Pistol Grips, Shotguns, and ALICE

Troy Landry and sons with two 13ft+ alligators at the market

I was watching The Daily Show with my brother last night and Jon Stewart talked about the gun ban. At first I had a problem with it, since you know... I live in Alabama... where if you don't have some weapon on you, you don't value your life all too much. The news made it seem like Obama was banning everything! Then I found out it was only things like assault rifles. There is a full list here. I have no idea what most of those names mean, but I don't see a pistol or a shotgun on there and I would be super shocked if you needed an assault riffle to shoot a deer. And if Troy Landry can catch them 'gators with just a pistol, you can protect yourself with a shotgun.

Still from the conference with the guy and the pistol grip.

In the satirical news report he shows a clip of a man with a large picture of a shotgun and he is holding a pistol grip. He starts babbling on about how adding the pistol grip to the shotgun will make it illegal. Then it goes back to Jon and he makes a witty comment along the lines of "It would still be a picture of an illegal shotgun with a pistol grip." I was dumbfounded and I came up with the smartest solution in the history of time... Don't put a pistol grip on a shotgun. WOAH! Who knew it was that easy?

Then this lady tells this really detailed story of this woman who injured a burglar with a gun and saved her family from harm. She argued that it would do more harm than good to ban guns. The person being questioned by the woman just looked down at her and deadpanned, "From what I remember of the story, the gun she used would not be on the list of banned weapons." At this point my brother and I are laughing so hard along with Jon Stewart, then she proceeds to stumble over the words "I don't remember what weapon she used." We paused the television at this point to laugh at the stupidity of the statement. You can give such a detailed recount of the incident but you can't remember what weapon she used while discussing gun control.

Scary enough for a date, huh?

Logically, no one needs a freaking assault riffle. I mean, it would be chaos in Alabama if we didn't have shotguns to cock on the front porch while Daddy waits for the prom date of his daughter, but in reality We really don't need military grade weapons for that, shotguns look just as scary (especially in the hands of the father). So I really hate the idea of banning guns all together, but only a select few make sense. People are just so caught up in the fact that the government is banning guns that they forget that they really don't need that arsenal of AK-47s in their back room closet.

What got us in this mess? Oh, right, school shootings... Recently I found out that the media is seriously twisting the story of the Newtown shooting. It's CRAZY! Watch this video and you will no longer believe that Emilie Parker is a real child anymore. I am not denying that it happened, but the media gave a face to the shooting through a non-existent child and managed to misinform it's audience about the whole thing (notice how there are no simulations unlike every other school shooting)

This shooting has the schools frantic. They finally realized that you need to get the hell off campus if the shooter is nowhere near your building. My school has been doing lock-down drills like crazy. They gave us a new procedure called ALICE, and I have no idea what it stands for... Maybe Alert, Lock-down, Inform, Contact, Evacuate? They even showed us a simulation of Columbine and the Theatre students of Auburn University created a video demonstrating the new procedure and the poor kid in the video got shot over and over and over. It was AWFUL! I left the room and vomited after the Columbine video. They even showed the victims begging for their life... I just cannot wrap my head around it.

After the videos (in my AP Government class I might add) we started discussing tactics. Then we got a little silly and started saying "well what if there is a fire and an intruder? They could have set the buildings on fire to get us out." Then we realized... What if there was more than one intruder and we all left the buildings and they massacred us? We came up with a bunch of crazy scenarios and realized that there was no definite way to keep us safe from intruders, but if approached we were just going to have to go with our instinct and let the adrenaline take over and get us to a safe place.

I am sorry, I kind of went on a tangent... Oh well... Best thing to do in both situations is to think logically. You don't need a military weapon and no intruder is safe.

Thanks for reading!

Love,
Emily, The Yellow Umbrella