The bio underneath the video above tells us that “Del Wilber is a former Intelligence Officer with the Central Intelligence Agency in Security and Counterterrorism. He served as an advisor for counterterrorism and counter-IED operations in Iraq from 2004-2007, as well as a counterterrorism advisor and consultant to the State Investigative and Protection Agency. He currently owns Secur-intel-solutions.” Respect. That said, I profoundly disagree with this statement . . .

When I was growing up, part of the curriculum in the high schools was firearms safety and marksmanship and we didn’t have Columbines or Newtowns because kids were taught to respect firearms, how to handle them safely and taught what their purpose was for. And that’s long gone.

Columbine was a bomb plot (my review of the book of the same name to follow), perpetrated by a psychopath and his deeply depressed co-conspirator. The Newtown spree killer was taught about firearms safety during multiple range trips with his mother. In both cases, firearms familiarity enabled the killers. Murderers who could have and should have been removed from society. From guns, knives, bombs, cars, anything that was potentially lethal.

The wider point: teaching children about responsible firearms handling is a must. At the same time, we must understand that there are evil people amongst us. To stop spree killings or other acts of murder we as a society and individuals must take responsibility for identifying these threats and making sure that they are removed from our midst.

That’s a lot harder than educating our children about guns. But it’s equally important to teach them that evil exists. Moving on to situational awareness, how to avoid danger, and the life-saving need to share information about dangerous people with others. “See something? Say something.” Teach them what that “something” is and keep the lines of communication open. My .02.

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49 COMMENTS

  2. The “thing” that was different was that people believed in God more than they do now. The biggest reason and really only reason our country is falling apart is because we have turned away from God. David Barton in his video, “America’s Godly Heritage” graphs(!) the downslide using many metrics. It’s on Youtube. Ever since we took God and prayer out of schools, out of govt. buildings and out of our lives it has been a significant trend in the wrong direction.

    • That’s cute that you actually believe that people were anymore faithful than they are now.

      Of course, using your same logic, we could conflate supposed religiousosity with racism, considering how racist and oppressive this country used to be towards minorities. Or as some might call it, “the good ol’ days”.

      • considering how racist and oppressive this country used to be towards minorities.
        Now this country is racist and oppressive to white middle class working patriotic Christians.

        • Oh, yes. 70+% of the population is SOOOO oppressed because you no longer have special privileges. Boo freaking hoo.

        • I’m pretty sure Christians (77%) radically outnumbers atheists (3%) of the population, Muslims, (1.7%), Buddhist(1%) and the list goes on and one, but be comfortable that the only people oppressing you are probably Christians. In fact if we polled prisons right now the percentage of those who identify as Christians would be higher than any other religion.

        • If you really believe that the country is 70% Christian and there’s only 3% that don’t believe in any of the magical sky-daddies, you must be living in some alternate reality. Or willfully uninformed.

          Depending on the study, it’s 15-25% of us now admitting to our atheism. You’ll see those number continue to grow as people become less terrified of the harassment that used to come from you who believe in magical nonsense and ancient mythology. I do know a handful of people who still attend church – they’re the upper-upper-middle/politicians and appearances still matter in those circles. It’s all about money and power, they don’t actually think there’s a deity up there – they just want you to think they do.

          You’re free to believe whatever Mazdaism-re-written-and-sprinkled-with-Greco-Roman-flair-by-bronze-age-goatherder-warlords-seeking-power-then-re-written-again-from-whole-cloth-in-the-17th-Century-to-suit-another-bunch-of-rulers you want. It’s your right, but this country was founded far more about freedom from the tyranny of religion, the freedom of it, is a corollary.

        • @16V The figure for Atheists and Agnostics are probable lumped together, meaning yes the figure is higher than just 3 percent, but not everyone is rabidly against the notion that God may exist. Some just say “I don’t know” and don’t identify with any religious faith. I find Agnostics are mostly live and let live kind of people, while Atheists tend to be bigger assholes about their belief in “non-belief”.

          But America is still predominantly Christian, maybe not going to Church every Sunday and pray every day Christian, but at least Culturally and ethically Christian. I doubt the country will ever become predominantly non-Christian, as to the percentage of the population, but I do believe the political ruling class and “intelligentsia” will become more and more hostile to the Judeo-Christian identity, substituting spiritual values with earthly ones. And that won’t be good.

        • Some just say “I don’t know” and don’t identify with any religious faith.

          This is atheism.

          Atheists tend to be bigger assholes about their belief in “non-belief”.

          You mean like Christians who are the biggest assholes, not only attempt to convert anyone and everyone, but also try to shove their religion into government and upon the citizen, usurping liberty.

        • I find Agnostics are mostly live and let live kind of people, while Atheists tend to be bigger assholes about their belief in “non-belief”.

          I’m a live and let live kinda guy, despite the long history of the ‘loving’ Christians hunting down and banning, killing, or just ostracizing those of my ilk for having the temerity to suggest that the world was not flat, and that the sun did not rotate around it. Thankfully, your club has slowed down, and now just tries to insert your beliefs into the general law (Don’t like abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t be gay, don’t get gay married. Until you are forced to have an abortion or turn gay and get gay married, it’s none of your cult’s damned business what those people do.)

