Juan Williams
Among the favorite arguments of anti-liberty advocates is Joe Average Citizen cannot be trusted with guns. Yesterday, while channel surfing, I happened to tune, briefly, into The Five. I happened to hear Juan Williams trot out the ancient and abjectly false canard that anyone owning guns is virtually certain to kill themselves, their family or other innocents. This is particularly ironic coming from Williams. I’m sure readers recall his dismissal from NPR for not being a sufficiently bull goose demented leftist. For a time, Williams tempered his progressive rhetoric, at least in part, one assumes, out of gratitude to the many conservatives that stood up for him, and to Fox, which employed him and continues to employ him to date. Obviously, gratitude, and rationality, go only so far.
Occasionally, a heart-warming story pops up, made particularly heart-warming by the inclusion of Joe Average Citizen doing something valuable and useful with firearms. Fox News reports:
A Tennessee homeowner held two escaped inmates wanted in the killing of two prison guards at gunpoint Thursday until authorities arrived and made the arrests.
[Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman Lt. Bill] Miller says the escaped Georgia inmates had crashed a car while being chased by law enforcement and fled on foot into woods along Interstate 24 near the rural community of Christiana.
Miller says something alerted the homeowner that people were outside his home and he saw the men trying to steal his vehicle. The trooper says the homeowner held the two at gunpoint with a neighbor he called until the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Department could get there to arrest them.
The escapees, Donnie Rowe and Ricky Dubose escaped from a prison bus by taking a gun away from guards and murdering two of them–allegedly. They stole multiple vehicles and were on the run when the unnamed “Tennessee homeowner” and his neighbor captured them.
But why would two hardened criminal murderers–alleged–so easily submit to Joe Average Citizen, a guy not a professional government employee, someone more likely to shoot himself or other innocents than evil-doers? Presumably the citizen did not have the kind of advanced firearm training given to the police?
It’s Basic Criminal Psychology 101. Criminals know what to expect from the police. They know the police are hampered by all manner of laws and rules, written and unwritten, spoken and unspoken. And these days, the Ferguson Effect weighing heavily on the nation’s police, police officers are very reluctant indeed to use deadly force, particularly if the criminals involved are black. Rowe and Dubose are white, but covered in nearly enough tattoos to qualify as non-white.
These days, thanks to the very same Democrats that work tirelessly to disarm the law-abiding by undermining the Bill of Rights, criminals not only feel sufficiently emboldened to disobey police officers, but to fight them and even assassinate them. It’s likely Rowe and Dubose made up their minds to go down in a blaze of glory if confronted by the police. If so, it was a potentially reasonable calculation that the police might just hesitate enough to give them an edge. After all, they’d already–allegedly–killed two corrections officers. That’s enormous street cred in the criminal world. Killing a cop or two would make them eternal celebrities.
And then Joe Average Citizen came along and the hardened criminal murderers–alle…oh, the hell with that–meekly submitted. Why?
Because Joe probably told them what plenty of Joe Average Citizens might have said in his position: “you’re going to lay right there, flat on your bellies, because if you don’t, I’m going to start taking you apart, joint by joint. Hell, I’m such a bad shot, you never know what I’m going to hit. I just might aim for your head and blow your weenie off, but I’m going to hit something–repeatedly. So go ahead, make my day. It’ll be your word against mine, except you won’t be talking anymore.”
The criminals understood they were facing people who are sick to death not only of their kind, but of the politicians that support and praise criminals. They knew those citizens with guns just might be inclined to get some payback for all the misery they’ve ever inflicted on decent people. They understood they were looking down the barrel at sudden death–justice–rather than years of trials, appeals, media appearances, favorable mentions in state legislatures and in the halls of Congress. They understood rather than being held up by “criminal justice reform” activists, they’d be six feet under.
But thank goodness Joe Average Citizen didn’t shoot himself, those he loved, or some other innocent. Juan Williams will be relieved, I’m sure.
Stately McDaniel Manor 
I’d like the real Juan Williams to stand up. Is he the more rational, middle of the road Juan of his first days at Fox, or is he the current day liberal talking points-spewing Juan? I’ve actually been trying to study his face when he’s not talking on The Five to see if I can ascertain the Real Juan. He looks angry and disgusted with conservative points of view most of the time. Therefore, my unscientific research tells me he’s much closer to a liberal tool than a reasoned moderate.
He has been snotty several times to KG. Tired of it. He changed since the time slot change, maybe it’s past his bedtime.
LOL! I think KG is getting fed up with him like she did with Beckel.
Dear FanGirl:
I’m sure having Trump in the White House tends to make him a bit touchy.
I heard JW make that statement,, but he is wrong so often, I didn’t bother to look up my source. I believe he was quoting from a 1998 “study”, which the NRA thoroughly debunked in 2001, that concluded:
“A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to kill or injure in a domestic homicide, suicide, or unintentional shooting, than to be used in self-defense…”
If I may quote myself: “So I read that and immediately I asked myself, where did they get that number from? A curiosity apparently not shared by our columnist, so I Googled it, and the top two entries were one from the Brady organization and the second was from the NRA-ILA, Institute for Legislative Action.
https://www.nraila.org/articles/20011211/22-times-less-safebranti-gun-lobbys-f
It listed the source of the study, “Injuries and Deaths Due to Firearms in the Home,” Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection and Critical Care, Aug. 1998, and then proceeded to list the flaws of that study. This analysis was in 2001. For upwards to seventeen years, Brady has been repeating the results of this extremely flawed study, because it knows that columnists like Fitzgerald will accept it without question and then spread the lies even farther. Perhaps the greatest flaw in the study which “proves” ‘A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used…yada yada yada”, except in all but 14.2% of the subject of the study, they were shot with some other gun!
“only 14.2% of criminal gun-related homicides and assaults he surveyed involved guns kept in the homes where the crimes occurred.”
Another good one. Now I can take what you’ve provided, Mike, to Quora dot com where I am surprised to find that I am in their “top 20” writers (near the bottom to be sure lol) I say that because there’re many “Juan Williams’s” on Quora all peddling this kind of misinformation.
According to a detailed report I read, the homeowner claims he never displayed his firearm, but carried it concealed in his pocket when confronting the two convicts. This does not ring true to me; would two hardened criminals, on the run after — allegedly — killing two corrections officers, meekly surrender to an “unarmed” civilian and his friend? I suspect something has been omitted from the details of this story.
Dear navyvet:
As you say, I can’t imagine they two would have meekly submitted without the threat of death. As always, one has to take media accounts with a block of salt.