Osler's Razor

Contrary to the message in this video, it is a leap in logic to conclude that all armed citizens are "living in a dream world." Undoubtedly, there are situations, such as the one depicted, where a concealed carrier would be ineffective, even dangerous. Additionally, there are individuals who may never be helpful against an armed assailant.

But think about the scenario portrayed in the video: poorly trained, inexperienced students in a crowded classroom are put up against a police officer trained to scan a room for threats and to shoot under stress, who knows in advance that someone will clumsily try to pull a weapon, and who enters the room and begins firing without any warning. I think this is a fair characterization of the experiment (tell me if you disagree). Even compared against the horrible school shooting we have seen, the video depicts only a single sequence of events. What would this look like, for example, if the armed student heard the shooter firing in the hallway before he entered the room?Given how unusual this situation is, why should we generalize from it?

The video frustrates me because it advances a particular agenda under the guise of experimental objectivity. I'm happy to talk about the dangers associated with armed citizens--there are many--but let's have that conversation in a context not artificially constrained (or set up to fail) by Dianne Sawyer's opinion.

Consider THIS VIDEO (a training video produced for the city of Houston, TX and paid for by the Dept. of Homeland Security). It instructs viewers in three possible responses to an "active shooter event" in an office building (notice that the building has a "no guns" sign on the door, @1:00). The first two options, run and hide, should probably be everyones first response. But if forced to fight, wouldn't it be better to take on the shooter with a gun rather than a fire extinguisher?

I don't carry a gun, concealed or otherwise, primarily because it would make me uncomfortable but also because my daily surroundings resemble those in the video (albeit without the masks and shooting). Still, I can think of 100 circumstances where I might want someone nearby to be armed.

And in the end, everything else aside, there's still that pesky Second Amendment.
 

The video isn't about the second amendment-- it's about the wisdom of people like me and you running around with guns, thinking that we are going to shoot intruders before they shoot us-- in other words, about using the freedom we have under the second amendment.

The intruder always has the drop on the people who are unsuspecting. That part of the video is realistic.

But, the bigger thing is that not many shooting situations are like that. It's very rare that someone goes in to do a school shooting.

Many more shootings are of these types: Depressed kid uses parent's gun to kill himself. Husband uses gun to shoot his wife. Gun goes off at gun show (two of those yesterday alone). Guy shoots the neighbor kid because he is mad at him, or because the neighbor kid is drunk and goes to the wrong house.

The "dream world" is the revenge fantasy-- that you will kill the person out to get you. Most people don't have anyone out to get us. [actually, if anyone has someone out to get them, it's me-- people are very regularly getting out of prison that I put in there, and what I write makes a lot of armed people really mad, and I get a lot of hate mail]. The reality is that gun is more likely to kill you, or your spouse, or the neighbor kid.
 

I think it would be extremely unwise for anyone to allow me and you to run around with guns—but we are accident-prone types with all sorts of crazy ideas.

And, thankfully, school shootings are rare. That’s one of the reasons (there were many, many others) that I strongly opposed Texas’ brief effort to allow and encourage guns on college campuses. But that’s also why I insist that our national conversation about gun control be tied to the examples you mentioned rather than school shootings.

In light of those, I think the best thing we can do is to enforce the gun laws we already have. It’s already illegal, for example, to have a loaded weapon at a gun show. At the only gun show I have been to (in Houston) there was a table at the entrance where police inspected all outside weapons.

In addition to the laws we have, we can do more to encourage (or require) responsible gun ownership. For one thing, I think gun owners should be held responsible for the consequences of negligent gun ownership. Guns should be locked in a safe or unloaded and out of the reach of children. For another, there should be no loophole with which one can avoid a background check when purchasing a gun.

But beyond all of that, the people I know who own or carry guns do not do so out of a misplaced revenge fantasy. They do it to because they believe that they may be forced to protect themselves or their loved ones. Conspicuously absent from the list of shooting types you mentioned were those associated with home invasion, armed robbery and sexual assault. These, unfortunately, are not rare.

Certainly many people equate having guns with the machismo and invincibility depicted in movies and video games. It probably makes some people feel tough or “big” to own a gun or to think about going out and gunning down the bad guy. But I don’t think those base instincts are what motivate most people to sit through 10hrs. of safety training in order to legally carry (for the record, any state that issues a license to concealed carry without a mandatory safety course is wrong, PA included).