james_nicoll ([info]james_nicoll) wrote,
@ 2008-05-15 15:48:00
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Huh
Sara Jane Moore, who shot at and missed Gerald Ford on September 22, 1975, was released from prison December 31st last year. She's 78. I wonder what she does with her time?

The set of all would-be Presidential assassins who were then paroled can't be very large.

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Re: I hope
[info]james_nicoll
2008-05-15 08:06 pm UTC (link)
My impression is that she now believes that her actions were wrong, which probably explains why they were willing to let her out. "She's a terrible shot," and "The President that she disliked is dead" are not good reasons to let a would-be killer out.

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Re: I hope
[info]caias
2008-05-15 08:16 pm UTC (link)
Since when does our government need a good reason to let people out of jail or put them in?

You must hate America...

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Re: I hope
(Anonymous)
2008-05-15 08:21 pm UTC (link)
Am I reading that right? She served thirty-plus years for one count of attempted murder?

Aren't there people who've been convicted of actual murders who get paroled earlier than that?

It seems like there should be some value in missing; unless of course the value is that she was not executed.

- Ken

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Re: I hope
[info]roseembolism
2008-05-15 08:23 pm UTC (link)
Damn right. If she's going to shoot at Gerald Ford, she better damn well HIT. Such lousy marksmanship is a crime in itself.

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Re: I hope
[info]caias
2008-05-15 08:32 pm UTC (link)
It's not a charge of attempted murder. The charge was attempted assassination, which holds a much higher penalty than an attempted murder charge.

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Re: I hope
(Anonymous)
2008-05-15 08:57 pm UTC (link)
I am tempted to snark about how the pigs are more equal than others, but I guess I can see that an assassination is an attack on everybody, because it assaults democracy itself and, etc. etc.

Still, my gut is telling me Ford wouldn't have been any deader than any other murder victim and probably therefore should not be treated differently by the law. But I am not a lawyer, I am not an ethicist, and I am utterly unarmed in this battle of wits, so I will say no more.

- Ken

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Re: I hope
[info]ckd
2008-05-15 09:26 pm UTC (link)
Besides, can you call attacking Ford an "attack on democracy" when he was never actually elected as either President or Vice President?

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Re: I hope
[info]j_larson
2008-05-15 10:02 pm UTC (link)
An assault on the republic, then. (Obviously, she's a Sith.)

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[info]erinzdad
2008-05-15 08:21 pm UTC (link)
TV leads everyone to believe that hitting a target with a handgun is simple. Not so, even at close range, and especially when shooting from the hip.
Add in a large dose of anger and/or nervous tension and you'll need a lot of luck.

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-15 08:45 pm UTC (link)
I've trained a number of people to hit with their very first shot with a handgun, at a range longer than she was at (um, that last is based on original memories of the TV footage, so I could be wrong there).

Certainly adrenaline complicates anything requiring fine motor control.

I remember I had been reading for years about how terribly difficult handguns were to shoot, and was quite shocked to discover how easy it really is. At reasonable ranges, ranges suitable for handguns, like 0-30 feet.

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[info]erinzdad
2008-05-15 09:06 pm UTC (link)
I neglected to add "without practice and/or experience". According to my friends in law enforcement, most gun fights take place at less than 15', yet suprisingly few are fatal at over 10'.
Of course I live in Texas, where concealed carry is common, so I've always thought good manners to trump a fast draw in most cases. Heinlein said "An armed society is a polite society", at least the survivors, eh?

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-15 09:26 pm UTC (link)
Gunshot wounds are often surprising, mostly by being less incapacitating than you might think (but sometimes the other way). One local trainer told a story about his police days when he and his partner put 7 rounds of .357 magnum into a perpetrator -- and then had to physically wrestle him into the ambulance when it came, he didn't want to go to the hospital.

Here in Minnesota we have a little over 50,000 permit holders out of a total population of 5.2 million, so probably most people wouldn't call it common. More common than 6 years ago, though. (I just renewed my first permit, applied for the first day it was possible under the new "shall-issue" law 5 years ago; I had been turned down under the earlier discretionary program, under which the Minneapolis police mostly didn't issue permits except to security guards, though I do know two of the exceptions).

In the Minnesota carry courses I'm familiar with (including the ones I taught), trying to convince people to be polite and non-confrontational takes up a considerable amount of the time. If they initiate or escalate the confrontation, it can call a later self-defense claim into question.

I'm not actually sure Heinlein was *right* on that one. A good duelist could feel he could get away with most social things because most people wouldn't dare challenge him.

