Large Fierce Mammal

These men have REAL assault rifles with bayonets attached, and they know how to use both. While more than capable of killing, military firearms are intended to cause casualties. The bayonet has no such purpose – it is either an instrument of control, or of death. (click the image to enlarge)

The blade strikes more primal fear into the hearts of men than the bullet. Possibly this is because few people have ever been shot, but sooner or later everyone will cut themselves to a greater or lesser degree. Thus there is a clearer understanding of just how bad things can get when the blade is delivered to flesh in the heat of an adrenalin rush, but who really cares? It works.

Since the inception of reliable repeating firearms as the primary weapons of the soldier, its gleaming, bloodthirsty companion, the bayonet, has remained a constant. A crowd faced by resolute soldiers who pause to fix bayonets is far more likely to disperse – and quickly – than one faced with conventional riot batons and shields. In recent military history, the British Army has won the day with bayonet charges in the Falkland Islands (1982) and Iraq (2004). In each case, a smaller force pinned down by enemy fire, outnumbered and at risk of being overrun, fixed bayonets and charged. What might be considered a bravely suicidal last ditch tactic instead resulted in a victory of amazing proportions with casualties massively skewed against the superior force. A line of determined, fiercely screaming men intent on slicing you to ribbons is just as demoralizing now as it has always been – even more so in this ‘modern” age of computer game mayhem, action movies, fantasy fiction, and over confidence in the almighty gun. ~ Dark Sentiments 2011 – Day 6: Cold Steel

Lessons learned from the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich coloured security policies and procedures that would be put in place when the games came to the City of Montreal in 1976.  Security at Montreal was a combined police and military operation, and in the past 30 years, I have come to know and work with three men who trained for, and were deployed as part of, the Canadian military contingent at those games.

Crowd and riot control was subject to some thinking and associated doctrine back then that would send people into flights of fanciful panic at their mere mention today. Notwithstanding that, what I’m talking about here is history, not fancy, and it speaks both loud and clear to the mindset of the rifle and the blade, as perceived from both ends of the weapon.

Simply put, a crowd is nothing more or less than a lot of people who are traversing a space on business of their own, or have assembled for a common purpose like the attending of a mass event. They need clear instructions on how to get to their seats, how to find important facilities like washrooms, canteens, aid stations, and public announcement booths, unimpeded thoroughfares, and little else. A crowd is made up of individuals and small connected groups of family and friends travelling together, but these will be autonomous from others in the crowd, although all may share a common and peaceful interest. This is the ideal, and ultimately, maintaining it is the goal of all security precautions.

And then there is the mob. A mob is a crowd gone bad, and it is only as smart as its least intelligent member. Many things can bring it to life – poor, negligent, unsympathetic handling of the crowd and not ensuring access to the basic needs of its members as listed above is one – but a mob can also be spawned from the actions of malicious people who have come with their own agenda in mind.

However the mob comes to be, like a wild fire, it represents an out of control situation, and presents security forces tasked with its suppression with some very big problems. Facing a complete failure of law and order, and doing things wrong, can make the situation worse and get people injured or killed who would not otherwise be so. But fear not, for one thing is certain – while it may behave as a single monstrous organism, the mob, like the crowd, is still made of people, and it is to these we must communicate through the red haze of mayhem. If we are constrained to communicate solely on the most primal lizard brain level, then so be it, as long as the message is received. Enter the bayonet.

Here’s a sample scenario. The mob forms, advances, and is confronted by security forces. It is ordered to disperse but fails to comply. Instead it advances, and as ranges close, insults, taunts, and missiles start to be thrown. The security forces, standing calmly in line armed with their service rifles, receive the order – MOST audibly – to, “Fix bayonets!”

Gleaming steel flashes from scabbards to become one with the dull steel of each rifle. Done properly, the ominous “CLICK” of each bayonet locking home will sound as one, with the combined psychological effect attributed to that of hearing the racking of the slide on a pump action shotgun from the other side of the front door to the home you were thinking of invading.

