Thursday, April 26, 2007

Not Too Much TV, the Wrong TV

I was reading the article Atrios had linked to about republic prez candidate Mike Huckabee's son getting busted at the airport with a loaded pistol, when I got to this paragraph:
The elder Huckabee, who said last week that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui perhaps could have been stopped if a teacher or student had also been armed, also has a concealed weapons permit.
I'm not surprised when the crazies at the National Review Online or Ted Nugent say that if they were there, and if those pesky no-guns-allowed laws weren't in place, they would've gotten Matrix on Seung-Hui's ass. But a guy who's actually running for president? What is he thinking?

John Cole has already done an excellent job painting the horrific picture of a campus with 26,000 gun-toting 18 to 22 year-olds, full of beer and aggression and really stupid ideas. College isn't that different from minimum security prisons, only when someone says to you "I'm the man" you don't have to clench like there's no tomorrow.

Obviously, Huckabee and some other people are imagining they'd be like Rambo or John Wayne or some other gunslinger they see every Saturday at 7:05 pm on TBS. Somehow they fail to get that these are not real people in real situations. Really, there's nobody named "Dirty Harry" working for the San Fran PD. If you want to learn anything from TV, something useful in your real life, you've got to watch reality TV.

And I don't mean that "Survivor," "I Love New York" (I can't believe she picked Tango!), "Fear Factor" junk. There's really nothing to be learned from these contrived craptraps, although I do sometimes wonder how many pig testicles I could eat while suspended from a helicopter. If you want to learn something that you can actually use in your daily life, you need to watch "Cops" and all the "World's Wildest .... Videos." I can't tell you how many great things I've learned from these shows, such as:

--- It's very hard to hold on to a naked, bloody, sweaty man.
--- A 1992 Chevy Beretta can drive on its rims for quite a few miles.
--- If you have drugs in your car and the cop asks if he can search your car, SAY NO.

When I started reading NRA shitake about how if everyone had guns the Va Tech thing wouldn't have happened or would've been cut short, I immediately thought of a scene from reality TV that I've seen over and over. For a few years it was in just about every "Wildest Police Videos" show, and it's still the finale for most "World's Shootiest Shootout" shows.



If guns were allowed on college campuses, it's not like the sick freaks wouldn't know about it. They'd do like they learned in Boy Scouts and "wail on the gays" -- I mean "prepare." Maybe shotguns and automatic rifles, maybe body armor, maybe both. If someone really wants to kill a bunch of people, and if he isn't as dumb as, say, Mike Huckabee's son, then it's going to happen.

5 comments:

Otto Man said...

Wasn't that clip remade as a movie? I'm not thinking of Heat, though it's close. This one had the body armor angle, unlike that one.

Mr Furious said...

I remember watching that video before. Crazy shit.

At least that "neighborhood gun shop" came in handy for the cops...

Should I be more worried that the police have to "borrow" weapons powerful enough to battle the robbers? Or that store selsl more powerful weapons to civilians than the police possess?

We are fucked up as a country.

Thrillhous said...

Yeah, the issue of police being outgunned in that battle led to a big debate about whether cops should have more powerful weapons. California cops now have access to the big stuff, but I don't know about elsewhere.

Another scary dimension is the armor-piercing bullets. Cops were getting hit by bullets that went through cars first.

Mr Furious said...

Yeah, gotta like the mismatch there...

The robbers in Kevlar walk calmly around, bullets plunking off their armor, while cops get laid out after taking one through the squad car.

There is NO legitimate reason for armor-piercing ammo except for use by law-enforcement or military.

Anonymous said...

I also watched that video about the Wildes Car Chase Video... Indeed a Chevy Beretta can still run for a few miles with its rims without even damaging its Centerforce clutch and still outrun cops... About the gunman in Virginia Tech, do they have security guards on that place and how come Cho Seung-Hui killed a lot of persons without even disarmed... How come that a student like him can het fold of a powerful weapon enough to kill a dozen people....