Lawrence O’Donnell Finds a Heckler…Himself!

Really this is an entirely scummy encounter on O’Donnell’s part.  Earlier that day (yesterday), Gayle Trotter offered a... well, I don’t think she would put it this way, but a feminist* defense of the right to bear arms.

If you can’t watch it, this mediaite account captures it well.

So to get her back for having the temerity to put that Senator in his place, Lawrence O’Donnell decided to yell at her for about eleven minutes.  You think I am joking?  Watch it:

Now you can read about the encounter here, if you don’t have the ability to view it right away, but nothing really captures like watching it.  And as the title of this piece indicates, I think it is fair to say O’Donnell heckled her.  He was downright rude.

Oh, and to the substance of his point, he says he needs examples of people needing assault rifles to defend themselves?  Of them needing high capacity clips?  Maybe Ms. Trotter didn’t have any examples, but let me present a few:

Well, first off, news reports are really hit and miss on details.  You might hear of people using “shotguns” and/or shooting, but very often you are not being told the exact gun being used, how many shots were fired.  I have never seen an article that tells you how many bullets could be held by a specific magazine.  But here’s a few examples I found just googling around.

First, on the need for high capacity clips. From December of 2010:

HPD identifies 2 of 3 robbers killed in jewelry store shootout

Owner kills 3 robbers in jewelry store shootout

In the back room of a humble jewelry store and pawn shop in Houston's East End Thursday afternoon, a gunman tied Eva Castillo's wrists tightly — too tightly. She complained of the pain, so he loosened the bindings. Then Castillo's husband was ordered at gunpoint to put his hands behind his back.

But Ramon Castillo had a surprise for the gunman and two cohorts, who had announced they were robbing the business.

Castillo pulled a pistol from his waistband and shot the gunman dead. Then he grabbed a shotgun from his office and engaged in a shootout with the other two armed robbers.

When it was over, all three robbers were dead — and Castillo, though shot at least three times, was still standing, having successfully defended what was rightfully his.

Houston Police have identified two of the three robbers killed during a shootout with a jewelry store owner yesterday as Nelson Wilfredo Tambora-Ramiro, 21, and Onilton Bolanos Castillano, 38.

HPD spokesman Kese Smith said the two men had Honduran identification on them. He said their immigration status is uncertain.

The third robber’s identity is pending from the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office.

It was the third time his shop, Castillo's Jewelry at 4502 Canal at Super Street, had been robbed since it opened 22 years ago, East End residents said.

Castillo, 52, apparently did not immediately realize he had been shot, officers said. He walked outside the store and looked around for more gunmen, then went back inside the business, realized he was wounded and untied his 48-year-old wife, who was unharmed, said Houston Police Department homicide investigator M.F. "Fil" Waters.

He remained in surgery at Ben Taub General Hospital late Thursday, where he was listed in critical but stable condition, with gunshot wounds to his left shoulder, left abdomen and legs, Houston police said. He is expected to survive.

Investigators said so many shots were fired inside the jewelry shop in a two- or three-minute span that they could not estimate the number of rounds. "We've got bullet fragments all over the place, casings all over the place, shotgun slugs all over the place, so it's really hard to determine at this point how many rounds were actually fired - but quite a few," Waters said.

There is no indication of course whether either the pistol or even potentially the shotgun utilized a magazine that would be outlawed under Feinstein’s proposed Assault Weapon Ban.  But when there are so many bullets flying that the cops can’t figure out just how many were fired, it seems obvious to me that this is a situation where the so-called high-capacity magazine would have done Mr. Castillo a ton of good.  Read the whole thing if you are inclined.

And there is the famous example of the mother who shot six times at a burglar in order to thwart that burglary.  Now she did not have a high capacity clip, but I bet by the end of the encounter she wished she did.  You see she had a .38 revolver, which you would correctly guess only carried six bullets at a time.  So when she fired for the sixth time—having hit him five times—she was out.  From John Nolte’s excellent piece on it:

[A] woman was working in an upstairs office when she spotted a strange man outside a window, according to Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman. He said she took her 9-year-old twins to a crawlspace before the man broke in using a crowbar.

But the man eventually found the family.

"The perpetrator opens that door. Of course, at that time he's staring at her, her two children and a .38 revolver," Chapman told Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh.

The woman then shot him five times, but he survived, Chapman said. He said the woman ran out of bullets but threatened to shoot the intruder if he moved.

"She's standing over him, and she realizes she's fired all six rounds. And the guy's telling her to quit shooting," Chapman said.

