Biker Shoot Out at Twin Peaks in Waco

If you’ve been watching the news lately you’ve probably learned three things.  #1, the Houston Rockets are going to the next round. #2. Kanye West’s performance at the Billboard Music Awards was pretty much just the seven words you can’t say on air over and over again.  #3. anywhere between two and six biker gangs decided to shoot it out in the general vicinity of a restaurant in Waco, TX called Twin Peaks.

As for the Rockets, I don’t watch basketball so who cares.  I care about Kanye “I’ma let you finish” West even less.  That last one though,  O.K. Corral style shootout?  That can’t be good.

As expected there are some anti-gun folks who are already starting to chime in on this incident and saying “Guns shouldn’t be allowed! Guns are bad! Etc. Etc.”  Before that gets too far, let me remind people why we do have concealed carry laws in Texas. About twenty four years ago, in nearby Killeen, Texas, at a cafeteria style restaurant there was a massacre.  Here are the differences between what happened yesterday and what happened  over twenty years ago…

Yesterday, everyone 18 were injured, 9 were killed as of this writing, and over 200 hundred arrested.  Here is one thing to note though.  Of everyone involved, and all of the weapons recovered, which included brass knuckles, knives, guns and so on, apparently every single one of them was not possessed legally, making everyone involved, dead injured or arrested, criminals.  Either the weapon itself was illegal such as the brass knuckles, or the person who had the weapon was a prohibited person.  Merely being a member of a gang, or having a gang affiliation makes the possession of a firearm illegal.  I can’t confirm whether any of these individuals had a permit to carry, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that number was zero.

Twenty years ago, one deranged asshole managed to kill 23 people and injure twenty more.  One guy managed that. From the incident yesterday there were over 200 people arrested, and fortunately they were less successful.

Amazingly, apparently no innocent bystanders were harmed in this mess, so on that note at least, kudos to the biker gangs for an incident with no collateral damage and limiting their killing to just each other.  But reasons like this are why citizens should be allowed to carry.  What if one of these Sons of Anarchy wannabes accidentally mistook a suburban family for a rival gang members?  How would that family defend themselves? Harsh language? Depend on the police?  Not to fault the police for this incident, but they were unable to prevent 9 deaths and 18 serious injuries in this turf war.  That innocent family wouldn’t have a prayer unless they had something to defend themselves with.  While some people are jumping on a bandwagon to ban guns in order to prevent this type of event from happening, I think it perfectly demonstrates why we need to keep the ability for those who are qualified for armed self defense.