Everyone knows someone who has lost a loved one to cancer. Hardly anyone in the general public has ever been shot, or knows anyone who has. Movies and television serve up a cornucopia of so called “gun violence”, but in its sheer quantity and its mixing of real violence with pretend, the reality has lost its bite. But everyone has been cut. Nearly everyone has been stabbed, even if only through a moment of inattention with a sewing needle. We can grasp how much those tiny injuries hurt, and by extension, how much more seven inches of gleaming steel at the end of 9 pounds of rifle, driven home by 200 pounds plus of determined soldier, will hurt. It will hurt a lot, and lizard brain says it’s time to be elsewhere.

This is a lesson that has been lost on the public, at least in the part of the mind where most do what passes these days for thought. Back on 16 December 2012 I wrote about the idiocy inherent in publicized comments that sought to make political capital out of claiming the children run down and stabbed in a school yard in China were far luckier than those shot in the school in Connecticut because they had the benefit of living in such an enlightened country as China with its ever so restrictive controls on access to firearms. As though I needed more evidence to support my argument, and with many thanks to my Esteemed Friend Jim Keating for bringing this particular article to my attention, I present for your delectation this CBC News item titled Vancouver stabbing attack suspect facing 12 charges. Click the link to read it.

In short, 33 year old Jerome Bonneric is now charged with four counts of aggravated assault, four counts of assault with a weapon, three counts of common assault, and one count of assaulting a peace officer, after he went on a rampage in a Vancouver apartment building in which he was visiting someone he knew. Visiting or not, there is no known connection between Bonneric and the people he attacked, including an elderly couple who unwisely opened their door to see what the commotion was about, only to have the wife hit with a hammer and the husband stabbed. He remains in hospital.

From only the first three public comments on this news item:

• From One Mind says, “I’m glad he didn’t have a gun.”
• gonegolfing says, “Another good example of why Canada is a much more desirable country to live in than the U.S.A. Her in America the nut would have been armed with an AR15 assault rifle and there would have been 30 people dead instead of seven treatable injuries. Thank you Canada for banning the ownership of assault type weapons.”
• Mrs. Dressup says, “Also glad that no firearms were in the picture.”

Again, all of these people are missing the point in their knee jerk move to focus on a demonized instrument, even when it isn’t present. Not unlike learning that someone has been attacked and permanently maimed by a Golden Retriever and observing, “Well, at least it wasn’t a Pit Bull!” To these I would ask, what if the elderly woman who opened that door had a 12 gauge in hand, and from her Korean War era military training knew how to use it? If a single explosive noise marked the end of the rampage, preventing her from being struck with a hammer and her husband from being stabbed, would you be unhappy, sad, and UN-thankful because a firearm was present?

Also, and tying directly into my observations yesterday, it’s obvious from gonegolfing’s own that he or she is unaware that:

• AR15’s are not assault rifles, nor are they banned in Canada;
• AR15’s are rarely the weapon of choice for people bent on a mass killing – an inconvenient prejudice I know, but crime scene statistics tend to bear this out;
• describing the way your imagination views the outcome of what might have been if something that didn’t happen had happened is not representative of, nor conducive to, intelligent debate;
• wounds received from being the target of a violent attack that may have ended your life, and that of a loved one as in the case of the elderly couple, do not fit my definition of something that can be easily dismissed as leaving only “treatable injuries”, regardless of what weapon, if any, was used to inflict them;
• Canadian law contains no reference nor definition of “assault weapon” – we have only non-restricted, restricted, and prohibited firearms, as well as prohibited devices, but no “assault weapons”, and the AR15 is a restricted firearm. We have never banned “assault weapons” because our courts don’t know what that is.

Fortunately, empathy and intellect came to bear in the next two comments:

• From Puckle: “This is just about the most frightening story today, attacked at your home for no reason by a madman.”
• From maxie66: “How terrifying for the victims. I hope they all recover physically and mentally. We need to address mental health issues. Nobody that does this could be in their right state of mind. Or drugs of some kind? Just an awful thing to happen.”

Ah! The point at last! The mental and physical toll of the attack and its aftermath. Aye! There’s the rub!

There’s no such thing as “gun violence” or “knife violence:, any more than there’s “fist violence” or “car violence”. There is only violence, and should that poor woman’s husband die in hospital from all this, it will be cold comfort to her that no guns were involved.