          All of the “good happy lovey” stuff attributed to any of the Abrahamic sand cults has been carefully tortured out of the surrounding text. Text about war, vengeance, killing nonbelievers, what to eat, what to wear, and what groups to kill. Not to mention the insanity of a worldwide flood, or a supposedly loving deity that would wipe out humanity like a petulant teenager because he was angry. Please, actually read the Talmud/Torah/Bible/Qu’ran. They are filled with no wisdom other than that of marginally literate bronze-age primitives. (The Qu’ran is just a rewrite/update of the OT, so as to allow the ‘prophet’ Mohammed to rape, pillage and plunder with “Allah’s” blessing. Oh yeah, and the 9 year-old wife…)

          “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
          ― Thomas Jefferson

          Believe as you wish and hold your beliefs. Keep them to yourself and quit trying to inflict them on the rest of us.

    • Communist Goals (1963) Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963

      Current Communist Goals: EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963
      […]
      26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”

      27. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a “religious crutch.”

      28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
      […]
      32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
      […]
      http://rense.com/general32/americ.htm

    • Violence and crime have been on a downward trend for 20+ years, all while church attendance and religious belief continues to decline. Got any other theories?

    • David: [Citation Needed]. People ceasing to take seriously demonstrably false, self-contradictory, indefensible nonsense didn’t cause guns to get pulled out of schools. Despite the whines of credulous, ignorant and astonishingly gullible people who were indoctrinated to accept that nonsense as fact, there’s nothing inherently peaceful about the christian religion. In fact, if you look at history, Christianity is at the root of an enormous amount of sectarian violence which has slowed but not stopped in 500 years. Few groups on Earth can lay claim to 500 years of almost non-stop atrocities.

      • “Few groups on Earth can lay claim to 500 years of almost non-stop atrocities.”

        Islam has a 12+ century unbroken streak, and they’re picking up steam.

  3. The police are NOT there to protect “society”, they exist to 1) seek out, 2) arrest and 3) help prosecute people (this by the judge who is in those “Flex Your Rights” videos.

    They have absolutely no legal obligation to protect anyone.

    • Hmmm. I’ve provided assistance to an average of 8-12 motorists per shift for the last 14 years. That’s directions, explaining laws, giving advice about guns and weapons, pushing stalled cars, jump starting, putting water in overheated engines, advice, etc. How does that fit into your police paradigm?

      • That’s great (no sarc.). You go with your bad self. We’ll (continue to) pray for you, your family, and your thin blue line .

    • Not only do they not have any legal obligation but it is not feasible that they do any protecting. Police may deter crime but its rare they prevent it. Their main function is to investigate crimes; occasionally they catch the bad guys.

  4. Its a numbers game pure and simple. We have 300million people and so a certain .01% of .01% of point zero whatever will eventually do something like a columbine. England excitedly states they dont have a problem with mass shootings anymore since prohibiting gun ownership in the 90s, while failing to include that guy just a few years ago who want on a day long shooting rampage from billage to village shooting over 30 people with a double barrel shotgun and .22lr rifle.

    Australians say their gun control works too and show as proof tgere hasnt been a port arthur massacre since the port Arthur massacre, but they fail to realize that with a population of 23million, they only have one tenth of the same chance that america has at any given moment for something like that to happen. In fact you could probably find geographical samples of america representing 23million people that have also not had rampage shootings over the same time period since Australia namned guns.

    • China has amazing gun control, so they have mass school killings by knife and hammer and such. IIRC, it was 28 dead and 120+ wounded in the train station attack a coupla years ago, I forget the last school numbers.

      It’s the hubris/naivte of humanity to posit that somehow we can make everyone sane and rational, or that somehow all tragedy is preventable through legislation.

  5. Well said, Robert. The few psychos out there committing the heinous acts are just wolves. Lt Col Grossman clarified these situations in a timeless manner.

    Not to preach, just to spread the good word: I highly recommend his books, On Combat and On Killing (among several others). My roommate at West Point lended me copies and they served as a turning point in how I viewed the world. I ended up purchasing my own copies.

  6. Teaching the responsible handling of firearms is only part of it. The second part needs to be a general education and guidance to being a person of good moral character. Otherwise you have a bunch of amoral kids who won’t be the perpetrators of negligent discharges.

    There’s a meme attributed to Samuel L Jackson, whether it’s true or not, I don’t know. But the general premise of it was that he grew up around guns in the South. But he was taught to respect both the firearms and human life.

    And yes, these unstable people don’t exist in a vacuum. In every single case there’s always precursors and warning signs. We need to act upon those warning signs more frequently and effectively. Sometimes just getting the guy out of the tree, so to speak, is all it takes.

  8. Here’s something even better. Should’ve been Cooper’s 5th rule ( Adjust your mindset. ).

    5) No one can protect you at the individual level, and anyone who says they will (or are) are lying.

