When I was fourteen or sixteen – pardon me, but I don’t remember precisely, nor did these things make any impression in the international mainstream media – mom and I went to what was probably an illegal demonstration in downtown Porto, Portugal.
No, I am not sure if it was illegal, or even honestly what the demonstration was for. Around that time it might have been for anything, including in support of whoever was the most right-wing candidate available. (Don’t get excited. It was never further to the right than social democrat, and at one time it was the socialist candidate.)
What I remember of that demonstration — one in a string of them — were the shots from above.
If my memory serves me (and understand that after these many years things run together, but be patient, there’s a point to this), the demonstration was in Avenida dos Aliados, which despite the name is a plaza, hemmed in between tallish, nineteenth/early twentieth century stone buildings. I’d guess from memory four or five stories high.
The shots came from either the upper windows or the roof of one of these buildings.
As someone in the crowd, I remember people startled, starting to move, eddies in the packed multitude, and then someone ahead of us going down, bloodied.
At that point, the running started.
I don’t know how I ended up running near a wall (we were pretty much in the center of the space) but I remember the moment a hand shot out, grabbed me, and pressed me flat against the wall. The shots continued through this, btw. The person who grabbed me was my mom, and for the next few minutes, we resisted the crowd going by so close they might pull us with them.
I don’t remember how many people were shot. Maybe four. Far more died in running down an underground passage, trying to get away/to the train station. That last is what my mom saved me from.
This is also why my blood boiled this morning when Hillary Clinton ran her ill-informed, loud mouth about the shooting in Las Vegas.
We’ll leave alone the fact that the “silencer” doesn’t indeed render guns silent. Larry Correia covered that recently in a wonderful post at his blog.
But even if it were possible to silence shots completely, would it be a bad thing, to prevent panic and the subsequent trampling?
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton wasn’t the only person speaking while wearing a stylish colon hat. Facebook and probably all the news media — I’m working on a book and at any rate have no intention of subjecting my blood pressure to that kind of hammering — are full of “experts” and “observers” and “commenters” talking about how this wouldn’t have happened if we had only banned private gun ownership.
The places where people gather are full of speculation and guesses as to what type of guns were even used. We don’t even know if they were legally acquired weapons. However, some carrion crows are willing to stand atop the bleeding corpses to craw their anti-Second Amendment song.
I told you my memory would come in handy here. It does. I don’t remember precisely what year this happened, or the precise circumstances, but I can assure you that at the time Portugal had strict gun control. (Likely it still does. I haven’t asked or cared in a long time.)
And yet, people possessed of malice and determined on evil could still acquire guns to shoot at a group of people who weren’t doing them any harm.
Frankly, we were lucky that day and the people in Las Vegas likely too, because bombs in that tight a space are far more deadly than guns. And I guarantee if guns were completely banned not only would evildoers still get them, but they would also still occasionally build bombs.
There is no way to stop a man bent on murder, except finding him before he commits it.
In this case, as in my experience, long ago, there wasn’t even any way for armed citizens to defend themselves. It all happens too fast, the crowd behaves like a sudden flood and pulls you weird ways. Nothing could be done. Though I suspect in the future there will be inspections of rooms overlooking venues.
What I want to say is this: the carrion crows viewing this as a chance to advance their agenda should get down on their knees and beg whatever God they believe in to forgive them and turn them into real humans, with real human feelings.
And that’s not counting the people saying it’s okay because those victims were likely Trump voters. Those people have willfully cut themselves off from the human race and made themselves a species of hyena far more repulsive than real hyenas — who are after all only animals who can’t help their behavior.
It’s very early. We don’t know anything.
We do know that no gun-control law ever kept guns from the hands of evildoers. Those laws do, often, take the means by which law-abiding people can defend themselves, even if that was impossible in this case.
Our thoughts and prayers go to those affected by this horrible act of evil.
And we await more certain knowledge about the perpetrator and his motives.
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