Eagles of Death Metal frontman: ‘Everybody has to have guns’
The frontman of the Eagles of Death Metal, the band that was performing at the Bataclan theatre in Paris when 90 people were murdered by terrorists last year, has remembered his terror at encountering a gunman backstage – and argued for universal access to guns.
The Californian rock band was performing in front of a crowd of around 1,500 on the night of 13 November when three terrorists armed with assault rifles entered the room and began shooting and throwing hand grenades.
It was part of a series of terrorist attacks in Paris that night, that Islamic State later claimed responsibility for.
Vocalist-guitarist Jesse Hughes, who is a long-time advocate for access to gun ownership, told the French television station iTélé in a 19-minute, at times tearful interview on Monday that restrictions on guns in France had helped to enable the terrorists.
Asked if his views on gun control had changed after the terror attacks, he said gun control “doesn’t have anything to do with it”.
“Did your French gun control stop a single fucking person from dying at the Bataclan? And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging head-first into the face of death with their firearms.
“I know people will disagree with me, but it just seems like God made men and women, and that night guns made them equal,” he said. “And I hate it that it’s that way. I think the only way that my mind has been changed is that maybe that until nobody has guns everybody has to have them.
A survivor of a mass shooting makes an appeal for more gun control? Even the politest disagreement is held to be vile.
A survivor of a mass shooting makes an appeal for less gun control? Well, take a look at the Guardian comments.
The message will probably fall on deaf ears. Governments don’t fear terrorists as much as they fear an armed citizenry. At any event, the masses of Euroweenies out there have a visceral, pathological aversion to guns: they’re on the government’s side on the issue.
It’s really remarkable how those comments show the demented thought patterns of some Guardian readers. Here is a man who was very nearly killed, and he has a solution, the gist of the response is that it is absurd to propose that the public be armed, and after all in WW2, lots of people were armed so no one got killed right? He is not saying that no one will be killed, he is saying, basically, that if the shooting starts, and innocent people can shoot back, then the end outcome is better. None of the comments I looked at tackled the issue head on.
Would fewer die if all had guns?
The Grauniad answer seems to be: We don’t care, all we care about is you not having guns, no matter how many of you die.
God made man, Colonel Colt made them equal
I remember reading once that when Captain Cook first sailed into the South Pacific, his ships were so far out of the experience of the South Sea Islanders that their eyes could see them, but their brains simply could not process what they were seeing. In effect, they could not accept the idea of these, to them, huge ships, and therefore ignored them.
The concept of armed self-defence is a similar thing for Guardian reading leftists. It is so far out of their comfort zone that they cannot accept that it is even a thing. It is impossible for them to debate it, or even accept that it is a subject worthy of debate. They simply dismiss it as something which cannot rationally exist.
And anyway, boats that big would surely sink, so they cannot be there, can they?
“The Grauniad answer seems to be: We don’t care, all we care about is you not having guns, no matter how many of you die.”
That is actually the State’s answer; the Graun is simply channelling it.
To the left real world results do not matter. They try to construct a world in line with their beliefs, and when it doesn’t work that well, e.g. gun control failing to stop gun deaths, or patients dying in their own filth in the corridors of NHS hospitals, then the answer is always that more of the same failed policy is required, or that the failure in question was a one off aberration.
Mr Hughes is correct.
As for the Guardian newspaper types -for years we have been told (even told ourselves) “just because people have evil beliefs does not mean they are evil people”.
I think it is obvious that they are evil people.
One can not reason with them or appeal to their moral decency.
Because they are evil.
As their attacks on Mr Hughes show.
QOTD?
Just about all comment threads of any size, of all political persuasions, are cesspits of anonomised spite and bile and stupidity and petty abuse (often wildly off topic) these days.
That Samizdata’s commenters often disagree with one another, and with the poster, but are obliged by our esteemed editors to do it mostly like ladies and gentlemen, and mostly to stick to the point of the posting, is one of Samizdata’s best features, I think.
Although, there doesn’t seem to be any disagreement here on this topic, and I too agree with everyone else, so far.
The thing about Muslim terrorists is how very hard they are to spot beforehand. They say crazy Muslim-type things? True, but so do thousands of Muslims. Which of them is going to do anything crazy about it? It is very hard to know beforehand. And many who never actually say crazy things very loudly, just do them, after hearing the crazy things.
Best answer: everyone be armed, for when a crazy Muslim actually starts doing crazy things. Eventually, given a few more mass slaughters, these truths may become popular in Europe, as they already are in the USA.
