensions and benefits. The three who cowered outside with Scott Peterson claim they were “under orders” to wait and secure the area until backup arrived. GARBAGE! Kids were being murdered inside as they stood there! At that point, humanity and morality DEMAND that “orders” go out the window until you save as many as you can! Imagine if firefighters decided to stand outside a burning school while children screamed inside. “We’ll just wait until it burns itself out.”

I was lifeguard from age 15-23. When I was 20, a teenage boy started drowning in the lake. I jumped in, swam out to him, and hauled him safely in. I didn’t wait until he was passed out, passively floating and almost dead. I didn’t wait because it was my DUTY to go! I don’t care if you think getting shot is worse than drowning (personally, I’d rather get shot). I didn’t do it because Ohio paid me the princely sum of $2.12 an hour to guard. I did it because I had a moral obligation as the official, trained, responsible person at the scene. People put their trust in me, and it was my responsibility to fulfill that trust. Solomon tells us, “Do not withhold good from them to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come back, and tomorrow I will give it.’ when you have it with you.” Prov. 3:27-28.

I am as pro-law enforcement as they come, as a former Reserve Officer, a prosecutor who trained cops for 13 years, with many LEO friends and a nephew who’s a police officer. I think 99.9% of LEO’s are great and sacrificial servants to their fellow citizens. However, those few who won’t fulfill their sworn duty before God and Man because they fear for their own well-being are a DISGRACE to the cops, firefighters, and EMT’s who died in the Twin Towers, and to every other emergency responder who’s ever died in the line of duty! I WILL NOT support a sworn public servant who turns his back on dying, helpless, children. Every LEO is trained and should be mentally prepared for this. Plus, we know that when confronted by anyone with a gun, mass killers surrender or kill themselves immediately 50% of the time. (And yes, I know that police can’t be sued for failing to act. SeeCastle Rock vs. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005); Deshaney vs. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, 489 U.S. 189 (1989)

But these cases say that cops owe no dutyto any specific person, but the general public as a whole. Well, those kids were certainly the “general public” while they were being slaughtered.) Also, don’t give me, “The killer had a superior weapon.” The safest time to shoot the killer is when he’s focused on his victims and not on good guys with guns coming in. “Superior weapon” my butt! It’s the man USING the weapon that makes him superior, NOT the kind of weapon he has! Besides, merely distracting a mass killer with your presence, let alone your gunfire, is going to make him lose focus and save lives!

In the past six weeks I’ve trained about 40 security team members from 6 different churches in the law of self-defense and the Bible and self-defense. Several are former and current LEO’s, firefighters, EMT’s and members of our armed forces. EACH of them are determined that the only way a mass killer will get by him to their congregation is over his dead body! THEY have sworn to obey God’s command, “Deliver those who are being taken away to death, and those who are staggering to slaughter! O hold them back! If you say, ‘See, we did not know this.’ Does He not consider it Who weighs the hearts? And does He not know it Who keeps your soul? And will He not render to a man according to his work?” Prov. 24: 11-12.

In doing so they obey the command from God, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Luke 10:27; Lev. 19:18. It comes down to this: “He who overcomes will inherit these things [heaven], and I will be his God and he shall be my son. But for the COWARDLY and the unbelieving and abominable and murderers…and all liars, their part will be in the lake of fire….” Rev. 21:7-8.

Thankfully, such officer cowardice is an extremely rare event, but the point remains that we are relying upon a law enforcement establishment that will never have enough personnel to man every public school and fulfill its other duties to the public. There isn’t enough money for the personnel. However, if volunteer militiamen were in place at every school, backed up by armed, trained teachers, the problem of mass school shootings is solved.

Two new facts about the Parkland attack have come to light. The Left screams about the potential damage to be done when a killer uses “high capacity magazines” holding 30 or more rounds. First, a 30-round mag is the STANDARD issue magazine for any AR or AK type rifle. Gun-grabbers, however, insist that if the 10’s of millions of 30-round mags were somehow confiscated and citizens were limited to mags holding 10 rounds or less (and in pistols too, as in the 1994 Federal Assault Rifle Ban), then killers so limited would kill fewer victims.