In other words, she was pointing an empty gun at him.  There is no truth to the rumor that she said this when she did:

Of course that is a joke, but that scene is the less famous example of Eastwood’s soliloquy in Dirty Harry and it is a key scene.  What had happened was a guy had just committed a crime, I think a bank robbery and they had a shootout.  Eastwood then gets the guy on the ground and the criminal looks at his shotgun nearby and he is tempted to make a grab for it.  So then Eastwood gives that line.  If you can’t watch it, he says:

I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

And as a result the guy backs down (which you don’t really see in that clip).  So after Eastwood has control of the situation, the criminal asks him if he really fired all his bullets.  And Eastwood points the gun at him and pulls the trigger and there is just a click.  That was his way of telling the man it was empty, and crucially he knew it all along.  That bit about “I kind of lost track of it myself” was bull.  He knew exactly how many shots he fired, and so his whole speech that time was designed to bluff the guy into surrendering rather than putting up more of a fight.

And all of that is a crucial set up for the climax.  If you haven’t seen this movie, then skip over this paragraph and arguably the next, but do see it as soon as possible.  It is a great movie.  Even if you disagree with its message—I mean it is even pro-torture at one point—it presents a viewpoint that you should confront.  So… SPOILER ALERT!  Anyway, so in the last scene he is facing off with the psycho he had been pursuing through much of the movie and he has another shoot out.  And he ends up pointing a gun at him as the bad guy has his gun on the ground and he gives pretty much the same speech.  But what is crucial is that this time Eastwood is angry and actively goading the pyscho into trying for his gun.  And this time the psycho goes for the gun and Eastwood's character shoots him.  No one would ever try him for murder—the guy was going for his gun after all—but you know from that crucial first scene that it is pretty much what it was.  Yes, he was defending himself, but he intentionally goaded the killer into the situation where it was necessary.  He gave the killer the hope his gun was empty when you know that Harry knows exactly how many bullets he fired.  It is the climax of a movie that presents one of the harshest critiques of our overly lenient criminal justice system ever put to film and it ends with Harry throwing his badge away because he just can’t play by their rules anymore.

And then he promptly jumped in the water and got his badge back, I guess, because they had a whole bunch of sequels.  That’s the problem with sequels, sometimes: they compromise what was originally supposed to be a self-contained piece.  It is clear as day that originally they meant it to be Dirty Harry Callahan’s last case, but then the movie did well enough that they made a bunch of sequels, taking a huge chunk out of the impact of that final scene.  Fortunately we are not likely to see a similar mistake with Gran Torino.

So while I doubt that the mother in Georgia gave the same line as Eastwood, she was doing the same bluff that Eastwood made in that clip: she was hoping and praying that this guy didn’t figure out she was pointing an empty gun at him.  I think it is safe to say she did not have enough bullets in that gun.  If I were her, I would turn in that revolver for an automatic with a high capacity clip.  Gun control advocates like to ask why a person needs that many bullets.  I would ask a different question: if a person is a law abiding citizen, why shouldn’t they have more bullets than they would need?  If you are a law abiding citizen who will only use a gun for lawful purposes, isn't it better to have more bullets than you need, than less?

Oh, and for bonus points, imagine if he had a partner in all of this?  Would six shots be enough?  Indeed, would ten?  And if there were three of them?  Four?

And then there is the issue of needing so-called Assault Rifle (recognizing that the definition of the term is so nebulous as to be arbitrary) we have a few examples of those.  For instance, here’s the story of a teenage boy using an assault rifle to save his and his sister from home invaders:

Some bloggers have said that it was specifically an AR-15, but I can’t get verification of that.  But an AR-15 was used in this incident:

From the accompanying article:

Early Tuesday morning, Christopher Boise heard a noise coming from the basement. As he walked toward the source of that noise, the RIT student noticed two men standing in the downstairs portion of his apartment.

"They were waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs," said Boise.

One of them had a handgun trained on Boise.

Within moments, Boise screamed. His cries were heard by his roommate, Raymond.

"It wasn't like a, 'I stepped by stepped on a piece of glass' kind of scream," Raymond said.  "So, I instinctively went to my gun bag."

Raymond owns an AR-15 which is a military style rifle.

Raymond estimated that just five seconds passed until the door started to open. It was one of the intruders.

"By the time I had it out and ready, one of the men came at my door, slowly opened it, saw that there was a barrel on the other side and from there backed out," Raymond said.