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[info]timgueguen
2008-05-15 09:53 pm UTC (link)
We had a case here in Saskatoon something like that, probably in the late '80s, where an officer emptied 6 rounds of .38 Special into an armed fugitive, who lived. Said fugitive fortunately didn't get a round into the cop with the .44 Magnum he was packing, assuming he got a shot off at all. These days the city police forces here in Saskatchewan all carry .40 Glocks.

Fascinating that it's assumed that people need to be convinced not to act aggresively. I suppose there must be at least a few people who think being issued a carry permit makes them some sort of juniour law enforcement officer.

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-15 10:28 pm UTC (link)
There are the Mall-Ninjas sometimes, but much more common are the ones who think it's self defense when they're arguing with somebody, pushing back and forth, and the guy knocks them down and starts to kick them. And there's some question of that; they are not a "reluctant participant" in that confrontation, and in Minnesota (I think in most states, but I've paid much more attention to the local laws) you must be a reluctant participant to claim self-defense with lethal force. (This is a case where a jury might decide either way, depending on the stories told about the earlier part of the confrontation by various witnesses and participants.)

We try to teach them things like stepping back from the confrontation (if they somehow find themselves in it), announce publicly that they're leaving to avoid further confrontation, ask the bartender (these hypotheticals nearly always happen in a bar) to keep the other person there for 10 minutes to avoid possible confrontation outside, etc. And then actually leave and go home.

Good policy if you're *not* armed, too, really.

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[info]cwoolard
2008-05-16 02:12 am UTC (link)
(these hypotheticals nearly always happen in a bar)

Interesting. Here in Washington State, firearms aren't allowed in bars at all. (With the exception, of course, of police on duty and on official business.)

I had thoght that was more or less true throughout the country.

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-16 03:35 am UTC (link)
I know some states have that stupid rule, but we avoided it in Minnesota. We have a much more sensible rule: your carry permit is only valid when your blood alcohol is under .04.

Some other states: You can be smashed out of your head and armed, so long as you aren't in a bar at the time.

Minnesota: You cannot be armed and smashed out of your head. If you don't have a lot of alcohol in your system, you can be in a bar or wherever.

Which seems sillier to *you*?

It can be handy to appoint a "designated carrier" (probably the same person as the designated driver), rather than disarm before the trip, and before all the things done along the way on the trip. Also the person driving may not wish to sit around unarmed when he's perfectly sober.

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[info]cwoolard
2008-05-16 03:56 am UTC (link)

I was going to say it would be easier to spot someone carrying a gun than to spot someone with a specific blood alcohol level, but of course it isn't. The entire point of concealed carry is concealed.

So yeah, that does make more sense. Just...it'd be a bit easier for the majority who try to be honest, if portable breathalyzers were more common.
In WA if I walk into a bar with a gun on my person, I know I'm breaking the law. In MN, I'm gonna have to guess, based on how much I've had to drink, whether I need to get up, lock my gun in the trunk of my car, and presuamby call a cab before I get cut off/86'd.

(Is .04 the imit for driving in MN, also? Here it's .08)

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-16 04:00 am UTC (link)
Driving is .08 I think (unless it hasn't changed from .10 yet). Carry is half driving. (The charge goes up another notch if you pass .08, too.)

Basically, one unit of alcohol is legal unless you're very small. Very little figuring to do (and anything more complicated than that is likely to be faulty anyway, metabolisms are too different, you do need that breathalyser).

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[info]fridgepunk
2008-05-16 02:25 am UTC (link)
generally the major constraint in physical confrontations is how easy is it to be violent at any particular moment - and how violent can you be without too much effort.

Handguns have the nasty combination of making lethal force very accessible, so that arguements that would have reached maximum entropy with attempts by the participants to try and kick each other's arses off, suddenly turns into a crazed close range gun battle.

And that's just what happens in London ffs.

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-16 03:37 am UTC (link)
This is theory. It does not happen in real life in any statistically significant number of cases. We know this now that we've got millions of civilians carrying legally for many years, in all kinds of environments (rural, urban, city, all parts of the country, etc.). Reality trumps theory.

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Oooo
[info]fridgepunk
2008-05-16 04:32 pm UTC (link)
Not to be facetious, but if you have stats on...let's see... the ratio of violent incidents where guns were available to either participants and were used versus number of violent incidents where guns were available and weren't used I'd love to read them.

