<p>When I was fourteen or sixteen &#8211; pardon me, but I don&#8217;t remember precisely, nor did these things make any impression in the international mainstream media &#8211; mom and I went to what was probably an illegal demonstration in downtown Porto, Portugal.</p> 
<p>No, I am not sure if it was illegal, or even honestly what the demonstration was for. Around that time it might have been for anything, including in support of whoever was the most right-wing candidate available. (Don&#8217;t get excited. It was never further to the right than social democrat, and at one time it was the socialist candidate.)</p> 
<p>What I remember of that demonstration &#8212; one in a string of them &#8212; were the shots from above.</p> 
<p>If my memory serves me (and understand that after these many years things run together, but be patient, there&#8217;s a point to this), the demonstration was in Avenida dos Aliados, which despite the name is a plaza, hemmed in between tallish, nineteenth/early twentieth century stone buildings. I&#8217;d guess from memory four or five stories high.</p> 
<p>The shots came from either the upper windows or the roof of one of these buildings.</p> 
<p>As someone in the crowd, I remember people startled, starting to move, eddies in the packed multitude, and then someone ahead of us going down, bloodied.</p> 
<p>At that point, the running started.</p> 
<p>I don&#8217;t know how I ended up running near a wall (we were pretty much in the center of the space) but I remember the moment a hand shot out, grabbed me, and pressed me flat against the wall. The shots continued through this, btw. The person who grabbed me was my mom, and for the next few minutes, we resisted the crowd going by so close they might pull us with them.</p> 
<p>I don&#8217;t remember how many people were shot. Maybe four. Far more died in running down an underground passage, trying to get away/to the train station. That last is what my mom saved me from.</p> 
<p>This is also why my blood boiled this morning when Hillary Clinton ran her ill-informed, loud mouth about the shooting in Las Vegas.</p> 
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<p>We&#8217;ll leave alone the fact that the &#8220;silencer&#8221; doesn&#8217;t indeed render guns silent. <a href="http://monsterhunternation.com/2017/09/26/an-opinion-on-suppressors-and-the-hearing-protection-act/" type="external">Larry Correia covered that recently in a wonderful post at his blog</a>.</p> 
<p>But even if it were possible to silence shots completely, would it be a bad thing, to prevent panic and the subsequent trampling?</p> 
<p>Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton wasn&#8217;t the only person speaking while wearing a stylish colon hat. Facebook and probably all the news media &#8212; I&#8217;m working on a book and at any rate have no intention of subjecting my blood pressure to that kind of hammering &#8212; are full of &#8220;experts&#8221; and &#8220;observers&#8221; and &#8220;commenters&#8221; talking about how this wouldn&#8217;t have happened if we had only banned private gun ownership.</p>
The Las Vegas Shooting and the Attack of the Carrion Crows