Pan flounder in an asiago sweet cream sauce. (Feat: Orange bell pepper)

I made this tonight, and it is EPIC.  So I share.  Be mindful that because of the way I cook, the only real fixed amounts are the amounts I know.  I approximate heavily when I cook, always adjusting on the fly.  If you're good enough in the kitchen, you'll be able to approximate to your own tastes.  Enjoi.

 Ingredients:
Heavy cream, around 1.5 to 2 cups.
Moscato d'asti white sparkling wine.
A bay leaf
around 3/4 cup chopped/diced asiago cheese.
2 egg yolks
1.25 lbs of flounder fillet
3/4 of an orange bell pepper, diced finely.
1 small shallot - minced
1 tbsp of garlic, give or take.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 tbsp butter

Equipment:
12"  frying pan.
small sauce pot
electric blender
wire whisk
spatula
knife
cutting board

you

Starting things off early, get a small pot warm and put the heavy cream into it along with a double-sized pad of butter, around 2 tbsp worth.  The butter is your timer, so keep an eye on it.  Add the bay leaf, watching for the butter to finish melting.   Once it's done melting, add your asiago cheese and start stirring slowly until the cheese is melted into the cream and butter.  Lower the heat at this time, adding two egg yolks and whisking, this will help it thicken.  Add a few cranks on the pepper and some coarse sea salt to taste. Now let it get happy.  This will take around 20 minutes of semi-regular stirring over low to medium low heat.  Use this time like I did and do the prep work you procrastinated on earlier.

Get your flounder ready once the sauce is happily simmered.  You should be seeing it thicken up by now.   From here, you want to put some EVOO in a large (mine's 12")  frying pan over medium heat.  Add your orange bell pepper once the oil shimmers and let it start to wilt in the olive oil.  Once it's started to get soft, or after you get bored (around 4 minutes), throw in the shallot and garlic, and keep agitating the mixture until the garlic is very aromatic and the shallot is browned up.   Stop and pull out your blender if you haven't already, and pour the mixture into the blender.  Blend until smooth.

Once your mixture is smoothed out, get it back in the pan.  Add the flounder atop it, and crank the heat to just below medium, letting the mixture brown up under the flounder.  Now, resist the urge to mess with your meat and let the flounder cook through to just over halfway.  Flip your fillets once they start to become opaque on the top.  Sear them, and place them aside on a plate.  Be careful, they'll try to fall apart on you.

Deglaze your pan with  the white wine and let it simmer for a minute while you fish the bay leaf out of your white cream sauce.   Now, add the sauce to the pan, and either whisk, or combine using the spatula.  Either way, you should end up with a fair and lightly oranged mixture.  Add the fish back to this mixture, turning your heat down another notch, but keeping it just above medium-low.  You'll want to simmer the fish for a few minutes in the sauce to finish the cooking.  This keeps the fish from drying out.

Poke the fish with a spatula to check to see if it flakes, and to check to see if it's cooked through.  Once both qualifiers are met, choose the person you don't like and set that fillet on their plate.  The rest goes to whomever.



A few notes:

Moscato D'asti is a sweet wine that's a great dessert wine, and an awesome table wine.   It's bubbly, but it's not so bubbly that it's relegated to special occasions.

I served this with butter roasted purple potatos and asparigus, and mixed some of the asiago cheese in with the butter for the cooking process.  Roasted the potatoes first at 325 for a good twenty minutes before adding the asparagus and cranking the heat up to 400 for fifteen minutes.

For dessert, I served a chocolate coffee mousse, which was fun, albeit whipping the mousse up was time consuming.  I need more practice with the hand mixer and my mousse recipes.

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Mindsets- part two of the cross-section.

