LA Times Gun Article

enjoy the following link


obviously- these comics are not mine, but I think they show the lunacy of some of the anti gun arguments.


here's the cut and paste, its kinda long so I apologize, but I don't want the link to die and lose the article- as always bold is my personal emphasis, not that of the author. I've tried to clean up the cut and paste as well as I can- but I don't want to be accused of modifying original text, so if its a bit south of cheese as for appearance, sorry:



(picture not part of article, its actually Oleg Volk's work.)

Gun dealer wants weapons on campus
March 5 2008

Two mass killers used Eric Thompson's online store, but he considers guns a deterrent.
By Stephanie Simon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 5, 2008
GREEN BAY, WIS. -- Online gun dealer Eric Thompson can't recall exactly what he was doing when he learned that one of his customers had just killed five students in a college geology class.

He knows what flashed through his mind, though:

Gun dealer wants weapons on campus
Photo Gallery
Gun dealer wants weapons on campus


Your Vote
Would you feel safer on a campus knowing that some students or faculty might be carrying guns?

90.9 %
91%
Yes
9.1 %
9%
No

5159 total responses

Not again.

Ten months earlier, another customer had killed 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech.

The coincidence stuns Thompson. He calls it upsetting. Beyond that, though, he doesn't know what he's supposed to feel. Remorse? Regret? He has none.

He had no reason not to sell a pistol to Seung-hui Cho, who walked from classroom to classroom at Virginia Tech last April, methodically firing 174 rounds. Nor did he have cause to question the sale of magazines and a holster to Steven Kazmierczak, who last month opened fire at Northern Illinois University.

Thompson donated to funds for the victims on both campuses. And he continued to sell guns.

His websites log thousands of hits a day; hundreds of buyers call his toll-free line. Thompson looks over his employees' shoulders as they process the transactions. He doesn't probe. It's not his business what a man in Kittery, Maine, wants with two high-capacity handgun magazines. Why a buyer in Hot Springs, S.D., is inquiring about Black Widow revolvers. Or why an anonymous e-mailer wants to know how best to fit a silencer on a pistol.

"I'm a businessman," he says. "It's a product. They have a right to have what they want to have."

Thompson is also a father; he and his wife have three young children. He says he feels a responsibility to do what he can to keep students safe. He's built an online forum, GunDebate.com, to solicit and sift through ideas. In truth, though, he already has a solution in mind, and he intends to push it as hard as he can.

It's this: Put more guns in schools.

Thompson, 35, fell into the gun business by chance.

An entrepreneur by nature, he ran a restaurant for a while, then founded a cleaning business. A conversation with a customer got him thinking about guns. Just before Christmas in 1999, he launched topglock.com in his spare bedroom, stashing inventory in his garage.

"I saw it as a business opportunity," he says. "If I saw a better opportunity in shoes at that time, I would have sold shoes."

His showroom, on an industrial strip near the famed Green Bay Packers stadium, bristles with hunting rifles and mounted antlers.

But the attached corporate headquarters feel more New Age than Rambo. The walls are painted sun yellow and sky blue. There are silk flowers in the spotless bathroom. Thompson, who has shoulder-length blond hair and a mellow manner, set up a cozy "serenity room" so his 17 employees could relax to the soothing sounds of a desktop waterfall and chirping birds. "So we can keep sane," Thompson says.

Thompson's firm, TGSCOM, runs more than 100 websites, each designed to appeal to a different segment of the gun market (and each calibrated to pop up high on Google searches). All told, he peddles 8,700 types of firearms, priced as low as $70 for a surplus rifle and as high as $8,800 for a shoulder-fired, semiautomatic, long-range rifle that takes jumbo .50-caliber bullets.

The thousands of gun accessories he sells -- grips, ammunition, barrels, holsters -- can be mailed to a buyer's home. Guns must be shipped to one of the nation's 70,000 federally licensed firearms dealers, who do background checks before releasing the package to the buyer.

Gun control advocates condemn online transactions as open to fraud, because convicted criminals can browse online, then pay someone with a clean record to place the order and pick up the firearm.

