Washington Post:

The gunman…was carrying an assault rifle, two handguns and as many as 1,000 rounds of ammunition when he shot his way into the huge New Life Church in Colorado Springs and was confronted and shot by Jeanne Assam, a former police officer who was serving as a volunteer security guard, police said.

“I saw him coming through the doors, and I took cover, and I waited for him to get closer,” Assam told reporters. “I came out of cover, I identified myself and engaged him and took him down,” she said.

Assam is a former law-enforcement officer; but was a private citizen acting as a volunteer when she acted Sunday.

So we have two mass shootings this week…in one, a civilian is encouraged to be armed and prepared; in the other…well, sadly, no (see this first-hand account).

And reading her account, I certainly question whether I – or any of the trained shooters I know – could have done much better.

About 80 feet down a main hallway, Murray encountered Assam, who fired several rounds at him, Sgt. Jeff Jensen of the Colorado Springs Police Department told a news conference. He said that “she definitely wounded him” but that police have not yet determined whether any of her shots were fatal or “whether there was a self-inflicted gunshot wound during this as well.”

“I didn’t think for a minute to run away,” Assam said. “I was given the assignment to end this before it got too much worse.” She said the encounter “was scary” but “my hands were not even shaking” as she prayed for help. “I was very focused,” she said. “I just knew I was not going to wait for him to do any further damage. I just knew what I had to do.”

I’ll wait for Kingsley Browne’s reponse…

A BBC article interviewing ‘leading thinkers’ on the role of freedom of speech…(hint: they don’t like it)

Here’s an interesting article about the dynamics of the Democratic campaign:

The Clinton organization had a clear plan A: It envisioned the candidate, as the choice of the party establishment and natural heir to the presidency, to so dominate 2007 that she would be able to corner, not have to capture, the nomination. It worked perfectly for most of the year.

The strategy has imploded. In a similar situation, Bill Clinton would have changed plans on a dime — he could have gone from B to E during a rest stop.

I’m East for a wedding, and while I wait for TG to suit up, I’m catching up on reading. I’ve bought a stack of books for Biggest Guy, and am slowly reading down them myself while I wait to give them to him.

So I just started the counterinsurgency classic, ‘Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife‘, by Nagl. And found a funny typo – or a suggestion that West Point (where he was a professor) isn’t as straight-laced as it’s reputation. From the Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to my mother and mother-in law, both of whom found books and provided emotional support and diversions from writing. Like mother, like daughter: Susi has fought insurgents in her pot plants and over the kitchen table as well as on the computer keyboard.

Who knew it was so much like UC Santa Cruz?? So far it does look like a damn interesting book…

It’s the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The survivors, inevitibly aging, are fewer and fewer and one day soon we will read of the passage of the last one. And a page in our history book will turn and close, I guess.

But the history is still with us.On a side note, there is a loosely related local conflict in which a group of local artists from Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro (where we had the kerfluffle about showing Tora Tora Tora a few years ago) are working witrh the City Council to use more of the historic Ft. MacArthur site as a part of the arts community. This conflicts with the local military history crowd, based in the Ft. MacArthur museum.

If you had a moment today, you might drop a note to the local city councilwoman, , as well as an email of support to , on the board of directors of the little-used military museum, and you might even encourage the executive director of Angels Gate to find a path that supports both expanding the arts, and preserving our history.

It’s a difficult problem, because the museum is not well-visited and resources are scarce. But at some level , we need to preserve parts of our history regardless of whether doing so results in blockbuster traffic – just as we need to support the arts even when the market doesn’t necessarily do so (cue gnashing of conservative/libertarian teeth).

Jeff Cooper used to talk with veiled disdain about ‘copchicks’. And over at Volokh, Wayne State law prof Kingsley Browne riffs off his new book ‘Co-Ed Combat’ – following on his old book ‘Biology at Work: Rethinking Sexual Equality’ to talk at length about why it is bad to have women in the military.I actually agree that there are certainly physical and probably cognitive differences between men and women; but you know what, when the chips are down, I’ll happily stand next to (in back of, crouching, actually) any of several tough-ass women I know (hi, TK!!).

