Images are screencaps from a video shared by @FiftyShadesofFDE, who appears to be shadow banned for his trouble.
While the California Governor was crying about the 2nd Amendment being a suicide pact and a 2nd mass shooting occurred in his state as his legislative and regulatory nonsense failed again, resulting in 7 deaths and perpetrated by another elderly Asian male, new details have emerged about the Monterey Park shooting.
The young man in the photo, wearing the white sweatsuit and jacket, has been identified as Brandon Tsay and he wrestled away the shooter’s gun at the 2nd dance studio, Lai Lai Dance Studio in Alhambra, and then fought with the assailant some time more until the much older man gave up and left. The man then took his own life in a vehicle that was being approached by police.
Mr. Tsay showed extraordinary courage. I’m sure a few viewers of the video may be critical of Tsay, wondering why he didn’t shoot back once he had the weapon. To this I will point out a few things. We don’t know if the barrel shrouded MAC10 (or similar) pistol was in a condition to be fired, that Tsay had any notion how to operate the 60ish year old weapon design, and Tsay is fighting a man old enough to be his grandfather. That last part, harming a senior member of your community, is a violation of ancient taboos and not to be considered and judged against lightly. Ultimately what Tsay did worked, he stopped the attack and the last person to die was the attacker.
Still more have started to don their tin foil apparel, and honestly I can’t be too critical of them for it because of the timing, and point out how “obvious” it is that these two attacks were staged to push gun control. This has been a popular conspiracy online, fired by coincidence that is easily explained with detailed analysis and the application of Occam’s Razor, but on the surface look suspicious. Before these latest two shootings in California, moving the conspiracy trope to elderly Asian male perpetrators, it was popular to farcically suggest gun stores should not sell Daniel Defense rifles and EOTech sights to very skinny young white men, as they had been present at more than one recent shooting. Theorists went so far as to publish a whole series of memes suggesting these young men were stoked to violence by the FBI. I don’t believe that, but the Federal government’s record on actions similar to that aren’t exactly spotless either.
Federal enforcement and operations have not shown themselves to be anywhere like beyond reproach. Instead their past actions invite the public and judiciary to use the most extreme scrutiny on all of their actions.
Media Response
Now that we’ve given Mr. Tsay his well earned praise, let’s go back to the media, the CA Governor, and all the other fools who’ve contributed to the line “Semi-Automatic Assault Pistol with an Extended High Capacity Magazine.” which would score about a D in any middle school English paper for redundancy. Way to aim for journalist excellence, CNN and friends.
In a time where a large segment of American gun owners are being attacked by the ATF (threatened with felony conviction) over pistol braces, people where terrified the shooter had used a braced gun. Especially with the media description, this seemed like ammunition in gun controllers magazine.
Instead we have an old man shooting an old gun. The MAC10/11 series were designed in 1964, produced in the 70’s, and have been cloned/copied here and there by other companies. They are large, blocky, heavy pistols that came with a barrel shroud to emulate the suppressor they were originally designed with. They had a 30 or 32 round magazine, depending on caliber, cost only $120 at the time, and an effective range of 50 or 70 meters.
I don’t know which model or clone the shooter used (Vox has reported Corbay M11, 9mm), but it is not any variant of a modernized rifle caliber and it wasn’t braced. This firearm could have been purchased any time in the last few decades, there was even a AWB compliant version made during the 94-04 Clinton Assault Weapon Ban called the PM11/9. It had ‘safe’ 10 round magazines and couldn’t accept the super dangerous thread on barrel extender, flash suppressor, handgrip, or a suppressor. None of which material alter the physics of a bullet, many of which make the gun more awkward to carry, and one of which is already NFA controlled (meaning the owner is registered and known to the ATF).
The descriptor tells us it was a semi-auto model. It looks to be a closed bolt model too, making it a post 80’s of some variety as the ATF considers the open bolt ones machine guns, even if semi-auto only (see, making things up is an ATF tradition).
None of the age or blocky awkwardness of this cold war relic come through in the CNN fearmongery, and that feels deliberate. It probably is deliberate. Never let a good tragedy go to waste. We can’t use any of the usual lines about ‘weapons of today being so power’ since this isn’t a weapon of today, this thing may have been built before I was born. We can’t say modern high power ammunition because all the calibers this thing could be in are about a century old.
It fails all the sniff tests of the scary terms thrown out by the inept and thwarted elites who drive the gun control debate because they refuse to accept that they cannot control human free agency, they cannot remove motive, and therefore there isn’t diddlyshit they can do to stop gun violence.
Vox opines, that is unclear if the elderly shooter acquired his ‘probably illegal’ pistol through legal means. But here’s the kicker, what if he did? What if he bought this when it was legal? What then? What if he didn’t get it through legal means and just bought it from someone who did after the CA or Federal AWB? What then?
Both of these scenarios are equally adept at proving, again, gun control doesn’t work. It requires voluntary compliance that they will not receive and you need only look at the brace ban commentary, the ATF still hasn’t published it to the federal registry by the way, to get an estimate of just how well modern and past compliance are working out. That rule is likely to be stomped out in court like the bumpstock one, the ATF does not possess law making authority and assault weapons bans nationwide are in the line of fire too.
Media sources around the nation are going to elevate this tragedy to something we could have prevented without giving us even the slightest hint how a new rule would have prevented the tragedy. That continues to be a fatal flaw in their logic, [X] rule wouldn’t prevent this or other attacks but we need [X] rule in order to prevent attacks… okay, which ones?
In conclusion, hyperbole, fearmongering, exaggeration, and criminally negligent wishful thinking continue to be the order of the day for gun controllers. Disappointing.
But men and women like Tsay, Fierro, and Dicken give me hope. People willing to step up and act in the moment when the laws have failed, as they will always have the potential to do and will continue to, will continue to save lives through their actions. People who aren’t going to lean upon the ghost of an argument that ‘the thing happening is illegal’ or that ‘these things shouldn’t happen’ and simply deal with the fact that they are happening. Billions of things shouldn’t happen every single day that do, they happen anyway due to nature, negligence, misunderstanding, anger, accident, and occasionally pure cruelty.
We can’t write any of those things out of existence with a law. We should stop trying. Stop believing people who say we can, too. They are only delusional, or lying, and I couldn’t tell you which is more harmful in the end right now.