It has been publicly demonstrated hundreds of times (check YouTube) that a person can change out multiple 10-round mags so fast that there is no significant difference in the total number of rounds that be fired in a short time. This fact was proven in this latest massacre. We know now (see, Dean Weingarten on Ammoland.com) that the killer couldn’t hide the longer 30-round mags in his backpack, and instead used 10-round magazines to kill 17 and wound 16 people! In any case, killers with pistols having 10, 15, and 17-round capacities killed and wounded far more people at Luby’s Cafeteria and Virginia Tech.

The biggest lie perpetrated by the Gun-grabber media is that “assault rifles are designed solely to kill people”. In fact, strategic military idea behind the 5.56mm round fired by the M16 and all successive variants down to today’s M4, is that it was designed to WOUND soldiers, NOT kill! The idea was that if the round killed an enemy soldier, his comrades would simply charge ahead to avenge him. However, if the soldier is wounded, then it would take two more enemy soldiers to take him to the rear for expensive surgery and rehab. Thus, each soldier wounded took a total of three enemy from the field. THIS is what the M16 round was designed to do on healthy, in-shape, young men.

Dr. Martin Fackler was the former head of the US Army’s Wound Ballistics Lab. No one in the world knew more about the effects of bullets on humans than Dr. Fackler. In 1992, he published a study of the killing effect of weapons in terrorist events from 1970 to 1991. He found the most common weapons were: 12 gauge shotguns, “assault rifle” calibers, 5.56mm and the Russian 7.62, and all pistol/revolver calibers combined. Fackler found that the one-hit kill rate of the shotgun was 76%. With the rifle calibers, however, the death rate from one shot was only 26%, while the handgun lethality rate was 24%. In other words, these “Weapons designed to kill people” actually killed only 1 out of 4 people, no greater kill rate than handguns! In fact, in the vast majority of mass killings with AR and AK-type semi-auto rifles, you will almost always have an almost exact ratio of 3-4 victims wounded to each one killed.

The death ratio was higher at the Sutherland Springs church massacre because the killer fired at very close range, his targets included small children and old people, and he had time to shoot many twice. I presume the ratio was 50/50 at Parkland because the killer was at close range, and possibly shot some of his teenage victims more than once or in the head.

Finally, Gun-grabbers harp on the AR being a “high-powered rifle”. True, but only marginally so. Rounds are called “high-powered” because their high velocities translate to more kinetic energy hitting the target. But 5.56mm is barely 2-tenths of an inch in diameter and only 50-80% heavier and twice as fast as a common .22 long-rifle bullet. The 5.56 is only “high-powered” compared to .22’s. .22 magnum. .17 caliber rounds. Some states ban it’s use for deer hunting, because it will not kill them reliably and humanely at any but short range.

Compared to the 30.’06 of WWI, WWII, and Korea, or the 7.62/.308 round of the late 50’s and Vietnam up to 1967 (when it was replaced by the 5.56), the 5.56 is an anemic round with vastly less killing power. We now know the Parkland killer tried to shoot out the school’s second-story windows so he could fire on the kids escaping below. But Florida building codes require reinforced glass that won’t shatter when hit by debris in a hurricane. His bullets merely cracked, but could not shatter the windows, even though he shot at least one window several times! His “high-powered” rifle couldn’t even penetrate safety glass!

After years of debate on this issue, don’t you think the news media would have found out these facts and quit spreading obvious, blatant, falsehoods? ONLY if they were honest and didn’t have a political agenda! Since however, they are DIShonest and have a Leftist political agenda to push, they continue telling bald-faced lies about guns and guns owners in a manner that would have Josef Goebbels giving them a standing ovation! The truth is, YOU are your own first responder. Arm and train, and tell your Governor to activate the militia.

Image: CC0 Creative Commons; Excerpted from: https://pixabay.com/en/mistake-error-facepalm-why-wrong-3019036/

Greg Hopkins

Greg Hopkins is a recovering lawyer, city prosecutor, police Use-of-Force law instructor, former city judge in two towns and criminal defense lawyer. He’s been teaching the Bible to teens and adults for 40 years. He now trains CCP holders and armed church security teams in self defense law. He also does expert witnessing in firearms and self defense cases. His book is A Time To Kill: The Myth of Christian Pacifism, on the Bible and Self Defense.

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