I posted a cross-section of events, and would like to clarify that the cross-section is not an average day.  It's a time-compression of a week, a month, the events within that time period.  Certain things like the incident involving the bench warrant almost never happen, and it's more representative of the major events that occur every once and a while, hence it's out of place in the locational progress of the cross-section.  That's not to say it's unheard of for a unit to be rocking and rolling all day like that, it's just rare.  Recently, though, at one unit, in a week, there were a large number of incidences that classify as major incidences.  The week started with a stabbing, led into a number of Offender Protection Investigations - allegations that the janitors on two wings were extorting sexual favors from offenders - saw yet another stabbing, a few suicide attempts, and reached its peak of scary when a mental health offender managed to kick a steel mental-health door open with his bare feet and tearing 1/8'th inch steel sheet like it was paper.  Nobody was injured, thank God.  All through this, the building schedule was maintained.  Nobody stayed late, and all scheduled events occurred, albeit late in some cases. 


So what the cross section actually represents is an average of the selected events and an average of how they are often handled.  By policy or not by policy, seemingly wrong or right, they all need not apply.  What happens in an incident is often fluid, and always shaped by the culture of the prison system.  Strip searches are informal punishment, homemade alcohol is destroyed if it's found in a common area, two fighting 'inmates' are merely told to stop, and an 'inmate' who attacks a 'boss' always bleeds.  What is right or wrong in there?  Policy stands behind each example in many ways, but not in all circumstances.  

I like to call the prison surreal.  It is altered from an outsider's perception of reality.  Men and monsters act so similar, and yet so differently.  The same man who's the best worker you've encountered is the man who killed five people in a bloody rage 20 years ago.  The man who just jumped on an officer, who's tattoos cover his entire body, embezzled a quarter million from his own company.  You never really know, and the only thing you can expect is that things will not go as expected.  The situations you encounter as a correctional officer are often highly irregular, so far as an individual's normal day goes.  I offer some perspective now: 

• Polunsky Unit - January 2010 - five offenders find God and try to escape from prison after evening church services.  They were stopped by a shotgun, but were not killed.  Stand behind that shotgun for a minute, if you would please; now point it at those five men and pull the trigger.  Did you remember to chamber a round?  Take off the safety?  Yell at the men to stop?  Ask yourself, now, what does it feel like to kill somebody?  Shoot again; you need to shoot again!  you are what stands between these five men and freedom.  Can you hear the AR-15s of the pickets above you, popping, cracking as they join your barrage?  Four shells are yours, 36 lead pellets.  Drop that empty pump action, it's worthless now.  Draw your revolver.  Are they still moving?  Does it matter anymore?  Do you keep shooting?  Answer quickly, answer honestly, lives and jobs hang in the balance.  Can you answer?  Is it heroic?  Stop.  Now.  Stand alongside yourself.  Take away that adrenaline and the smell of gunpowder.  Look at the men; five unarmed men, not moving.  Did you kill them?  Did you hope?  That they lived or died?  These are hard questions if taken seriously.  Can you answer them?  

•  Any Unit - Any Given Day- 30 offenders approach a wing door, returning from chow.  Pat searching them is routine.  The offender standing in the middle of the hallway isn't.  Offenders walk to the sides of the hallway so there's always room for staff to transit by the quiet lines of offenders.   I hope you feel up to this, because you have to correct this offender's behavior.  Approach him.  He's bigger than you, doesn't matter how big you are.  Tell him to get out of the middle of the hallway.  He doesn't want to.  Ask him for his ID card.  He won't give it up.  Worried yet?  Look around, who has your back?  One officer two corridors and barricades away.  What bout the 20 offenders in the hallway?  Concerned yet?  Where's the cellblock picket officer?  3 row, along with the other wing officers.  Do you let the big offender go?  Do you let the disrespect stand?  Answer now, there's no time for contemplation.  Don't back down now, a test of intent is needed.  Order the offender to the wall.  Can you muster a commanding voice?  Tell him to submit to a strip searc, by policy he cannot refuse.  Does he comply?  What if he doesn't?  Can you summon additional staff?  Will your supervisor stand behind you and lock the offender up for refusing to submit to a strip search?  Is all this worth it to keep a guy out of the middle of the hallway?  Think fast, time wasted here means more problems on your wing as offenders go into the wing from the chow hall with alcohol from the dishroom and stolen food off the serving line.  Is this one more important than any of that?  Is any of it important?  Why?  Think fast! There's no right answer, but you do need to answer.   