The two men fled the apartment.

Nothing was taken and no shots were fired.

Now, you might say, “see?  He didn’t need any bullets at all, and certainly not a high capacity clip!  After all the gun was not even loaded when they ran (as is revealed in the full article and in the video)!”  The problem with that is that clearly in this case, it was the fear factor that drove the burglars** off.  So what part of their fear was relevant?  Would any gun have worked?  Would an ordinary hunting rifle have worked?  Or did it specifically help that it was a military style rifle?  And did the burglars think, albeit erroneously, that this man could fling at them up to thirty rounds without reloading?  We might never know the answer to the question and therefore we cannot know whether a lesser weapon would have done the job.

And the irony of it is that allowing this young man to have an AR-15 might have saved lives.  If he had nothing, who knows what the burglars might have done.  Were they just there to rob, or kidnap?  Or maybe the burglars thought that the two young men were gay (rightly or wrong--I don't want to suggest anything about them) and wanted to beat them up.  One of them could have been hospitalized.  One of them could have died.  Or imagine if Raymond’s weapon was not as intimidating.  Imagine the law kept him from having that AR-15, or limited the size of its magazine and the criminals knew it.  One of the criminals had a gun, too.  Would they have thought that they could take Raymond on?  Would a firefight have ensued?  One can only guess, and one can only speculate at how such a shootout might have went, but it seems unlikely that all four men would have escaped that situation without someone at least being hurt.

But I saved the best example of the use of Assault Rifles for defense for last.  The LA Riots:

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused of beating the now-deceased Rodney King.  During the five days, mobs around Los Angeles looted stores, burnt 3,767 buildings, caused more than $1 billion in property damage, and led to the deaths of more than 50 people and left another 4,000 injured.  A story that has been forgotten since then is that of the brave storeowners in Koreatown who fended off mobs with handguns, rifles and assault weapons.

On the second day of the riots, the police had abandoned much of Koreatown.  Jay Rhee, a storeowner in the area, stated to The Los Angeles Times, “we have lost faith in the police.”

With the cops nowhere to be found, hundreds of people marauded through the streets towards Koreatown.  The neighborhood suffered 45 percent of all the property damage and five fatalities of storeowners during the riots.  Having had enough of waiting for police, Korean storeowners assembled into militias to protect themselves, their families, and businesses.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “From the rooftops of their supermarkets, a group of Koreans armed with shotguns and automatic weapons peered onto the smoky streets…Koreans have turned their pastel-colored mini-malls into fortresses against looters tide.”

Rhee claimed that the storeowners shot off 500 rounds into the sky and ground in order to break up the masses of people.  The only weapons able to clear that much ammo in a very short time are assault weapons.  Single shot pistols or rifles might not have been able to deter the crowd hell-bent on destroying the neighborhood.

By the end of the day storeowners had slain four looters and fended off the mob.  It would be 24 more hours until the National Guard arrived and another two days before the riots were completely put down.  Had the riots occurred just a couple of years later when the Congress banned assault weapons, many of these storeowners may not have been so lucky. It’s situations like the LA riots, which, while being rare, can occur anywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to far off countries during the Arab Spring.

Assault weapons are legal for this reason: they protect people from extreme cases of assault.

And for bonus points, while the article doesn’t mention if they had so-called high capacity clips or not, with shooting over 500 bullets into the air, it seems reasonable to believe they used a few, doesn’t it?

Indeed, I even found an example of a person needing an “Assault Shotgun” which is defined in Feinstein’s proposed ban in relevant part as having an auto-loading function.  This doesn’t allow for constant fire (because that is nuts), but it allows you to fire one shot per trigger pull without having to pump or reload.  So from Business Insider:

At noon Saturday, 72 year old Menuard Frazier's home was invaded by three men who beat him and tied him up while they robbed his residence.

According to WSAZ, the three men knocked and asked the retiree to use the phone. As he led them to the kitchen, they jumped him, tied his legs up and put a sheet over his head.

When the crew left, Frazier dragged himself to the kitchen, got a butcher knife and cut himself free.

After grabbing his 9-millimeter automatic pistol he spotted the thieves making their way back across his yard from robbing his son's home, and they opened up with weapons they'd stolen from the younger Frazier's house.

Frazier returned fire as the trio rushed to their pick-up for a get away.

Moving out of pistol range, Frazier dumped the 9-millimeter and grabbed a Remington 1100 auto-loading, tactical shotgun and emptied that into the back of the truck.

