In the wake of this latest installment of Bewailing That Next Disaster We Keep Insisting on Making Inevitable--all the tiresome tooth-gnashing dances in front of the fainting couch, I did find this article interesting:
Orlando police repeat the gross ineptitude of San Diego cops in the "McDonald's massacre"
If nothing else, it's actually substantive to what happened, as opposed to the usual fixation on How Can We Absolve Ourselves By Going After Some Ginormous Group Of People Who Didn't Do It.
Therefrom:
To review, a white racist who hated Mexicans entered the McDonald's in San Ysidro (very close to the Mexican border) and started shooting. And shooting. And shooting.
The first cops on the scene did nothing, even as the shooting continued. They contacted HQ which in turn contacted the SWAT commander, who was at a social function at Mission Bay.
Until that time, SWAT was primarily geared up for hostage situations. Nationwide they'd never faced a maniacal shooter who just wanted to kill as many people as possible before they in turn were gunned down. So the San Diego SWAT commander ordered officers on the scene (including a sniper with a clear shot at the guy) to wait until he arrived in San Ysidro to properly assess the situation. That's about a 40-50 minute drive. Meanwhile the shooter is calmly walking around the restaurant, systematically shooting primarily Mexican women and children.
FINALLY the SDPD SWAT boss arrived, assessed the situation and gave the sniper the green light. The crackshot quickly dispatched the shooter. 78 minutes after the shooting begin, it was over.
Seems like I'm starting to see a few voices saying that many of those who died at the nightclub in Orlando, only died because it dragged out so long. This comparison to the San Ysidro shooting, and the damning comment it makes about what Grigg describes as "Officer Safety Uber Alles" policy, is interesting.
Will have to keep an eye on Grigg for the commentary...and (le sigh) on Mas Ayoob, to tell us all how we've got it all wrong, again; that the cops did absolutely nothing wrong.
5 comments:
Why anyone would listen to that scumwad Ayoob is beyond me. Yeah, I suppose he knows guns, but he is clearly The Enemy. So, I guess it would pay to pay attention to him to keep up with how The Enemy thinks... but I just can't stomach him. He utterly disgusts me with his self-sucking ways.
Kent, I'm not gonna argue that Mas is--and has been for quite a while--so blindly beholden to the Thin Blue Line mythology that pretty much anything he says on that matter can be considered Official Propaganda, and treated as such. It's disgusting, the moreso for all his posturing as a "no-BS" analyst, and I offer no defense for it--because there is no moral defense for it.
But personal honesty must acknowledge that it was he who taught me my first and best lessons about avoiding fights, and I know that has saved me at least one fight, and probably others, over the last 25 years. Even Jeff Cooper, for all his obvious work for liberty, was still fatally statist, and wasn't interested in avoiding fights.
This is where my conflict comes from. I still cannot reconcile, for myself, how someone with such a good grasp of the subject (of how to avoid a fight in the first place, and yet win it if necessary), and such a willingness to share it with a general audience of Everymen, can also be so completely unwilling to even discuss systemic police corruption and abuse.
Yes, I can see that it is true. But I still don't like it, and still have the need to acknowledge the good with the bad. Perhaps I can be forgiven for that.
There's nothing to forgive. You find value in what he has helped you understand, and you acknowledge it. I'm sure I could learn from him, too... if I could stand reading anything he has written. That's clearly my loss.
Oh, I'm not sure that, today, I could get past his "Only Ones" problem either. Maybe it was a lucky case of my encountering him first at the right time, before I had a handle on my own yet-unpurged statism. :-)
Indeed, gentlemen, Ayoob is not my favorite self defense commentator, and I pretty much reject all the cop stuff in both rhetoric and training. I've read his books (well, at least two) and found some pearls there among the rocks... but I wouldn't buy another one of his. Such is life.
About the Orlando thing... Lots of things are going to come out of this, both good and bad. I'd think it would spur people to seriously consider NOT going to mass events at all, but especially in gun free zones. I've read where the "gay" folks are suddenly buying guns... and hope that's true. I also hope they will quickly obtain good training, and consider all of the other things that are important to self defense and safety in general. Especially the fact that each individual is truly responsible for his/her own safety, not the government.
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