CO's are more likely to encounter scenarios like the second one described than the first.  Surreal is feeling alone amongst 100 people that you know and probably talk with.  Did I forget to mention that?  Work on a unit long enough and you will get to know the offenders.  You will learn their lives, their habits, their dreams and strives, and no matter how well you keep your life secret, they will know yours.  Would that cloud your judgement?  Imagine, then, being alone amongst them.  A gray uniform in a sea of white.  Will one of those offenders jump in to help you?  It's a possibility.  Don't count on it, though, no matter how well you know those offenders.

In the end, law enforcement and corrections is all questions; a day of a thousand questions that have no right answers, but do have wrong ones.  You get better at answering as time goes along, but lessons are learned the hard way.  The big inmate in the middle of the hallway might be getting ready to shank somebody, or he could be a deaf janitor.  While dealing with him, 2 gallons of alcohol might make it onto your wing, and a brawl erupts in your dayroom later due to that.  If you stop one of the worst case scenarios, or if you stopped neither, did you do your job right?  I'll leave it at that, and up to you. 

A cross section of a prison.

I want to make it clear that what is to follow is not the average day in a prison.

Macroscopically the schedule of a prison is: Wake up call for breakfast chow at 1:30 AM. Chow begins at 2:15 AM and runs for an hour. After chow is complete, there's 4 AM count, and at around 5:30 AM offenders are staged for vocation and work turn-out. Work turnout runs solidly past 6 AM, and occurs as First Shift officers are taking over. 7 AM count comes and goes, and medium custody showers before lunch chow occurs at 9:45 AM. Lunch chow ends an hour and a half later, and outside rec is called for, as well as church services on certain days. Things calm down for an hour or so, and then 12:30 PM count begins. 1:30 PM, should count clear, sees workers turning back in and the beginning of workers turning out for second shift. Second Shift officers take over at 2 PM, and turn out workers for the next hour. At 3:15 PM, education lets out, and at 3:30 PM count time again. 4:30 sees the beginning of evening chow, as well as the beginnings of building showers. By 6:30 chow should be done, as should showers, and recreation is called for. 7 PM is count time, with a recreation house-call at 8-8:30 PM, and another count at 9 PM. Workers turn in at 9:45, and third shift turns out at 10, while Third Shift officers are taking over. After that it's rack time, lights out at 10:30 PM and count at 11:30 PM, then the day begins anew.

From the outside, looking at that schedule, it would seem the prison would work like a Swiss watch, beautifully intricate and delicately precise. Truth be told, a prison runs more like a $2 timekeeper from walmart; it gets the job done accurately and with little fanfare, but how it does it is neither pretty, nor delicate.

-- 12:30 AM -- A block -- Suicide attempt.
"A wing" as it's called, is the lockup block. It is arranged differently than other blocks. It's two stories tall and has fewer cells per row. Aggressive offenders are housed here. Some cells have an inner and outer door used to isolate the offenders inside - Normally those doors stay open. Tonight, at 12:30 AM, an offender has decided to try to hang himself. He made an ordeal of it, and the wing lit up with calls for the wing officer. The offender was ordered to stop, and incident command system (ICS) was activated. Within a minute, three responding officers, the third shift lieutenant and a video camera operator arrive to intervene and document. The offender is successfully talked down, but initially refuses to submit to restraints so they can move him to a psych observation cell. It takes 30 minutes to convince him. Secured in the cell, ICS is deactivated.

-- 02:15 AM -- B&C corridor - Fire
While putting up offenders after breakfast chow, the C1 block officer notices an outlit sparking and flaming up in one of the empty wing cells. ICS is activated and maintainance is called. The fire geos out when the circuit breaker pops, and ICS is deactivated.

-- 06:00 AM -- D&E corridor - Confrontation
A worker from B1 wing cuts across the hallway to talk to an offender on E1 wing. Ordered to go around and get back in line, he refuses. The offender becomes belligerent and verbally abusive. The officer orders the offender to submit to a strip search, and the offender complies. No contraband is found during the search, and the offender is allowed to go. The issue is considered to be informally resolved.