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[info]argonel
2008-05-15 10:02 pm UTC (link)
Part of those numbers are a bit misleading. There are a pretty large number of armed citizens that don't feel that a concealed carry permit is necessary. Mostly because when they are armed it is generally for hunting and they are openly carrying a long arm.

Re: a good duelist, if he was offensive enough someone or someones would eventually shoot him in the back rather than risking a duel. If he was well enough known as being an ass the likely response would be hmm, worst case of falling on live ammo I've ever seen.

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-15 10:30 pm UTC (link)
People keeping guns *in their home* are a big part of the armed citizenry too, and don't need carry permits (in a few states they need weapon permits of some sort to own guns at all, though).

And then there are lots of funny cases. In MN, during the discretionary period too, you could carry in your home, and in your place of business, and while traveling directly between them, without a permit.

There are also a lot of people, I'm morally certain (I only know of a couple of examples, and of course I won't be specific), who just carry illegally. Including people who could get a permit easily.

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[info]shimgray
2008-05-15 10:19 pm UTC (link)
The way I like to interpret the Heinlein is "a polite society is much better at coping with being an armed society"...

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[info]robertprior
2008-05-16 12:26 am UTC (link)
I'm not actually sure Heinlein was *right* on that one. A good duelist could feel he could get away with most social things because most people wouldn't dare challenge him.

Sudan. Somalia. Lebanon. Lots of counter-examples to that old bromide.

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[info]cwoolard
2008-05-16 02:06 am UTC (link)
One can hardly consider heavy machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades "duelling weapons".

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Albania
(Anonymous)
2008-05-16 11:18 am UTC (link)
Pre-WWII Albania? Basically every adult male carried. In fact, if you didn't, you weren't seen as a real male. There were exceptions -- priests, doctors, foreign visitors, etc. -- but carrying was the default.

One of the great unsung struggles of the 20th century was Enver Hoxha's Communist regime's disarming of the Albanians. Took over a decade and a fair number of deaths.

Hoxha was an evil asshole, but we can see his point: before WWII, adult males in northern Albania were outnumbered by adult females more than 3-2. And this was entirely because of the blood feud. Put another way, if you were a young adult male just old enough to pick up the gun, there was about an even chance you'd die by the gun before reaching old age.

It's an example oddly unknown outside of Europe. Go figure. There's also the northern Caucasus before the Czars clamped down in the 19th century; that's less well documented, but followed the same pattern. (It's where Frank Herbert got the word and concept "kanly" from, mind.)

BTW, yes, it was a polite society. Very polite; almost famously so. It was also a society where foreign visitors regularly mentioned stepping over dead bodies in the streets. (That's not an exaggeration. There are memoirs.)


Doug M.

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[info]dd_b
2008-05-16 02:07 am UTC (link)
Any idea what percentage of people are/were armed in Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon? I'm not sure those really qualify; I think the militias were always a quite small percentage.

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[info]beamjockey
2008-05-16 03:06 am UTC (link)
You want to amend the aphorism?

"A society with 65% of its citizens armed is a 95% polite society?"

The rhetorical impact begins to sag.

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[info]austin_dern
2008-05-15 08:32 pm UTC (link)

Oscar Collazo, one of the two who attempted to murder Harry S Truman in 1950, was released from prison in 1979, and had been eligible for parole since 1966 but had refused to apply. (Grisielo Torresola, whose shots did kill officer Leslie Coffeit, was killed in the shootout.) Truman had commuted Collazo's death sentence to life imprisonment, and President Carter commuted that to time-served.

Lolita Lebron, Irving Flores, and Rafael Cancel Miranda, who attacked the House of Representatives in 1954, were also freed in 1979, also pardoned by Carter; Andreas Figueroa Cordero (also part of the House of Representatives attack) was freed earlier for health concerns.

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[info]nexstarman
2008-05-15 08:34 pm UTC (link)
Arthur Bremer shot and paralyzed George Wallace during the 1972 presidential campaign, after Wallace won the Florida Democratic primary. Bremer was paroled last year.

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[info]yorksranter.wordpress.com
2008-05-16 10:23 am UTC (link)
They should start an "I Shot the Prez Club".

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[info]chaotic_nipple
2008-05-15 08:38 pm UTC (link)
If the president in question had been a Democrat, she could probably have gotten a job as a Fox News commentator. :-P

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Assassins
[info]montedavis
2008-05-16 12:55 pm UTC (link)
Moore, Bremer et al. are players in Sondheim & Weidman's brilliant, not-well-enough-known Assassins. Get the CD or torrent or whatever. Listen, especially to the ballads: of Booth, Czolgosz, Guiteau.

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