Perhaps a change will happen when some crazy Muslims take exception to something said in the Guardian, and slaughter some of the people who work for it. Okay, the Guardian will then blame the Guardian, like they blamed Charlie H, but it might be a start.
Correction, not everyone be armed. Just enough of us to make a real difference.
Picking up on Brian’s point, at a rough guess, on a random Youtube video, the ratio of views to comments is around 500:1 or thereabouts. Of these, a fair selection will be Godwinised comparisons to you-know-who and another section will be technical debates or rants over something incredibly obscure, and some name calling. We should factor in the fact that those who comment are a tiny minority and the propensity to comment may overlap with a propensity to be a ‘ranter‘ rather than a debater.
The opportunity cost of commenting is effectively just above zero, the benefits slightly higher, so it might be that it is in the nature of commenting that it attracts those who value their own opinions more highly than others value do, as they perceive a net higher benefit from commenting, without realising the worthlessness of their comments -I seek to prove my own point here 🙂 -so we are stuck with an inherent sample bias. I almost always try to respond to points and keep them civil, but sometimes people say things that are so evidently wrong that my inner Jack Russell emerges.
Solution:
1) Allow open and concealed carry
2) Kick Muslims back to the ME where they can kill each other all they want
John K,
That is very interesting about Cook’s ships. It’s new to me but here’s a similar thing. The 1054 Supernova was recorded in China, Japan, Korea and a few other places. Not in ANY European chronicles though. The presence of a guest star (the Chinese term) didn’t fit with pre-Copernican European cosmology/theology. If it can’t happen it didn’t and this was very bright and lasted for months.
JohnK hits the nail on the head, I think.
One of the commenters on this story at Sky News actually used the “mass shootings only happen in America” line. And clearly thought he’d made a brilliant point.
““I know people will disagree with me, but it just seems like God made men and women, and that night guns made them equal,” he said. “And I hate it that it’s that way.”
God made men and women but it took the introduction of firearms to make them equal? So it was divinely intended that people not be equal? Who do we think we are, Gods children?
Terrorists are probably the best thing to happen to oppressive governments as they enable oppressive laws that prevent people from acting independently in their own defense. Independent actions give people ideas. Can’t have that.
Billl,
I don’t think that was the point. I think the point was not equality in principle but practically.
For the anti-gun crowd, the State is their religion. Anyone who has or wants a gun is being sacrilegious. There’s nothing more or less to it than that. It is intractable.
gotta respect that band name.
NickM:
That is another interesting example of a sort of groupthink; if something is so far outside the group’s terms of reference, then for all intents and purposes it cannot exist.
To take the example of our Guardian leftists: they know the attack on the Bataclan happened; they know it was only ended by the actions of armed men; these armed men were employees of the French government. From this they seem to draw the lesson that it was not the fact that the men were armed which was important, but that they were employed by the state. I can only conclude that they feel that someone who was armed but did not receive a salary from the state could not have been of any use in defending people against the attackers.
If I am right in this diagnosis, I am forced to conclude that these Guardian reading leftists suffer from a mental illness which cannot be cured by drugs, and sadly all the lunatic asylums have been closed down. What are we to do with them?
TI always smile when these ball-less wonders say they’re “going to take away all the guns” or whatever. Sure you are, pal.
Oh, you meant you’re going to tell the police to go grab them?
Always willing to put someone else in danger for your “moral convictions”, aren’t you?
Non so much paid, as trained and supervised. (Their thinking of course, not mine).
That ordinary people shouldn’t be allowed guns isn’t a conclusion these people have reached after a process of reasoning. It’s their starting point, and unshiftable axiom. Everything that happens is to be interpreted in that light.
That’s also why their ‘arguments’ for gun control are so bad. They think that as gun control is so obviously right then any argument that supports gun control must be good. Even if that argument is as idiotic as — and this is a paraphrase of what one Guardian idiot really said — ‘If other people had had guns that night then more people would have got killed’. Seriously, some moron said that. *More* people would have been killed than by a gang of armed terrorists who were able to walk around slaughtering anyone they liked. It’s hard to see how more people could possibly have been killed that night, but apparently ordinary people shooting back would have caused that too happen. (But of course nobody thinks that if the people shooting back are police who have had firearms training — amazing what firearms training can do).
