Dr. Vino called me a lot yesterday. The charter member of TTAG’s Armed Intelligentsia wanted metaphorical ammo for his Twitter war against Mike “The Gun Guy” Weisser. I tried to convince Dr. V to cease fire by describing the arguments I used to have with my second wife.

Whenever I got cornered the former Mrs. Farago, when there was no way for her to escape the facts, she changed the subject. That’s exactly what happens when you “debate” a gun control advocate. The entire exercise is perfectly pointless; anti-gunners are divorced from reality.

Here’s an excellent example from one Jozef Figa, guest columnist at Iowa’s thegazette.com.

Mr. Figa was shocked and appalled by The Hawkeye State’s move towards gun rights restoration. Specifically, Senate File 25 (a “stand your ground bill”), Senate Joint Resolution 2 (permitless carry) and Senate File 108 (“which calls for eliminating federal prohibitions on machine guns and sawed-off shotguns”).

Wait. What? That last bill eliminates state prohibitions on machine guns and short-barreled rifles and shotguns. Federal regulations — as dictated by the National Firearms Act — would remain in place.

See what I mean about gun control advocates and facts? Upon this firm foundation of sand Mr. Figa builds his castle of consternation.

What if these bills become laws? With lots of people running around with different guns, it would be impossible to distinguish good people with guns from bad people with guns. The results could be drastic.

Predicting that firearms freedom will lead to a “drastic” surge in “gun violence” (a.k.a., blood running in the streets) is gun control advocates’ go-to strategy. And why not? It’s really all they’ve got.

Most of the time, proponents of civilian disarmament like Mr. Figa leave it at that: bad things will happen! This time it’s different. Mr. Figa actually illustrates this fantastic connection between gun rights and murderous mayhem.

Here is a scenario: I am a good person with a gun. I am in a shopping mall. All of the sudden shots are being fired. People are screaming and run around in panic. For me, the choice is obvious: I need to find the bad person with a gun.

My sawed-off shotgun is ready. So am I. And there I see him: A person with a machine gun. I yell, “Freeze!” He turns toward me; gun in hand. So, I stand my ground and shoot him. After all, I don’t know him, and I did not have time to ask him whether he is a bad person or a good person.

What if I do know him and I know that he is a good person? But good people have been known to turn bad. People who used to be good have done most mass killings in the U.S. So, I stand my ground and shoot him.

But what if I actually know that he is a good person? He doesn’t know me. What he sees is a person with a gun. I could yell that it’s OK, that I am a good person. But why should he believe me? So he will try to stand his ground and shoot me. Therefore, I have no choice. I have to stand my ground and shoot him.

Chances are there will be more than two people with guns in that place. So, we can safely multiply the number of people in this scenario by, say, twenty. Which means that many good people will shoot other good people. And the bad person can sit back and enjoy the show.

Mr. Figa’s nightmare of “everyone shooting everyone because no one knows who’s the bad person” is patently ridiculous. Do I really have to point out that common sense dictates that the person shooting innocent people is the bad person?

How many defensive gun uses — of which there are thousands each year — have ended-up in a free-for-all firefight (regardless of the types of weapons involved)? For that matter how many police shoot a good guy with a gun in an active shooter situation? Precisely none.

To those who think that this scenario is improbable and otherwise crazy, I have a question: Why?

With lots of people carrying guns distinguishing a good person from a bad person would be impossible. Therefore, the aforementioned bills threaten to transform public places in Iowa into free fire zones.

Mr. Figa’s logic uses the same “logic” the former Mrs. Farago deployed: this is true because it’s true. While I will not speak [further] ill of Ex II, Mr. Figa shows himself to be a paranoid fantasist, someone who knows nothing about the subject of which he speaks.

Is this kind of ignorance bliss, for a Sociology professor no less? Yes. For anyone who values their life, for any American who cherishes their natural, civil and constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms, no.

