In the days before I became a real estate investor and had my own real estate investors education club, PittsburghREIA.Com, I was a shooter. I spent most of my life protecting the lives of other people. Most recently I worked in counter-terrorism for the Dept. of Homeland Security. Now that I am retired (full time real estate investor), I offer a free newsletter on my website learnHowToShootGuns.com.
The tragic events in Aurora remind me of all of the other nationally covered shootings. Starting with Columbine, the media has made it a habit of divulging every detail of the shootings to the public. They critique the methods of the shooter, the weapons, and even details about his mistakes. What the media is essentially doing is creating a training program for the next shooter. That is why we now have a graduate student with no training what so ever, wearing police gear, and using SWAT tactics on a defenseless crowd.
Now there is no way to eliminate the crazy people from our society, there will always be another lunatic who in his sick little mind, feels justified in killing random innocent people. We can’t disarm the crazy people. For starters criminals are notoriously bad at following laws. Even if you had the magic ability to remove every gun from North America, the next loon will just build a flamethrower or some homemade hand grenades. It’s really not that complicated.
So we are left with two choices. The first choice is to assume that the police will arrive before the shooter gets around to killing us. Across America, the average police response time is 23 minutes. Heck, five minutes is an eternity when you are unarmed and hiding from a murderer. The second choice is that you can take responsibility for your own darn safety. I know the Zimmerman case has cast a long shadow over the right of self-defense, but in a city where you can legally carry a gun, do you think anyone in their right mind would arrest you for shooting the guy who just opened up on a crowded theater? I am willing to bet that anyone in that crowd would have traded a kidney for a pistol at that moment.
As a trained combat shooter, I cringe every time I see one of these events. All I think is why on earth didn’t someone do something? Then I remember that most people haven’t prepared themselves to do anything. As real estate investors, we take action while others just sit around and do nothing. We make a lot of money because we can take action. In the world of self-defense, it is the people who take action who survive. I want you all to survive when evil enters your life.
Josh Caldwell
http://LearnHowToShootGuns.com/
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Great comments Thank you Josh!!
Ginny Robertson
Las Cruces, NM.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who think an unarmed citizenry would be safer, than if allowed to keep and bare arms. With the police 23 minutes away, who is going to protect us from that armed criminal? Thanks for the article Josh.
I can just picture 4 or 5 people in a darkened theatre all shooting at each other. How would anyone know who is the attacker and who are the defenders? With bullets flying everywhere how many people would be hit? At least if he had to reload after 10 shots, someone could have grabbed him.
Keith,
You have a few misconceptions here. First off the average number of people killed in mass shootings when police stop the attacker is 18.25, the average when an armed citizen stops the attack is 2.2.
RE Keith part 2
Limiteing your shooter to 10 rouds between reloads wont even help the people in the crowd. There is virtually no way that anyone unarmed can get to the shooter. Even if we assume that he has to reload every 5 shots, the reload takes so little time that it would be scuicide to rush him. Ive attached a video of me doing slow reloads for instructional purposes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nty8NU8lCRI
Part 3 –
Your defensive shooters would have to be stone cold morons to loose track of the original shooter or to start shooting at anyone who was also shooting back at the attacker. Its really not hard to figure out.
WE DON’T HAVE TO LEARN TO USE A GUN AND WE DON’T HAVE TOO MANY PEOPLE SHOOTING PEOPLE IF OUR GOV DO THE THINGS RIGHT
Josh, thanks for this informative op-ed, and your dedication to education. Recently I walked in on an armed robbery in progress, but I was unarmed. This criminal has been at large with the same MO for three years! Had I been armed at the time, this crook would be behind bars right now!
Do not lie cheat or steal and do not tolerate those who do just start traching this in school