I’m a flaming liberal. If I were any more of a flaming liberal, I would actually be on fire. So, big surprise, I read a lot of liberally-bent blogs. I read a lot about feminism, racism, why rebublicans suck, atheism, and sex. I should know better. Anytime one of my regular blogs has a title that indicates the post is about guns, I should NOT read it. The one thing crooked in my liberal-party-line is gun rights.

Sigh.

Must. Practice. Looking. Away.

In Bang Bang Boogie, pandagon takes on concealed carry on campuses.

The problem with concealed carry isn’t the concealed carriers.  It’s all the bullets they would fire at the unknown shooter, or at the kid who was carrying a stapler and dressed in dark clothes.

Um. Has that ever happened? How many times has a carrying gun owner accidentally mistaken a completely benign situation and begun shooting? While media-darling murderous rampages are not very common, I’ll bet that stapler-carrying (or whatever) shootings are even less.

It’s highly unlikely that concealed carry would make mass shootings more likely - it is, however, highly likely that when someone is insane enough to decide they want to kill a few dozen people, a disorganized, untrained armed response is likely to make the situation far more dangerous to all involved.

Worse? Worse how, exactly? I think the idea is the assumption that an armed responder is going to shoot bystanders. Fine. Take that as a given. It still isn’t likely to make a serious shooting situation worse.

In the Virgina Tech murders, 32 people were killed and several others wounded. If 12 people into the murders, a concealed carry person had responded and somehow managed to kill 12 bystanders before killing Cho, guess what? That’s better, not worse.

In the recent New York murders, 13 people were killed. An armed potential victim who responded early would have had to kill a lot of people to make the situation worse.

And on and on and on.

Don’t forget that murderous rampagers tend to shoot a lot more people than they kill, too. Our hypothetical armed responder who somehow has  the complete inability to aim worth a shit would probably do so as well. Newsflash: I, personally, volunteer to take a bullet in the arm if it means fewer people will die.

Then there’s I Do Not Want My Whopper To Get Capped, also from pandagon. The story is about an armed robber at a Burger King. A gun owner, John Landers, engaged the would-be robber verbally, and ultimately both fired their guns, leaving the would-be robber dead and Landers seriously wounded. No one else was injured in the incident.

Pandagon characterizes the situation like this:

…this guy got into a firefight in a public place, endangering himself, the employees and other customers and passers-by, is in serious condition in a hospital and probably could have died if a bullet had been a half-inch off, all to save a fast-food restaurant literally hundreds of dollars.

I think it’s a mistake to think of Landers’ actions as trying to save the Burger King money. If a guy with a gun is robbing an ATM and doesn’t know you can see him, trying to save the money is a silly choice. And I think it’s a mistake to think that a gun-holder who’s after your money is going to take it calmly and then leave. This is a false-positive/false-negative situation I don’t want to be on the wrong end of.  If a crazy/desperate person is threatening people with a gun, it is not a reasonable assumption that everyone is going to end up fine as long as the perpetrator gets the money. Choosing to act with your own body, life, and gun in this situation is an attempt to save lives, not an attempt to save someone else’s money.

This section has several  problematic assumptions:

However, there’s a reason that we train people to do this for the community at large …  law enforcement officials are in a far better place to handle situations like this without endangering others, providing they do their job correctly.  Your average armed person, with no real training and prone to misread a situation, often becomes as much of a danger to the others as the criminal, if not more so.

First, law enforcement officials aren’t “in a better place to handle situations like this”, because they aren’t there. There’s some kind of fantasy going on here, thinking that the police are there to protect you during a specific crime. They just aren’t. If a crime gets committed in front of a police officer, you’re talking about a stupid, rare criminal. The police aren’t even there to protect you if you are reasonably certain a crime is going to be committed, such as if you’ve received specific threats. This issue has long been settled in the courts. It’s your job to protect yourself and the people you care about.

Second, who says the “average armed person” has no real training? I don’t know the average for law enforcement firearm training/practice. I found one city website saying they do marksman training 4 times a year. I also don’t know the average amount of training/practice a concealed carry gun owner gets. Of the concealed carriers I internet-know, they tend to train/practice at least once a month, with many advocating every week sessions. I don’t know how the numbers would stack up there. But, I do know how the shooting statistics stack up. According to Cramer and Kopel (1), 11% of police shootings kill an innocent person. 2% of shootings by non-police citizens kill an innocent person.

And who says the armed person is “prone to misread a situation”? That’s just guessing. Police officers, when they shoot people, have a lot going for them. They are generally assumed to be good people. They are given a lot of leeway for “acting in good faith”. People generally approve of them having guns. Your “average citizens” do not have these things going for them. They are assumed to be suspect for firing a gun in public - a gun that many people don’t think they should have. They are not given the benefit of the doubt. They are very likely to have to defend themselves in court over a shooting, which they have to pay for themselves. If they are “prone” to read a situation one way or the other, I would bet that they are more likely to err the other way.

I am a gun owner, but I do not yet concealed carry. However, if I am ever in the midst of a public incident where a person is attempting  to commit a crime with a gun, I sure hope there are some concealed carry people present. The police certainly won’t be present. I’d like to have the best tools available to save my life and the lives of others, and I’d like to rely on a little more than “guns are bad” wishful thinking. The gun that’s bad is the one in the hands of the person who might shoot me. The gun used to stop that person is good. And the person who wields that one - facing public scorn and risking his or her own money, freedom, and life - is a hero.

(1) C. Cramer, and D. Kopel “Shall Issue: The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws”. Independence Institute Issue Paper. October 17, 1994

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