An angry Frazier told police: "I ran out on the porch with an 11-hundred automatic and emptied it as they drove across the creek down here," he said. "I did my best to kill everyone of them."

The Remington 1100 auto-loading, tactical shotgun would be covered under the proposed ban (thanks to my gun expert Mr. Hoge for the consultation on this point).

I could find all of that in only a few minutes of googling.  Now of course O’Donnell might object that none of those cases involved women.  So what of it?  Certainly there is no question that a woman could have done those things.  So the gender of the people defending themselves is irrelevant...

...except in this sense.  I think culturally women are being taught that guns are a “guy thing.”  I think culturally too many women are afraid of guns.  Very often the rise of prominence of women in our society, from being literally chattel that their husbands could rape if they wanted to in the nineteenth century, to being something closer to equal members of our society who can vote and more recently serve in combat, many women have felt that men needed to learn from women how to be better people.  And there is something to the idea that women civilize men.

But I think women could stand to learn some from men.  Let me tell you a pair of stories.  The first about a woman, an elderly woman, I know.  She has passed on but she literally was as old as Reagan.  One day her son was getting ready to marry a woman and they were trying to pick where to go for a honeymoon.  They didn’t have very much money—as is often the case with young couples—and they decided to have a romantic winter on the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, cozying by the fire and so on.   But the mother got it in her head that really they should be going to a place in the sun in Florida, even though it would stretch their budget.  So she told her son that his bride-to-be was just being polite when she said she wanted to go to the Poconos and that she really wanted to go to Florida.  And she also told her future daughter-in-law that her son was just being polite and really wanted to go to Florida.  And they really were about to go, until the bride-to-be broke down and said she knew he really wanted to go to Florida but she really didn’t, and the whole scheme was revealed.  The ended up honeymooning in the Poconos as both of them really wanted.

I remember hearing that story many years after the fact from the “bride” of it, and thinking that it sounds like an “I Love Lucy” maneuver.  But on reflection, I realized that this was generational divide.  Women in that time were not able to exercise overt power, but I think there is a natural desire in all people not to be powerless.  So they have to use covert power, what can only be described as conniving.  And while I don’t blame the old woman in the story for being this way, can’t we all agree that it is better when couples can be open about their feelings and negotiate based on equality?

Another story comes from a woman and a man who are more my age, friends of the family.  The man tells me how he got a call at work one day from the wife, when she told him that someone tried to break into their car.  It was clear as day: the door was partly ajar but not quite unlatched.  Plainly someone tried to break in and as they did the alarm went off and chased the criminal away.  The man knows his wife will be home before she is, so the man says to his wife (paraphrase): “I want you to write a simple sign by hand, and put it on the driver’s side door.  This is what it should say, so write it down: ‘I know what you tried to do.  I am listening.  I have a shotgun.’”

She got upset and said, “you’re not going to be waiting out there with your gun, are you?”

“No,” he replied, “but I want them to think I am.”

Well, he comes home that night and sees what she put on the car.  “I know you tried to break into my car and I called the police and you will go to jail for a long time!”

He then goes into his home and asks his wife why he didn’t put up the message he dictated out to her.  She said she created a sign with that, too, on her computer and showed it to him.  It had the same words, “I know what you tried to do.  I am listening.  I have a shotgun.”  Only it had a cartoon gun underneath it.

So he went and wrote the correct message by hand and taped it to the window.  And no one tried to break into the car again.

The reality is men have had overt power for much longer than women and I submit that there is a difference of culture between us that extends beyond any physical cause.  It is a mentality that can be changed.  One of the byproducts is that men are more comfortable with overt power and in the case of this couple I just talked about, the man was better able to understand how to project power.

Mao once said that power comes from the end of gun.  It might sound strange for me, a stanch believer in freedom, democracy and capitalism to quote a communist dictator, but he and I understand that same truth: what policies we advocate as a result is where we diverge.  I want to see that power distributed broadly to the people, including to women.  Mao, on the other hand, made sure only the government had the power before he starved tens of millions of people to death in the Great Leap Forward.  We both agree that guns are power, but Mao only wanted his dictatorial government to have that power.

Let me respectfully suggest to women that they learn from men in this respect.  Learn to stop being afraid of guns and the power of life over death that they represent.  Instead, be powerful yourself and be able wield that power against anyone who might harm you or the ones you love.