-- 08:00 AM -- Infirmary Corridor - panic button pushed
The Psychological Services panic button is pushed, initiating a rapid response from the south searcher's desk officer and the pill-line officer. A tense situation with a mental health offender and a psychiatrist has arisen and defused itself in less than 30 seconds. The offender is restrained and moved to an observation cell in the infirmary. ICS is not activated.

-- 1 0:00 AM -- South Chow Hall - fight
During chow, an offender throws a plastic cup at another offender. A fight breaks out. Officers working the chow hall deploy chemical agents. ICS is activated. Additional staff, a supervisor and a video camera operator arrive as the two offenders are being restrained, and one after the other, they are escorted, on camera, to the infirmary for a post use of force/fight physical evaluation, and then to the lockup wing to await a hearing for the disciplinary infraction of fighting without a weapon. ICS is deactivated.

-- 11:30 AM -- Turnout Corridor - contraband found.
While pat searching offenders turning out for the kitchen, an officer finds on one offender: 2 pornographic pictures, 3 tobacco cigarettes and 3 marijuana cigarettes. ICS is activated, and the offender is restrained. A supervisor and video camera operator arrive, and on camera the offender is escorted to A wing. Office of the Inspector General is notified and takes possession of the evidence. ICS is deactivated.

-- 12:00 PM -- D1 Wing - forced move.
An offender refuses to respond to a bench warrant. ICS is activated and use of force is authorized to get the offender out of the cell and out to the waiting law enforcement transport. A five-man move team readies, putting on protective equipment. The offender is read a statement of intent to use force by the shift captain, and fifteen minutes later, after continuing to refuse to go, he is sprayed with OC pepper spray. He is left there for 15 minutes, then asked again if he will move. He refuses once more, and the five man team moves into position. He is sprayed again as the team opens the door, quickly moving in and restraining the offender. He is carried out of the cell and placed on a waiting gurney, and wheeled out of the unit to a waiting transport vehicle, and then forcibly placed in that transport vehicle. Once the door is closed, and the transport is on the way, ICS is deactivated.

-- 04:00 PM -- F&G Corridor - discrepancy in count.
F2 wing count and recount do not initially match. The initial number has been called in to central searcher's desk, and a second recount is done to verify one of the two numbers. The second number is verified, and the correction is called in, creating a panic as the new number indicates 1 offender is missing. Using turnout rosters, housing rosters, the wing count sheet, and the unit count sheet, the missing offender is identified, and the search begins. He is found shortly thereafter in the shower, having been overlooked when the north hall officer counted the work group he was part of that had been stuck in the shower through count. Count clears late.

-- 07:15 PM -- H&J corridor - Alcohol found.
While counting the H2 wing dayroom the wing officer finds a bloated bottle filled with an orange liquid. Removing the cap and smelling it, the officer determines it to be homemade alcohol. It is confiscated and destroyed. A search is done for more, but none is found. H2 wing is medium custody.

--08:00 PM -- H&J corridor - Shank found.
While pat searching an offender coming on to J2 wing from the rec yard, an officer feels a long, hard object along the offender's inner thigh. The offender pulls away and the officer draws his Carry On Person chemical agent and orders the offender to the ground. ICS is activated and additional staff, a supervisor and a video camera operator arrive. The offender is strip-searched and a metal shank is found taped to his inner thigh. The shank is made from a piece of fence-wire. The offender is restrained and taken to A wing. ICS is deactivated.

-- 09:45 PM -- K block - Alcohol poisoning.
During an ingress an offender is seen to be being assisted out of the dayroom and back to his cell. Later, the offender is found unresponsive and ICS is activated. The offender is brought to medical and woken with smelling salts. He becomes belligerent and is returned to the wing. Non-responsive, ICS is re-activated, and the offender is taken back to the infirmary. He is diagnosed with acute alcohol poisoning and is treated and kept in an observation cell. ICS is deactivated.