    Your kids aren’t safe in schools, anyone claiming that they can (or are) are lying, but they are completely full of it on purpose if they claim they can do it by getting rid of guns.

  9. “He served as an advisor for counterterrorism and counter-IED operations in Iraq from 2004-2007”

    Not to discount some really great patience, hand-holding, sympathy, and genuine training we got from the EOD / Task Force Troy guys over there. But the head-shed’s “advice” on IED’s (2007) was ‘don’t get blown-up’ if you see an IED cordon it off, set security, and call it in to EOD. The enemies TTPs were translated through us.

    If he wanted you to be safe he’d be urging you to have FBI profiler’s as door greeters at Lowe’s and Home Depot, because that home-grown IED crap can get real creative if they don’t have to make their explosives in their kitchen (unless they’re using a pressure cooker), alright, just forget it, refer back to rule #5 above.

  10. The book on Columbine I think you are referring is a very interesting read. Thank the Lord the two perps weren’t very good at their craft or it would have been a much worse.

  11. we didn’t have Columbines or Newtowns because kids were taught to respect firearms, how to handle them safely and taught what their purpose was for. And that’s long gone.
    There are a lot of things that went by the wayside from the 1950s to our current time.
    Church, God and morals in society, Patriotism, American Pride, American Way, and other now deemed cornball ideas. Yeah, there were downsides to the society of the 1950s, but I would at least swap the moral character of that time period for the nihilist trends of what we have now.

    • Yeah, there were downsides to the society of the 1950s, but I would at least swap the moral character of that time period for the nihilist trends of what we have now.

      How to tell if someone is white.

        • Yep, calling out a white guy for desiring to go back to the days of Jim Crow because he knows that those laws won’t have any affect on him is racist. Makes one really feel safe that you’re a cop and can spot such racism…

      • Stop with your incessant whining, take take chip off your shoulder, get help for your racism then attempt to grow up.

      • I dunno, what was black on black violence rates compared to the 1950s and now? Out of wedlock rates in the black community between 1950’s and now? Drug abuse rates? Has their plight gotten any better now that the Federal government has stepped in with a cradle to grave promises?

        Maybe they just traded one problem for another. So the hard, localized tyranny has been dismantled, but the resulting soft, federalized tyranny that much better? According to BLM, apparently not.

        I’m assuming you are just talking about blacks, because I don’t think this applies as much to other minorities, like Asians for example.

        • Got to love the “blacks were better off before the CRA” argument. How naive.

          I’m assuming you are just talking about blacks, because I don’t think this applies as much to other minorities, like Asians for example.

          Oh, of course. Because Asians and even Hispanics were treated completely fair and as equals during the same time frame. What a wonderful age that was!

        • It’s all about Equality. Either you are it, or you gotta ask for it. It boils down to which way Grindage raises his kids to think of themselves. We can’t do that for him. We tried, and we still talk about the (1400/1500/1600/1700/1800) 1950’s. Nobody can give you equality. Asking for it is the same thing (loosely paraphrased J.M.Thomas R., TERMS, 2012)
          Grindy, tell your kids what I tell mine (if I have to, someday, I’ll do it) -that they are awesome and eveyone (and GOD) loves them.

    • Now, now, please stop with the BS. Most of those were one on one and a lot of them were college students, adults, they were not like Columbine or Sandy Hook.

  13. The 1927 Bath Michigan School Massacre happened during the Good ‘Ole Days.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

    “All the Kehoe farm buildings were destroyed, and the two horses trapped inside the barn died. Investigators found a wooden sign wired to the farm’s fence with Kehoe’s last message, ‘Criminals are made, not born,’ stenciled on it.”

  14. if you do some research on schizophrenics, you will see they usually have very violent tendencies, even in children. they may only commit one violent act but it is usually an extremely violent solitary act. diagnosing these people can prove difficult as we saw with lanza, his mother pretty much refused to get professional help, so really his parents are to blame. they were too wrapped up in themselves. not to mention he was anorexic so his brain was damaged from not eating. again, how do you not notice you son is anorexic? they just ignored him. ask any psychologist what too much solitary confinement does to the human mind, especially when its malnourished.
    then you have situations like Virginia tech where the therapist warned LLE and nothing was done. and his mothers recourse? she prayed and had an exorcism done. so helpful combating this “evil”.
    alot of people will refuse help if it means they have to admit their loved one is beyond their help and actually maybe beyond help altogether.

  15. The quote continues:

    “For I tell you that this which is written must be fulfilled in Me, ‘AND HE WAS NUMBERED WITH TRANSGRESSORS’; for that which refers to Me has its fulfillment.” They said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.” And He said to them, “It is enough.”

  16. I have a right to defend myself. Any questions? The 2nd Amendment was put into the Constitution so the people could protect themselves from a corrupt government. That is why it says “shall not infringe” so we can have what the government has to prevent a Holocaust. The only gun control law there should be is that criminals can’t have any firearms. Thanks for your vote, pass the word. mrpresident2016.com

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