Thompson gets several calls a week from federal agents who want to know where he shipped this assault rifle or that shotgun. "They never tell us why they're calling," Thompson says. But he knows: The weapon was likely stolen or used in a crime.


He shrugs off such unfortunate transactions as part of doing business.

"I'm sure Wal-Mart has sold more weapons to killers than I have," he says. Liberal calls for more restrictions on gun sales only strengthen his resolve to stay in business: "As far as letting people's comments push me out, I feel that is like letting the bully win."


Although he didn't enter the business for political reasons, Thompson has become passionate about gun rights; his website offers a discounted membership rate in the National Rifle Assn. He's taken up sport shooting as a hobby. And he expresses deep respect for the gun enthusiasts -- cops, hunters, sportsmen, collectors -- who shop at his sites.

Few try to scam him with credit card fraud. Many who call his toll-free line end up chatting with his employees as though they were old hunting buddies. They're good folks, Thompson says, "one of the pleasures of being in this industry."

One of those customers, Nicholas Koch, strolls into the showroom on a cold afternoon looking to add to his collection of Glocks. A former Marine, he has six or seven handguns at home -- he's lost count -- and two rifles. He settles quickly on a sleek 9 mm.

"I like firearms in general," says Koch, 24. "And these look sexy, for a pistol."

He fills out the required form, checking "no" to such questions as: "Are you a fugitive from justice?" and "Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana . . . or any other controlled substance?"

A clerk calls Koch's name and Social Security number into a federal hotline and gets the all-clear. "Can I get frequent Glock miles?" Koch jokes. "You guys should make punch cards. Every time you buy a gun, you punch out G-L-O-C-K, and when you're done, you get a free T-shirt."

Koch, who's studying for a college degree in geology, resents the critics who fault Thompson for the crimes his customers commit. "It's like Chevy getting blamed for people driving drunk," he says.

Thompson appreciates the support. In recent weeks, he's received hundreds of nasty e-mails:

"You make me sick."

"You've got blood on your hands."

"I sincerely hope you go to hell for what you've allowed happen!"

"HOPEFULLY YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS THE WONDERFUL YOUNG KIDS AT THOSE 2 COLLEGES."

In Thompson's experience, then, it's the anti-gun crowd that spouts violence. After Virginia Tech, vandals splattered his store with eggs. Some of the e-mails threaten his children.

Gun owners, by contrast, seem rational and responsible -- and that's why he wants to see more of them in classrooms.

"I'm not going to say that we don't have a problem with violent crime in America," he says. "But there's a logical answer."

Thompson starts with the uncontested fact that campus shootings are often over before law enforcement can respond. At Virginia Tech, Cho barricaded the classroom building and shot himself in the head as police broke through. At Northern Illinois, Kazmierczak killed five students in less than two minutes; he committed suicide before police arrived.

But what if someone else in those classrooms -- a student, a teacher -- had been carrying a gun? Isn't it at least possible some lives could have been saved? Isn't it worth giving our children that chance?

"Otherwise, it's 'Welcome to your killing spree,' " Thompson says. "Because there's nothing to stop these shooters."

He argues too that allowing guns on campus could deter future shootings.

That perspective has caught on widely since the carnage at Virginia Tech. Most states long ago declared schools gun-free zones; only Utah allows concealed weapons at all public colleges.


Today, at least 14 states are considering allowing guns on campus -- among them Arizona, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. A national advocacy group, Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, has signed up 7,000 members in two weeks, bringing its roster to 19,000.

The trend alarms gun control activists.

Even trained police officers hit their target only 20% of the time, says Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. So how could a student, caught up in a terrifying attack, be expected to shoot straight?

"If a bad guy comes in, everyone always wishes there were the John Wayne hero in the classroom to respond," he says. "But that's really hard to pull off."

There have been few weapons offenses at colleges in Utah. But Helmke worries about all that could go wrong: guns stolen from backpacks, passed around at parties, pulled out when a romance sours.

He also asks whether we can trust states to make sure that permit-holders are skilled shooters with solid safety training. In Florida, a Sun-Sentinel investigation found that more than 1,400 felons, including killers and child molesters, had been granted concealed-carry permits.

"The bottom-line problem is: We make it too easy in this country for dangerous people to buy guns," Helmke says.

