Theres preaching to the choir, and then theres preaching to the sinners.
Sort of reminds me of folks being so excited because Sarah Palin was on the Republican ticket and how much good she was going to do with RTKBA. The people that really liked her were already pro RTKBA. Turns out, she didn't swing too many additional votes beyond the RTKBA community. The choir voted for her and that was about it.
Effective article? If you consider preaching to the choir as a way to get sinners into church, no, not effective at all.
What most pro gun folks completely fail to understand is that their logic and views don't convince people who don't share the same logic and views to become pro gun.
Don't look at his style from the RKBA side, look at it from the anti side.
Right. Take a look at the article from an anti-gun position and what do you see? You see a pro-gun ostentatious loud mouth (sort of like Rosie O'Donnell to us) who not only notes how bad the tragedy was, but also notes several other examples of why guns are bad as evidenced by people being killed with them. So not only are anti-gun folks not going to want to read his article in the first place because of who wrote it, if they read it they will think him an idiot for explicitly laying out why guns are bad.
The trouble is every time I ask one of these folks to give me an example of the wild west after ccw was passed or open carry is allowed, none of them can.
Sadly, what pro-gun folks need is some sort of horrible event like the Giffords shooting to actually be clearly stopped stone cold dead by an actual average citizen who has a ccw, and this just hasn't materialized in a manner about which an effective argument can be made. We really don't have a shining star event. We have lots of individual events, but the generally fail to promote a sense of societal benefit even if they are shown to work very well at the individual level (which is where day in and day out that people are typically benefitted).
Pro gunners talk about how Zamudio was on scene and acted smartly, not drawing his gun, and isn't he a great example of CCW. No. He arrived on scene after the shooter was downed by unamred people. The fact that he had a gun didn't change a thing about the situation. He is a great guy for rushing to help, but then again, a lot of folks rushed to help as well that weren't armed, or if they were, nobody knew it because they didn't use their guns either and they didn't spend time on TV telling the world how they would have used their guns if they had to like Zamudio did.
Seattle Mall? Dan McCowan, not a good example. He was there and he acted in some of the most absurd ways resulting in him getting shot multiple times and is now crippled.
Tyler, TX? Mark Wilson lost his life trying to protect others and was heralded for his efforts by several folks, saving lives, but nobody wants to promote the extreme risk of loss of life in protecting others via CCW. Not only that, Wilson wasn't a normal CCW person. He had owned a gun range and had been a firearms self defense instructor.
Colorado Springs church shootings? The gunman was stopped by a CCW person. A lone female with a pistol stopped a man with a rifle during the course of his killing spree. Wow, that sounds like a shining star for us, but the female wasn't your average female CCW person like my mom or yours. It was Jeanne Assam who was specifically in place to act as church security. It was voluntary, but she was a guard for the service in which the gunman came in, having attended another service as a patron. Not only that, but Assam was a former police officer and said in multiple TV interviews that she didn't shoot the gunman per se, that it was "all God" and that "God Guided Me and Protected Me."
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/14817480/detail.html All things considered, I don't think the argument for the RTKBA is going to benefit from the argument that when the time comes, God will be the one really running the gun and not the rest of us. We all home for Divine Intervention, but thusfar it has not proven to be a reliable and recognizable factor.
So it has been a bit hard to come up with great counter-arguments based on hero figures that we can showcase as really saving the public, or our children, via RTKBA. No dbout that guns are used to save lives every day in every state of our country, but the vast majority of the events are singular and small, impacting individuals and families, but not whole communities or the nation like many of the mass shootings do.
So what about Nugent as a spokesperson for RTKBA?
Good thing about him is he also has the facts and figures to back-up his argument.
Ted Nugent has a lot of facts like the anti-gunners have facts. He is not one you should consider as making factual statements until you verify his claims on a fact by fact basis.
Appalachian School of Law? This is another event Ted commented on and one where he misrepresented the facts. I see above where another person has mentioned that the antis don't believe facts. Many facts really aren't. The shooting took place in 2002. In 2007 he was on CNN and spoke of it.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/19/commentary.nugent/index.html He noted...
More recently, just a few miles up the road from Virginia Tech, two law school students ran to fetch their legally owned firearm to stop a madman from slaughtering anybody and everybody he pleased. These brave, average, armed citizens neutralized him pronto.
Nice misrepresentation, Ted. He neglected to mention a few related facts about the incident. He neglected to mention the unarmed students who actually physically engaged the shooter. He neglected to mention that the two brave, average armed citizens were not actually all that pronto. They showed up late. He neglected to tell us that the two average students were law enforcement officers, one current and one retired. He neglected to tell us that one also put on a ballistic vest. Lastly, he neglected to tell us that the shooter was already disarmed and had his hands in the air by the time the pronto brave average citizens arrived with their guns.
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/appalachian/nd/tackle/gun/054.html No doubt that Nugent had the right information. He probably knows this stuff better than the rest of us, but he did not tell the truth and he twisted the information in a manner to favor a pro-gun position, something that we abhor when anti-gunners do it.
In that CNN interview, Nugent also noted that the owner of a dance hall brought the shooting of a school dance to a halt with his shotgun. This is another misrepresentation (Edinboro, Penn). James Strand did own the facility where the dance was being held. He did confront the gunman with a shotgun and actually held him at bay until the police arrived. What Nugent didn't tell you was that the shooter had fled the scene after the shooting and that Strand gave pursuit, catching him in a nearby field. In other words, the shooting spree at the dance was over. The shooter was making his escape when caught by Strand. Strand did a great job, no doubt, but he didn't stop the shooting at the dance as claimed.
http://edition.cnn.com/US/9804/25/school.shooting.pm/
So when was the last time y'all can remember that a pro-gun person was convinced by the likes of Rosie O'Donnell about the "validity" of the anti-gun position and the facts she provides? Then why would anyone think that Nugent's words would be any more effective?
Aside from those mentioned, do we have any shining events? Sort of. We have the CCW patron at this bar in Nevada that stopped a shooter who was on his second magazine of shooting people.
http://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/19251374.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2021752/posts
Of course, a lot of people think that guns and drinking don't mix and would be slow to use this as an example of a CCW person doing a good job at a critical time. Anti-gunners would argue that drinking is what contributed to the start of the shootings.
How about shooting a derranged archer? CCW did a good job in this case...
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6219604.html
How about the aftermath for the principal who stopped Luke Woodham. Is he considered a reveered hero? Not really. Despite his quick thinking a good work, a lot of people who actually appreciate how he did what he did.
http://www.keepandbeararms.com/information/XcIBViewItem.asp?ID=1343
Oh my......