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51 COMMENTS

  1. Here’s an excellent example from one Jozef Figa

    Having spent so much time among people of Italian ancestry, I just had to laugh. To wit, this from Wikipedia:

    “Noun

    “figa (plural fighe)

    “1. Alternative form of fica

    “2. (vulgar, chiefly northern Italy) cunt, pussy”

    Some things you just can’t make up.

    • He’s Polish, or Eastern European. I took a class from him about fifteen years ago and I remember some of his stories.

  2. We need to stop people from having guns for the same reason we need to lock up all young black men from the age of thirteen to thirty : because it will stop crime – all crime. And since the police can’t tell the difference between a good black man and a criminal one – locking them all up is the only solution.
    This waste of skin is a bigot. Period. He’ll never concede that the vast majority of gun owners aren’t criminals because his bigoted world view won’t permit him to.
    Now lets see him respond to that.

    • Thanks in advance for letting me add this to my own arsenal of replies to anti-gunners I deal with. 🙂

  3. The moment he imagined a scenario where he was carrying a sawed off shotgun and squaring off against a guy wielding a machine gun at a mall in America was the moment he proved himself to be 100% certifiable. There’s no need to debate him at this point because even the most casual low information voter knows that stuff like this simply has never happened. Not once. Anywhere. Ever. It is pure deluded fantasy, and him using it as some sort of thought experiment proves he might as well be talking about riding unicorns through the streets while fighting ogres.

  4. He may be a college professor, but he writes like a fifth-grader.

    It’s getting easier and easier to refute these “all hell will break loose” arguments by simply pointing at the growing number of states that are relaxing their gun laws with precisely zero “wild west” shootouts resulting. Kind of like how the more states decriminalize marijuana with no attendant rise in crime or drug abuse, it gets harder to argue that prohibition accomplishes much useful.

    It’s almost as though, in setting up a system of allied but sovereign states that can act as laboratories to test various policies and governing mechanisms, our founding fathers actually knew what they were doing.

    • “Writes like a fifth grader.” That’s exactly what I thought. It’s spooky. He writes like an intelligent fifth grader – I can tell because I might have written that in fifth grade, Spelled right, punctuation correct, the scenario has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but the word choice is simplistic and the basic premise is something that an adult would find not credible. The sentence structure is stilted, and the sense of urgency is, well, childlike. I’d give him an “A” for my elementary school class, but as a college professor? I’d send him to see a neurologist.There’s a tumor or something.

      • In order to pander to the ignorant, stupid, and fearful he speaks (writes) like them, using vocabulary and sentence structure according to their level. If they’re as ignorant and as simple as he is, then he chooses his language accordingly. It’s like an Obama or W. Bush speech- they change their dialect, accent, and word choice based on their audience. Bush became more Southern when pandering to the South and Right and Obama became more ghetto talking to inner cities and blacks and tried to sound i telligent and educated when speaking to white Leftists. Of course, I could be giving this Figa too much credit…

    • Humorous and appropriate indeed, good sir. It brought a smile to this one’s face.

      Should Mr. Figa tread too far down that authoritarian path, he may not be nearly as fortunate as the treacherous doctor.

  7. So that dumb Polak asks, what if everyone had a gun? Oh gee, I don’t know…there would be a lot less crime? And you don’t need a Ph.D. to figure that out.

    See, this is a pet peeve of mine, these self-righteous left-leaning moron immigrants who don’t assimilate and keep pushing and voting for the same oppressive laws that drove them out of the old country in the first place. Hey, Jozef, either embrace the American culture or get the fu<k out. Go back to the failed quasi-socialist-communist society that you couldn't leave fast enough back in the day.

  8. “How many defensive gun uses — of which there are thousands each year — have ended-up in a free-for-all firefight…”

    This one time in COD, or was it Battlefield? Ah, it doesn’t matter. Either way, we were all just standing around chatting when someone shot down a helicopter for no reason and suddenly it was a fucking war zone. Bullets zipping everywhere, machine guns, Mare’s Legs, pistols, DMR’s, rocket launchers… even fucking tanks and APC’s! Jesus it was chaos. I had no choice but to start capturing enemy control points and blasting everyone in site until the match ended.

