The other day, Ashby posted this painfully ridiculous video from Dennis Storemski, head of the Mayor’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security Department in Houston about confronting an armed assailant:
I'd like to add something here. First, while it's intended to instruct people about what to do in a situation like this, it only makes it seem like it COULD HAPPEN AT ANY MOMENT RIGHT BEHIND YOU BOO! More fearmongering in an already hysterically fearful and paranoid society raised on police procedural TV dramas, Court TV dramatizations and sensationalized news broadcasts.
Second, what the mayor have done that would've been more effective? How about forcefully supporting the program to track bulk sales of assault rifles, passed via executive order by the Obama administration to stop the flow of assault weapons across the Mexican border -- a process that gets American law enforcement killed and has been at least somewhat responsible for the deaths of 47,000 Mexicans over the past five years of their drug war. This initiative, the only pro-gun safety stance taken by the president, only applies to four states that border Mexico, and one of them is Texas where, you know, the Houston mayor lives!
Why can't she make a video about that, about the killing going on, and how we need to do a better job of tracking bulk sales of long guns, as the President is trying to do, to stop it. Or how about a video about closing the gun show loophole in Texas, as 17 other states have done, the very loophole that has affected our national security by allowing the likes of John Patrick Bedell to purchase weapons to shoot up the Pentagon, not to mention members of Hezbollah who were caught doing it in 2001? By the way, the Columbine killers got their guns this way, and the gun shows are so unregulated in so many states that Timothy McVeigh made money on the gun show circuit by selling guns pre-Oklahoma City. Why not a video about the dangers of this to our national security and personal well-being?
Because that would make too much sense. Instead we get 1950s throwback edutainment video that was *this close* to including Indiana Jones hiding from a nuclear blast inside a refrigerator.