This also explains why Guardianistas are happy to make false empirical claims without having any interest in whether there is evidence to support them, or evidence against them. What they say just has to be true, doesn’t it? So another Guardianista claimed that if everyone had guns then there’d be mayhem and huge amounts of murders all the time, because whenever someone got angry they’d pull out their gun and start shooting. It didn’t seem to occur to this dimwit that there might be places where you can carry guns and the murder stats are actually lower. That just doesn’t compute, does it? And anyway, everyone knows that murders are always happening in all parts of America all the time, aren’t they?
if everyone had guns then there’d be mayhem and huge amounts of murders all the time
no-one things everyone should have guns. Toddlers, Liberals, Unionists, criminals, activists, leftists of all sorts, and non-citizens including immigrants, bludgers, etc, obviously don’t qualify. The right to bear arms is a Right of Citizens, in fact citizens who are eligible to be in the militia, not just anyone!
Once you understand that, it’s clear that gun-users (the right is not just to own, but to use to protect the security of the Nation) are unlikely to cause damage to many other Citizens with rights. And when criminals or illegals or liberals etc get taken out by Citizens exercising their Rights, well that is exactly the point of the Amendment!
Guardian reading leftists suffer from a mental illness which cannot be cured by drugs, …. What are we to do with them?
And this is precisely why we have the 2nd Amendment
People who are unable, and unwilling, to defend themselves, are free to live their lives only because no one wants to enslave them. Yet.
“The right to bear arms is a Right of Citizens”
Um, no. It is a right of “the people”, which includes non-citizens. Try again.
Comment threads and the Guardian’s in particular, are interesting examples of how immune to logic most people are.
A popular Guardian thread can be upvoted hundreds of times for saying the polar ice caps are disappearing because of human activit. You can respond by saying Antsrctic ice is at a record high, arctic ice has rebounded 50% since 2012 and that in any case for 9000 of the last 10,000 years the planet was warmer than today.
And no one, literally not a single person, will say hey, that’s interesting, didn’t know that.
Whether it’s guns, climate, politics or anything else, people are basically religious. We’re probably hard wired for it and just swapped the bible for other Bug Ideas.
Sorry for the typos. The blue screen is just about invisible on an iPhone.
Case in point. Just popped over to the Guardian and in a thread about Beyoncé and the BLM movement, I dropped a post about her private concert for serial rapist Gadaffi.
They deleted it within 3 minutes.
I’m assuming it was because it criticised Beyoncé, but maybe it was Gaddaffi.
Chip,
Wasn’t Mr Qadhafi was a victim of sexual violence? Someone stuck a dagger up his arse, please show more sensitivity to victims and their friends.
(-‘was’).
Laird – read the Constitution! Whatever the liberal court may have decided, Rights are for Citizens who undertake all the Duties of Citizenship (including under the 2nd amendment) not for criminals or illegals or loyalists or democrats or whoever else.
George Washington hanged loyalists without trial, confiscated all their property, and drove them out of the country!
If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me!
AngryTory- George Washington also owned slaves! If it was good enough for George, I’m sure you’re making slaves right now!
AT, the Constitution mentions the word “citizen” in only a few places, and the Bill of Rights is not one of them. I know the Constitution thoroughly, and have studied it carefully for decades. The words are clear; they just don’t say what you want them to say. Which is precisely the problem with liberals, come to think of it.
And whatever Washington did or didn’t do to loyalists during the Revolution is irrelevant. In case you didn’t notice it, that occurred prior to ratification of the Constitution.
Laird, GW owned slaves before, during, and after the (falsely-named) Revolution. Is he a good role model?
And I think the ‘Revolution’ should be more rightly called an act of Secession. In France, the Revolution involved the Capital city (Paris). London was not invaded by an American Army, nor was it damaged by any army or fleet- and British society stayed the same, with no disruption to the class system. I suppose, though, that Americans prefer revolution, as Secession implies that the South was right to try to secede.
NickM, the English and Normans (and other Europeans, doubtless) were very aware of the comet in 1066. We now know that they then knew about it because the Norman Conquest accounts incidentally recorded it. We likewise now know that the Chinese of 1054 noticed the explosion of the star that the ancient Egyptians called Rashap to form the Crab Nebula in 1054; they maintained a calendrical group that watched the sky carefully enough to notice the appearance of a nova, and they maintained records which were not later lost. (The book-burning emperor was long dead and Mao was uninterested in destroying celestial observations, only in rewriting the past upon earth.)
The strange indifference of the polynesians to Cook’s ships until they anchored and people came out of them was noticed by many – it is a well-attested fact of recent times. The explanation for it (“too far outside their understanding”) is very plausible, though of course, by its very nature, it was never articulated by those polynesians – it is a theory, not an observation as such.