    Really could have used some gun control in that situation. Also a commander worth a shit. Must’ve been Battlefield but either way you get the point: Gun control. Otherwise people shoot down helicopters and shit.

    I was lucky to get out alive with the high score.

  9. College professors (and I have known a few) are among the most narrowly educated members of society. They exist in a bubble of their own creation. Don’t rely on them for anything remotely resembling a real world scenario.

    Charlie

    • In general I agree. My degree is in Sociology with an emphasis in Criminal Justice and Military Leadership. I used to enjoy listening to my uber-liberal professors, looking to the other conservative guy in the room to see the look of derision on his face, and then proceeding with a real-world example of how his stated philosophy was utter bullshit which my colleague promptly followed up. The only exception I recall vividly was my primary CJ professor. She was brilliant and would gladly stomp on patently ridiculous liberal horse-hockey as regards our justice system. We’re still friends today. I’m beginning to see just how very blessed I was to have the college experience I did as opposed to the liberal indoctrination I hear so much about these days. Thanks Uncle Sam!

    • This exactly. Its the reason I dropped out of higher education back in ’86. By then I was hanging around the more senior professors and noticed that although they were tops in their particular speciality, in every other area they were as dumb as a box of rocks. This is where I got my current disdain for the so-called ‘experts’. Over specialization had destroyed their ability to think. I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I choose a different path.

  10. Something close to his scenario actually happened in Seattle some years back, call went out, “two males, armed and dangerous, shots fired”. Ended up in a small shooting war between the uniforms and a pair of plainclothes detectives answering the call. Luckily they were all p*ss poor shots so I believe no one was injured. But that’s the police, good guys with guns is sometimes debatable, especially in liberal enclaves.

  11. What is a “bad” person? Seems that the definition should be pretty static once the paradigm is established, irregardless of the “accessories” such “bad” person might avail themselves of.

  12. Little Jozef has not just divorced himself from reality, he has ended all contact forever with the real world and anyone who inhabits it. That leaves him with little more than his dark, twisted imagination to rationalize his anti-civil rights intolerance and bigotry.

  13. Before you think Mr Figa is crazy, look up the response to the Chattanooga Reserve shooting. Police ended up shooting the bad guy but not before almost shooting a Navy Officer carrying a pistol who was shooting at the bad guy because they saw someone shooting and could not determine if they were good or bad

    • There was also a fatal blue on blue shooting in Maryland a year or two ago in response to a drive by on a police station. The underlying connection in both of these incidents is that it was police, not private citizens, that have issues identifying the good and bad guys.

    • He is not just crazy, he’s certifiable. Regardless of blue-on-blue incidents, I’ll still take my chances armed in such a scenario given the choice. If he’d prefer to go out with only his putz in his hand over polymer, aluminum, steel and brass, that’s his choice.

  15. For a professor, his sentence structure and grammer are seriously deficient. For a person with (presumably) a brain, his critical thinking skills are non existent.

  16. Gun control is a Marxist/Communist construct. An armed populace cannot be forced into the Marxist/Communist utopia, so disarming is a top agenda item for them.

  17. “For me, the choice is obvious: I need to find the bad person with a gun.”

    This was the first clue that he was cracked. This idiot thinks that everyone with a firearm is looking to run towards the gunfire, probably in an attempt to live out their video game fantasies. No Mr. Figa…the choice made first by almost everyone is to get themselves and loved ones to safety. Pulling the trigger on another human is for when all other options have been exhausted and it is the absolute last chance you have of survival.

    Clueless morons like Mr. Figa assume that everyone with a firearm has vigilante fantasies. The good news here is that we can’t be defeated by the tyrants if they don’t understand us and assume that we are something we are not.