Cuil, Electric Cars, and the theory of Bob

I was playing around with Cuil, the new startup search engine. Considering the subject of startups, I typed in "Tesla Motors WhiteStar" The results were promising, and after clicking around, I ended up stumbling through a series of webpages, culminating in my researching of the various methods of alternative energy on the website popularmechanics.com (Some picks from my list in history.). What I keep seeing popping up in both comments and blog/article text is mentionings of federal regulation, and if you have 4 hours to dive the articles and links, you'll notice the same trend in there.

Right now we can see E85 popping up in the odd place. E85 has emerged as the front runner of alternative fuel technology. Perhaps it'll get us over the hump, but I despise the amount of money the United States Federal Government is putting into it. In one of the articles from above, SynthFuels are mentioned, in comparison to the United States putting into the Ethanol craze. Synthfuel was given millions and millions of dollars up until 2007, even though the technology failed mere years after the oil crisis in the mid-late 70's prompted the subsidies. Government has this track record of providing gobs of green cash to, not just the "green tech of the future" but any tech that looks like it may or may not have a possible promise some unnamed amount of time in the future. It's a simple game, really, wow the right people with the right connectsions, get media cover, hype built up, and you have yourself a subsidy.
It needs to stop.

The United States Government is spending money like crazy. We're in debt to an amount I don't even want to fathom, and we spend billions upon billions of dollars on things that the marketplace should be allowed to decide, such as what fuels our vehicles most effectively. Gas prices were at $4 a gallon. That scared a number of people and sliced SUVs at the ankles, toppling the market-niche-turned-status-symbol. At $3 a gallon, we were getting Tesla Motors, Fiskar Coachbuilding, the Chevy Volt, amongst others, and now, at $4, we're FINALLY seeing the Honda Clarity hydrogen car, and the Equinox Hydrogen concept. Chrysler has said petrolium is out of the long term plans, and Daimler-Benz has sworn off Gasoline by 2015. We're going places, people, and urgency is now appearant. Cafe standards are about to kick in, 35 MPG minimum, and gasoline engines are struggling to get that, especailly in vehicles built to do what SUVs do.

The marketplace, however, would have decided this a long time ago if regulations hadn't forced gasoline engines to evolve to where they are. Of course, we also wouldn't be here if Carter hadn't regulated Gas prices in the 70's, giving americans a proper taste of sky high fuel costs, leaving us the sheltered rich kids now turned out into the crime ridden ghetto at night; but I digress. The problem is with regulation. An unregulated marketplace is a happy marketplace, it can maneuver more effeciently, it's unencumbered with regulations that paint it into corners, and much much more. Right now, government can subsidize a poor technology, give it the abilty to outlast its better and more liked competitor, give it the ability to undercut in price, as was shown by the inexpensive E85 at various gas stations. The real cost is seen in higher taxes that offer diminishing returns as they trickle down through the layers of beaurocracy until finally our $2-$3 put in knocks a buck off each gallon we pay for, if that much. Supposedly that's how it works, but dang if the numbers don't quite add up in my mind. I want to say each individual will knock, per dollar put in, $0.01 - $0.10 off each gallon he/she buys, and the rest is made up of credit that is, in effect, government debt. A dollar can only get stretched so far (Just about any mother of 5 can tell you just how far that dollar can get stretched, ask her, not me.), so why are we subsidizing?

Why don't we stop the subsidies, stop the penalizing of certain sectors of technologies, as well, to make sure that the playing ground is level, and take all the savings in government, pass that on to the citizens, and let the marketplace figure out what it wants to do with the mix of high gas prices and the culmination of technologies that I doubt stunted by the system (read: lack of subsidies) back in the 1990s (My proof? Electric tech was waiting for the new iron oxide batteries A123 is peddling for the Volt, LiION is also relatively new, coming about in the 80s and being perfected by a number of the biggest corporations. Hydrogen and Nanotechnology are seeming to go hand in hand, and both are powered by research grants. Ethanol had no public interest because gas was cheap and Ethanol was expensive in the 90's.) the marketplace is a big boy, it can survive on its own, and a good idea will nearly always push through. And the only thing that can stop that is practices that are mostly illegal in today's generally accepted version of capitalism.