Or even just learn your lesson from these brave women:

@dloesch At 19, I was raped in my own home. I was unarmed. I haven't been unarmed since!This will not happen to my daughter!
— sooner1 (@intrepidokie) January 30, 2013

@ahutchison84 Pepper spray enraged my attacker, and I was brutally beaten and raped anyway. Now I have a gun.@intrepidokie @dloesch
— Dagan K (@dagank4) January 30, 2013

No one should blame these women for being raped, of course, but people can and should take rational steps to avoid being victimized themselves.  One of the things they can do is carry a gun.  Don’t be afraid of that power.  Embrace it and enjoy the fact that it instantly levels the playing field considerably.

Because without that gun, it is at best a contest of strength.  Now there are some women who can definitely beat some men.  For instance, this is Laila Ali:

And in case it is not obvious, she is not only beautiful (Rule 5 in effect, ya'll), but strong:

Indeed she is a boxer and one of the children of Mohammed Ali.  I haven’t watched her fight but I bet she could beat up many ordinary guys.  She looks pretty tough.  But she is somewhat the exception, right folks?  Isn’t it the case that most women won’t hold their own in a fight?  But every woman would have a better chance with a gun.

Or to sum it up, there is this picture from a female twitter user and gun rights advocate:

Take that power into your own hands, women.  Do not depend on luck or the police alone to protect your life, your family, your property, and your sacred right not to be raped.  Be ready to defend yourself, too.

And a real man, who has your best interests at heart will support that.  Listen to this 911 recording of the husband of the woman above who shot the intruder with the .38 revolver.  Basically she called him when the incident happened and he used a second phone to call the police for her:

There is no specific words that convey it, but you can sense listening to it the sheer love that this husband has for his wife, being able to defend herself and their children from a man who apparently was searching the house for them.  Real men want the women they love to be strong, so they can be safe.

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* In my mind feminist is not a dirty word and it is high time conservatives took back the word from the radical feminists who have hijacked it.  At the minimum a feminist is a person who believes in equality of opportunity between men and women and reasonable legal equality.  (By reasonable, I mean that there are some very obvious biological differences that justify some distinctions.  For instance, the government can offer women, and not men, free pre-natal care.)  It does not have to be being pro-choice on abortion—although obviously many feminists are.  Rather it is being pro-choice on pretty much every other subject, saying women can be doctors, lawyers, police officers and so on.  I suspect I part ways with many of my fellow conservatives when I say that I also favor allowing women to serve in combat roles on a voluntary basis, but so be it.  I hate all forms of discrimination and therefore I will not say to a woman who is fit for combat and wants to go into combat that she may not.

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** When I say burglars, I have a very specific definition in mind and I frankly use it without thinking about it very much.  You might think a burglar is synonymous with a thief.  Well, many burglars are thieves, but not necessarily.  The crime of burglary is simply this: breaking into a person’s home with intent to commit a crime.  Some definitions require this to be done at night, but the Supreme Court has said that this is not essential as far as the sentencing commission is concerned.

And please note, that breaking requires some affirmative act.  If a man opens an unlocked door and walks in, with the intent to commit a crime, that is burglary in most states.  But if you left your door open and he walked through without even touching it, it is not burglary, at least by the classic definition.  And of course the specific elements of the crime can vary by states, so what I am saying might not apply in your state.

And when you think about it, it is important to recognize that if a burglar is chased off, often you will never know what crime he or she intended to commit.  Was the person looking to rape?  To kidnap?  Or just to steal some valuables?  Unless they catch the criminal and he or she confesses, you will never know what he or she planned.

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My wife and I have lost our jobs due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up to ten years.  I know that claim sounds fantastic, but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these claims using documentary and video evidence.  If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right.  And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing, mostly for snark and site updates.  And you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History here.  And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

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Disclaimer:

I have accused some people, particularly Brett Kimberlin, of reprehensible conduct.  In some cases, the conduct is even criminal.  In all cases, the only justice I want is through the appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system.  I do not want to see vigilante violence against any person or any threat of such violence.  This kind of conduct is not only morally wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him.  Do not call him.  Do not write him a letter.  Do not write him an email.  Do not text-message him.  Do not engage in any kind of directed communication.  I say this in part because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on his property.  Don’t sneak around and try to photograph him.  Frankly try not to even be within his field of vision.  Your behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his organizations, either.  And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might report.  And even then if he tells you to stop contacting him, obey that request.  That this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something else.  In my heart of hearts, I don’t believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above.  But if any of you have, stop it, and if you haven’t don’t start.