      • Trained to run towards gunfire? Maybe, but no matter how much some ‘trainer’ wanted to convince me to run towards gunfire, I wouldn’t do so. Advance towards it, maybe. Running headlong into gunfire is just foolish, no matter how many people want to persuade me to do it.
        But if you want to do so, I’ll be glad to provide cover and follow up on any breaches you create…

      • Those same folks are trained to identify the enemy and eliminate him, as opposed to shooting each other.

  18. The Cedar Rapids Gazette has been in a Death Match for 20 years to a bid to replace the Des Moines Register as the “leading” progtard newspaper in Iowa. Neither can figure out why their subscriptions have plummeted.

  19. So, we can’t ever do anything because we might be wrong?

    This sounds like someone who’s never had to confront his own ignorance or mistakes. Oh, wait: sociology professor. My mistake. It makes perfect sense now.

  20. “With lots of people carrying guns distinguishing a good person from a bad person would be impossible.” — Jozef Figa

    This simple statement betrays the author’s inner-most belief: everyone with a firearm is a bad person. The mere act of possessing a firearm makes you so “bad”, in fact, that it justifies killing you.

    Thus, saying that, “… anti-gunners are divorced from reality… ” is an understatement. Their destructive sentiment that has filled their reality vacuum: you have no right to life if you possess a firearm. This is what we are up against.

  22. “……… I tried to convince Dr. V to ‘cease fire’….” Cease fire? Are you f***ing kidding me? You’ve got a living breathing academic elitist Libturd with a doctorate in your sights, you’re “bracketing” them and you want to “cease fire”? If anything the situation calls for a massive air strike, f***ing carpet-bomb the damn gun-grabber. Ridicule his supposed intelligence, mock his ancestry and obvious lack of testosterone, question his reasoning for seeking refuge in the USA, ascribe ulterior motives for his immigration, suggest he’s a Communist mole, all while relying on overwhelming positive facts that support us and the 2nd Amendment. While you’re at it email and PM “right-thinking” friends and associates and have them “pile on” the hoplophobe, make his/her life a living hell, target their personal and professional pages etc. they would do the same to us but NEVER in a million years call for a “cease fire”.

    Our rule should be, when/if you decided to engage in what always will be a one-sided “discussion” with our enemy go for the throat right from the start, anything less than total destruction is a waste of time.

    • And you are the reason the debate for gun control laws rages on. You sound like the kind of lunatic who would rather open fire on a crowd to “get the bad guy” instead of using reasoning to defend yourself or your loved ones (exactly the kind of person Figa is speaking about). You would harass and encourage others to harass this person because he doesn’t hold your same beliefs??? That’s fu**ing asinine! I believe in the right to bear arms, man. But when I read your post I started to reconsider some arguments for “gun control”. Thanks for that.

  23. The guy is a former commie-bloc import professor. I’ve actually taken a college course he’s taught. His article was pretty cringy, poorly researched, and his hypothetical situation reminded me of an 80’s “b” movie scene. I’d expect more from a guy who I KNOW has taught social sciences and critical thinking in the past.

  24. Sometimes people come around. My wife and I talked guns last night and it went pretty well. She just hasn’t ever thought about a lot of things. And there’s lots of facts and figures she has never seen.

    • I should note that she was specifically flustered about the newest Constitutional Carry State. Blood in the streets stuff. It was an interesting conversation.

  25. You can’t blame people for withdrawing logic initially when dealing with something deemed incessantly violent by the media and something they didn’t grow up with. What I don’t understand is how Republicans refuse to “believe” (as if it’s something to believe in, like Jesus our lord and savior) in climate change and all they care about is when it interferes with their hunting goals. LOL RETARDS. But yea science and facts only matters when it comes to guns, forgive me father for I have sinned. And yes I still read your blog even though it pisses me off!

    • Everybody believes in climate change, also called “the weather”, the climate changes (dramatically) 4 times each year in most areas. What is totally unsubstantiated is whether human activity affects the weather in any way. If it is ever proven that it does, the first response obviously should be nearly instant mandatory population control, reducing the world’s population by at least 75% within 100 years. Are you saying you think that is justified, now?

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