The nation hasn’t exactly joined hands in a united response to the Orlando massacre. But since this terrible mass shooting happened in one of the most weapons-friendly places in the country, maybe we can at least all agree that having wildly permissive gun laws does not make a city safer. O.K., probably not. On Wednesday, Donald Trump took time out from vilifying Muslims and put some of the blame on gun control. If the patrons of Pulse, the gay bar in Orlando, had been carrying concealed weapons, he said, they could have taken control of the situation. The gunman would have been “just open target practice.”
There are few anti-gun control arguments more absurd, self-serving, and fantastical than the “only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun” canard. It’s easy to assume that of course you’d react appropriately in a mass shooting situation. Of course you’d soberly assess the situation, recognize the danger, and use your trusty sidearm to drop the miscreant in question before he could do any damage…but would you? Could you? The bad news is that the truth isn’t on your side, Cupcake.
What no one making this argument takes into account is the shock and chaos that can render an individual virtually incapable of taking any action at all. There have been studies showing that up to 20% of soldiers fail to fire their weapons in a combat situation. These are trained soldiers- combat is their milieu- and yet even some whose job it is to fight are unable to react “properly.” For a civilian to believe there’s no question but that they’d react appropriately and with the necessary and sufficient force to save the day is as arrogant as it is baseless.
Despite the lack of evidence supporting the contention of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © that OF COURSE a “good guy with a gun” would act appropriately to save the day, they keep making the argument. It’s almost as if they believe that if they repeat it often enough and with sufficient fervor, it will be accepted as unquestioned fact.
Donald Trump’s fantastical imagining of a scenario in which an armed clubgoer could have put Omar Mateen down is so delusional that not even the National Rifle Association (NRA) could offer a defense of it. When the sociopaths at the NRA can’t get behind you, it’s safe to say that your argument is pure crap.
[T]here actually was an off-duty police officer working in the club who tried to shoot the gunman but failed. This is important, because the myth of the cool and steady shooter is one of the most cherished beliefs of the National Rifle Association and its supporters. Trump himself has bragged that if he’d been in Paris on the night of the attacks there, he would have shot the terrorists. (“I may have been killed, but I would have drawn.”)
This is an excellent example of delusional gun thinking. Although Trump frequently reminds us he has a permit to carry a gun, there’s no indication he’s ever done so. And there’s certainly no evidence whatsoever that he has any skill in hitting things.
It’s very, very difficult to draw, aim and shoot accurately when you’re under severe stress. It’s one of the reasons that police officers so often spray fleeing suspects with bullets. They can’t hit a moving target, even though they get far more weapons training than your normal armed civilian.
If trained soldiers and law enforcement personnel don’t uniformly react and act appropriately in a mass shooting situation, how can an untrained civilian credibly argue that they absolutely could and would? The “only a good guy with a gun” argument is as arrogant as it specious and self-serving. When you believe that ANY attempt at common sense gun control is a thinly-camouflaged attempt to curtail, if not destroy altogether, your Divinely-ordained “gun rights” and your right to protect the innocent, you’ve lost all connection to reality.
A few weeks ago in Houston, a 25-year-old Afghan war veteran named Dionisio Garza walked up to a stranger sitting in a car at a carwash and shot him in the neck while railing about “homosexuals, Jews and Walmart,” according to local reports. He fired off 212 rounds, mostly from an assault rifle, hitting a police helicopter and a nearby gas station, which burst into flames. The police said a neighbor who heard the shooting came running with a gun, but was shot himself.
If we’re to have any hope or achieving a meeting of the minds (an unlikely prospect, given the entrenched intransigence of Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes ©), we need to be able to discuss the issue as it is. If you want to continue to see yourself as the modern-day reincarnation of John Wayne, that’s on you…but I’d wager that even if you’re carrying and someone opens fire in a public area, you wouldn’t save the day. The armed security guard at Pulse didn’t, and the available data shows that the “only a good guy with a gun” argument is just plain wrong.
Even if you were one of the few who defied the odds and reacted calmly and appropriately, you can’t assume that one “good guy with a gun”- invariably a handgun, will be able to fight a madman armed with an AR-15 on even terms.
I understand that Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © have deluded themselves into believing that their “gun rights” supersede any and all other considerations- up to and including human life. If they continue to refuse to discuss gun violence as it is in the real world, then those of us unwilling to settle for the random carnage and senseless bloodshed that is the status quo have a duty to act.
I’d love to have the opportunity to reach something resembling consensus on common sense gun control…but if Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foes © refuse to even compromise, I’m perfectly comfortable with imposing a solution.
How many more must die before we do something to stop the slaughter…or, if not stop it, then at least reduce the likelihood of another Orlando or Aurora or San Bernardino or….?