The only thing the government should be doing is enforcing anti-trust laws and keeping monopolies and unfair business practices from occuring, acting as a referee instead of what it's currently doing, guiding the game to an outcome favorable to those in power at the time.

Cudos to Cuil for giving me a good launching point. I'll admit, it's not as refined as google has become, but I remember the days when Google was new, and it was so much fun to input things like "diphallic superstructure" into the google search text box, and generate no results. Googlewhacking, it was called. Two words that come up with absolutely nothing. It's still done to this day, but it's incredibly difficult. Google said its infractructure was still learning, I believe, and now Cuil is asking for the same consideration for their search engine. I like its results, personally, the search engine seems, so far, to think like I do. That's hard to come by. Of course, that's ehnanced by the occasional "input search terms - draw blank" that we share....heck, that's why I'm using the dadgummed thing. But, it learns, I learn...and I have so talked myself into a corner here.

I expect, by now, you've either forgotten about, or are vaguely curious as to the Theory of Bob. I shall enlighten. When I started this post, I figured, given my state of mind, I'd have a hard time closing it, and theory of Bob was my easy out. The theory is that you can utilize a random notion to distract from the fact that you can't sum up an article in a proper conclusion without contriving one from a randomly generated concept. Let me know how it worked.

One is not a hundred.

Today, it seems, we are so many people. Me, I'm Harsan, Harsan_Ronyo, Harsan.Ronyo; I'm Silent_Fox (well, used to be I could be), Tobias, Tobias DuPree, Tyla, Christopher, and Anon80353429Z on certain websites mum wouldn't want me browsing.

Then came openID, to help bring some simplicity to our online activities. And now I'm all the above, plus http://obscureabstractions.blogger.com/ openid.aol.com/tobiasdupree from AOL, I'm HarsanRonyo from Yahoo (who actually gave me a choice)....and none of these work with all but the highest tier of social websites, and none of my accounts can link into any of my other openID accounts.

It's supposed to make life easier, but what I'm seeing is new account names tied to old accounts that once were compartmentalized. I'm looking at my AIM account suddenly being able to get into Yahoo and do things should it be cracked. I need to up security on accounts from AOL to Vox because of all this.

Add to it that now I have a "one account to rule them all" from all these services I used to have just an account with, but my legacy accounts can't be tied into a single "one account to rule them all"; how do I get myself pulled into one "me" like this promised, because I'm starting to get a multi-personality disorder from all the names I have to enter to access all the accounts on this very large internet.

I state again, openID was supposed to be a problem fixer, not a problem causer. If it had redeeming qualities from my perspective, I'd be praising it for what it did. A unified account for internet access? Sign me up! (just not for my banking and money requiring stuff) I'd love to be me regardless of where I was. That's tough! But no, I have to be me, me, me, me, me, me, me, and me, and oh, me, because the system is flawed and won't let me tie to an overriding name, but instead hands me a new one and a new headache.

Up your password security if you have these accounts:

AOL (the link is to their special password change website)
Blogger
Flickr
LiveDoor
LiveJournal
Orange (Telecom, french)
smugmug
technorati
vox
yahoo
wordpress

and for more information go to http://www.openid.net/

Signing off Irate,
Harsan, Tobias, Silent_Fox, Christopher, Anon39387892347025X, Tyla, etc. etc. ad nausium.

Yelling Fire

A nifty thought occured to me as I lay awake, suffering insomnia last night...or maybe the night before. It's illegal to yell fire to spark panic. Heh, odd thought, but it got me thinking more on concealed carry, hell, even open carry, and the common argument that banning those two things can be equated to the nonexistant (Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969)) ban on yelling fire in a crowded place because it will probably cause panic and hurt people.