Thompson dismisses that argument as willful blindness.

The bad guys will always have guns, he says. It's time to make sure the good guys have them too -- and have them handy, even in algebra.

"No one wants to admit we have a problem. It's like how you don't want to see the starving kids in Ethiopia," he says. "But we know it's going to happen again. It's time to hit it head on."

He mentions the shooting last year at a Colorado Springs, Colo., mega-church. A troubled young man with a heavy-duty arsenal killed two girls in the parking lot. As he tried to storm the church, a member of the congregation who had volunteered for security duty pulled out a pistol and shot him. The man then killed himself.

Thompson loves that story. The next time he's in the news, he hopes the headline will read: Internet gun dealer linked to pistol that stopped mass killer in his tracks.

Classic rock plays softly in Thompson's call center as Alex Wallin sells guns.

He chats with a customer about night sights. He tells another caller the going price for an AK-47 assault rifle: $479.53. On another call, he gets into a long discussion about the merits of the latest model Glock. "It's a short frame," Wallin explains. "It'll fit in your hand a little better."

His tone is light and friendly. But when he takes a break, Wallin admits the school shootings have rattled him.

These days, when he takes an order, he listens hard.

"Sometimes you get calls that make you get kind of leery," he says. "You feel like, 'I don't know if they should have a gun or not.' " Wallin says that he's canceled a few transactions because of this unease -- the customer doesn't speak English, or something else doesn't seem right.

Thompson cuts him off with a rebuke. "We don't screen customers," he says.

The screen over Wallin's desk lights up again. Three more calls have just come in. He sits back down, briskly picks up the phone.

"This is Alex," he says. "How can I help you?"

stephanie.simon@latimes.com

My opinion- first notice at the time of this posting that of over 5,000 votes nearly 91% of the people are in favor of guns on campus. That means one of two things, or a combination of the two:

Us pro-gun crowd hit this poll en mass
People are realizing that security is a right, not a guarantee.

It is also important to notice the level of violence threatened by the Anti-Gun crowd. It has long been speculated in some circles that the reason many anti's are against people owning guns is projection. They know they are irresponsible, irrational people who cannot take on the self discipline necessary to protect themselves without turning into a fucking psycho, so they assume the rest of the world can't either.

This is not unlike playing pick up baseball with a kid who brings the ball, then strikes out and leaves. If he can't hit the ball- no one can hit the ball. Very childish, but telling.

Is it true? I have no idea- I do know there are very few simple answers in the world, so I unfortunately have to think this is not one of them. Though I bet it's spot on for a small number of folks.

I think the Dealer is totally right. Police cannot respond in time to save us people. I don't know how many times it has to be proven to the citizenry of our nation that refuse to open their eyes are prefer to remain blind and deaf to the world around them, but life happens far quicker then you'd like to imagine.

lets say police can respond in 2 minutes to your location (which by the way, is a phenomenal response time)

so lock yourself in a room and stare at a clock for two minutes- not too bad right? now have a friend pound on the door for those two minutes. . .time seems to slow down a little doesn't it?

now have that person in the same room with as you, and have them try to play 'tag' for two minutes. think you can stay away till the police get there? cause if not, that could mean your life. There are some situations we cannot run from, violence can be forced upon us and our only reaction is to either take it and hope for survival, or pro actively make decisions that keep us, and not the bad guys, out of harms way.

I've said this before- so apologies if this is old hat for any of you out there, but I feel it needs to be reiterated-

No one is responsible for you but you.

and equally as important-

I believe most people in this world to be good. More good people, defending themselves legally, and with moral consideration, means a world with more good people doing the right thing. Criminals will do wrong because they think the benefits out way the risk (or they are totally sociopaths, hey both happen but the former happens more frequently than the later) If good people defend themselves, the risk will be too great for a large number of criminals to do their work. No body likes a fair fight- the criminals especially. They want soft targets, not concerned and prepared citizens. They want disarmed, misinformed peasants.



Make no mistake- Your own self defense is your Right, if you choose not to exercise it, you have accepted that you will leave your rights in the hands of others. Nothing wrong with that per say- just nothing I would ever do willingly.