And in case you’ve forgotten this story, go read the whole thing:

What follows next is a classically executed counterattack. The two senior NCOs, one a woman, take the fight directly to the insurgents in their trenches:

The Squad leader dismounted with his M4 carbine, and 2 hand grenades, grabbed the section leader out of the first vehicle who had rendered radio reports of their first contact. The two of them, squad leader Staff Sergeant and team leader Sergeant with her M4 and M203 grenade launcher, rush the nearest ditch about 20 meters away to start clearing the natural trenchline. The enemy has gone into the ditches and is hiding behind several small trees in the back of the lot. The .50 cal and SAW (squad automatic weapon – corrected) flanking fire tears apart the ten enemy in the lead trenchline.

I’ll mount a more serious response in a bit, but for now…over to you, Prof. Browne…

TG went to get her hair cut and brought home a copy of Penthouse she’d been reading – or claimed to have been reading. There was an article about the military in it, right between the naked Second Life and hentai characters and the “Wow!! He went 30 days without sex!!” article.

“Don’t you know this guy?” she asked.

In the Crosshairs – Snipers are vital to battlefield victory. Why did two of them become targets of our own military establishment?

…by Matthew Currier Burden, also known as Matty O’Blackfive.

Sweet!! You go, Matty!!

Abu Muquama is one of my favorite new blogs – by two people with serious cred in counterinsurgency (I’ve groveled and begged them to follow Totten and crosspost some of their stuff here, that’s how good I think they are). You ought to be reading them.

Along with the Small Wars Journal, they are helping some folks in Afghanistan out – apparently, there is an ad-hoc counterinsurgency academy being run by some wicked smart mid-level Army officers.

They need books.

Amazon has books.

You have money.

Are you getting my drift? Throw down for a book or two and help make more wicked smart U.S. soldiers.

I caught the news from Omaha late tonight.

The first thoughts always are visceral – imaging (not imagining) the same thing here in the bustle of the Del Amo Mall just up the street from my house. Then I imagine the holes ripped in families and communities, the faces I will see tomorrow in halftone in the morning paper.

My view on this stuff is simple; it’s best summarized by the book ‘Stand on Zanzibar‘, where author John Brunner coined the term ‘mucker’.

Blogger Cosma Shalizi – who blogs at ‘Three Toed Sloth‘ wrote a good summary some time ago:

“Mucker” is a word coined by the science fiction writer John Brunner in his great novel Stand on Zanzibar. The word derives from “amok,” which will require a bit of history. It is a Malay word, and a person who goes violently insane, rushing through the village and murderously attacking everyone in his path, is said to have “run amok.” In what was an egregiously idiotic statement, even for him, the eminent French critic Georges Bataille called running amok the purest manifestation of revolt, “the movement by which man rises up against his own condition and the whole of creation.” (Bataille never ran through the streets of Montparnasse madly slashing with a kris, so he either lacked the courage of his convictions or was a hypocrite with a small – a very small – modicum of brains.) The Malays, inevitably, were and are more sensible: they kill those who run amok.

A “mucker,” then, is someone who runs amok; the times havin’ a-changed, now they use guns. As always, they are people driven to murderous madness by intolerable frustration, repression and conformity, whether in an isolated kampong or the Postal Service. So far muckers seem to have been mostly Americans, but just the other day the radio carried news of one in Germany.

It does Mr. Brunner’s prescience great credit to have foreseen the need for this word, back in 1964; and it does the rest of us no credit at all, for letting such a word be needed.

There is something dark and bloody in the human heart.

Not this blog … the LA Times blogs.

I’ve said for a while that it will be easier for newspapers to learn to blog than for bloggers to learn to be publishers. Note that that doesn’t cover the cost-structure overhang that is threatening media companies today, which is what’s going to grind them as institutions for the next few years.

So the LA Times has hired local blog wild man Tony Pierce to run their blog presence. I’m trying to decide on an over/under for his tenure there, but can say with some cofidence it’ll be short.

Now that’s not because he and I butted heads when he laid out some bullshit about Pajamas Media. It’s not because he was just quoted as saying

Huffington Post showed up out of nowhere when no one asked for another political blog and is now getting more hits than Drudge mostly because they are serious about politics and they’re echoing what regular Americans actually believe.

…that’ll fit him right in with the Times folks.

It’s because he’s batshit crazy.

But I say that like it’s a bad thing. Maybe not, eh? We’ll see…