The thought begin to fester as I contemplated it. I always thought something was wrong with that argument. I realize now that it is the threat of imminent harm. It's a step beyond argument, using an unstated logical step, you see, you have to shoot someone to cause harm with a gun (unless it's a .25 ACP, then you have to actually beat someone with the thing.), and there's no statistics that show that carrying a gun will cause panic; and concealed carry minimizes that side of the argument nearly completely. By taking the logical step that someone who carries will undoubtedly shoot someone, and then establishing that as the point to argue, the anti-gunners make a persuasive argument, and it's really hard to latch onto what's wrong with the statement, but the fact of the matter is, carrying a gun is not shooting someone.

I've carried before, legally, and nobody is ever the wiser. I live in Texas, and I don't have my permit, so it rides in my backpack, unloaded, or in my car, loaded. If anybody asks, I'm taking it to the range later in the day (Please ask, I always love an excuse to go to the range), Texas legal I call it. I've never generated a panic, because nobody sees it, and in 3 months of carry I've never shot anybody, nor have I ever needed to draw the weapon. I'm not yelling fire in a crowded area, I'm just carrying a weapon inconspicuously and legally.

That's my simple view on this one.

Guns on Campus

Okay, folks, firing up the ol' word processor. I'm pissed. Every time I hear about this...this....SHIT, I get pissed. Firearms on Campus, they need to happen, they need to happen RIGHT NOW.

http://www.whec.com/article/stories/S347279.shtml?cat=565

15 injured, suspected 4 dead. It was a friggin' suicide run. Just like all of them. Take as many out as possible, before one goes. Now, that's my opinion on it. Here's the facts as I know them:

1. What the man did was illegal. He brought a gun onto a college campus in Illinois, into a classroom. Murders and Assaults aside, the man was breaking the law, yo.

2. The students were abiding by the law. There is no report yet of any students shooting back. Yup, nobody broke the law by bringing a gun on campus.

3. There was no help. No security, that I'm reading of. There was an attempted slaughter, that's what there was. These students, professors, they had NO HELP COMING.

Tell me, dear readers, what is wrong with this picture?

Guns on campuses aren't a problem. They're carried without problems in a number of states at a number of prestigious colleges, Go to Utah, New Hampshire, Vermont, they carry on those college campuses. It's when some dipshit with a dangerously egocentric view and a death wish comes along, that's when it all goes to hell.

If one of the students had been armed, if only one of them had been armed, tell me, how much worse could it have been? She brandishes her gun? He fires back? Hell, he/she gets shot? oooh, here's the big one. He hits a bystander! Yup, that'd make the situation worse..problem is, the fore-drawn conclusion is wrong.

According to Kramer and Kopel (it's a link) Your average Joe is not likely to hit a bystander. In studies across the United States, the plain ol everyday civilians, have a better record than the police, in hitting what they shoot at, and in /not/ hitting bystanders. In Miami, over six years, and 21,000 carry permits, no innocent bystanders were shot. In Missouri, police shot at the wrong guy at an 11% rate, while John Q Public had a 2% rate. In similar studies, and cited in the same paper above, civilians are more likely to apprehend, rebuke, or subdue the criminal (83%), as opposed to the police (68).

Well, with that settled, I guess she must get her gun taken away from her, then, huh, wouldn't be news fit to print if it didn't happen that way, eh? Wrong, again. Gary Kleck found, and documented in his book "Point Blank", that less than 1% of self defense cases, the, uh, estimated 700,000 to 2,000,000 a year, see guns being taken away from the crime victims.
Well, shit...guess he gets shot, then? Nope, again, Kleck, Point Blank, the lowest injury rates in defensive cases were found with those folks who resisted with guns. The second lowest injury rate was not resisting at all.

Well, shitfuck....we've got ourselves a quandry...

If statistics show that your everyday Dick and Jane are more competent than the police, why is it that people are so against concealed carry amongst these college students who only want to defend themselves and others?

It pisses me off that a criminal can break the law, do their business, and leave a mess behind, and yet if a person who is prepared for an incident like that, who trains, who carries a gun, on the off chance that some shit where a weapon is needed /may/ go down, same as a person buckles up on the off-chance that they might get hit by another car, why is it that the person who carries a gun is subject to prosecution and punishment, when the suicidal mass murderer obviously has no deterrent.