By contrast, we have no valid reason to feel wholly sure that no-one in Europe noticed the crab explosion. Even if none or very few did, that may have related to poorer mapping of the sky, so poorer ability to be sure if a star were really new. The mediaeval period is full of celestial observations – often with a gloss explaining that these strange lights in the sky meant that God was telling the writer’s enemies how wrong they were. (In more recent times, they’d be called flying saucers, of course.) Not recording the nova of 1054 (or losing that recording between then and now) probably does say something about the state of western civilisation a thousand years ago, but not that it was mentally incapable of regarding a celestial event.
This post is making much of a very small point, not to criticise NickM (to whom my apologies for fussing) but because this is a tiny example in us of what the left do in spades – explain an uncomprehended historical fact by an immediate reference to ideology (in this case, to be fair, not so much an ideology as such but a “they had this religious view of the heavens so …” idea). Much of the left’s myth-history is obtained by using ideology as a substitute for thinking. Let’s recognise it in us, the better to recognise it in them.
I fully intended a reasoned and respectful comment, but after reading the comments in the Guardian all I can say is: f*ck voice Guardian, and f*ck the commentators and the horse they road in on
1054, the year of the supernova, was also the year of the Great Schism, which has its wonderful legacy of Russian Basso Profundo.
It may well have been that this was regarded as the big issue of the year in Europe, rather than a particularly bright star, as well as what Niall says.
Though it’s all a bit nebulous.
The BBC reports that Jeb Bush has been ‘widely mocked’ on Twitter after tweeting a picture of his gun, engraved with his name on it.
I think that those who think that they mock him make his point far better than he did.
Expecting non-hypocritical logic from the typical Gruaniad reader really is a mug’s game.
Mr Ed:
The BBC, as usual, misses the point. Any mockery due towards Jeb! is because this supposedly pro-gun politician didn’t actually own a gun, hence the feeling that it is a bit lame only now to buy a piece and get your name engraved on it.
I suspect that Jeb! is one of those conviction free politicians who will do whatever the focus group tells them will get them votes. Florida is a pro-gun state, so to be politically viable, he too was pro-gun. If he had been standing for Governor of Maryland, he would have been pro-gun control. He is a RINO politician of the type we really don’t need any more.
JohnK, Yes, I see your point. Finding Jeb Bush down at a gun range might be a bit like finding a Boston Brahmin working in a speakeasy in deepest Kentucky. You think he was up to something.
Whereas at least his big brother could appear to be a gun owner without looking like a ballroom dancer in a garage.
TRUMP™ open carries in the debates. I bet Jeb! doesn’t. But if he did, there’s great Constitutional precedent back to 1804 for the two gentlemen settling their differences as the Second Amendment offers.
“…so it might be that it is in the nature of commenting that it attracts those who value their own opinions more highly than others value do, as they perceive a net higher benefit from commenting, without realising the worthlessness of their comments -I seek to prove my own point here 🙂 -so we are stuck with an inherent sample bias. “
This description may be true of commenters at youtube or the guardian, but as a description of internet commenting in general, it’s a very rough sketch. I often comment, perhaps more frequently than is good for me (and often with qualms about doing so), at a think-tank website belonging to Taiwan’s new president-elect. The overall number of comments per article is very low and as such there is little debate or argument. But I comment because, in addition to the low opportunity cost and the “inner Jack Russell”, it’s an opportunity to point out errors; often simple factual errors, or logical errors. Several writers seem to have disappeared from the website after I pointed out such errors in their articles. Now I don’t know whether my criticism caused them to be booted, or whether they did not return for entirely unrelated reasons, but that does indicate that commenting is not necessarily worthless.
angryTory- how many slaves do you own? If it was good enough for George Washington, why is it not good enough for you?
Oh indeed mike, a well-placed comment that is helpful to the causes of reason, truth and liberty is always worthwhile, your efforts sound well-placed. My comment referred, with a little irony, to the virtue-signalling commoronteriat and the many crazies of YT.
Oh, Mr Ed, not only are you being dreadfully unkind to the denizens of UT (myspeak) or YT (uspeak), but your inner Ogden Nash is showing up more & more lately. Also your inner SF writer, many of whom delighted in puns and double-entendres such as “nebulous” in that other discussion.
And very glad to meet Mr. Nash and Mr. Brown here, too. 😉
PS. Are suggesting spreading the truth? Isn’t that a little — radical?
Mr Ed: thanks. The deafening silence at that place is easily interpreted as an indication that I am viewed as a “troll” because I’m always criticizing (where others merely praise), but would be embarrassed to ban me. Yet there is nowhere else to comment in English on Taiwan news and politics (my Mandarin isn’t too bad, but I’d find it exhausting and would probably mangle something at some point).