Which is the title of an article in the New York Post by Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Not that he needs my link to drive his traffic, but the article is worth reading.
It’s a short article with reading in it’s entirety. It’s more timely today than it was when it was published after the Virginia Tech shootings.
Here is one short quote,
Police can’t be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it’s usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they’re armed, they may wind up not being victims at all
The response time to the Aurora shooting was incredibly short, still a lot of people were killed or injured. I have to wonder what the outcome would have been if the theater didn’t have a “No guns allowed” policy and some of the audience was legally armed?
Which is all I’m going to say about that shooting other than the police, EMS, and fire personnel who responded did a great job under horrendous circumstances. Without them a lot more people might have been killed and injured.
Anything else anyone says is just politics, and I’m staying out of the debate. If you’ve read this blog more than a few times, you know where I stand.
– Well said, sir.
Being a responsible gun owner includes knowing when NOT to use your gun. This wasn’t exactly Columbine or VA Tech, where there were reasonably clear lanes to return fire.
Darkened theater with random increases and decreases of light (from the movie). Random loud noises and music (from the movie). Smoke in the air further obscuring the view. Dozens of people screaming and running in random directions. The criminal already has his weapons out and opened fire. Any audience member who draws their weapon and shoots it in that scenario at further than point-blank range is almost as dangerous as the criminal himself.
More gun control laws would not have prevented this tragedy. IIRC, some of the stuff he obtained was already illegal (high-capacity magazine) so he would have gotten around the laws to get his weapons.
Armed audience members would not have prevented this tragedy. By the time an audience member could have drawn their gun, people were already dead; and panicked return fire (not every gun owner is calm and well-trained) would have produced more dead and wounded.
What both sides needs to think about and remember is this. Sometimes, the sick bastard plans well enough, is careful enough, and is lucky enough that he gets to create his own little Armageddon. Sometimes, the bad guy wins; and all we can do is pick up the pieces, and try to prevent the next sick bastard (through improved mental health systems, knowing the warning signs, and engineering obstacles at the theaters) from starting his rampage in the first place.
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know if shooting at the bastard was possible or not. That’s a decision that has to be made based on a number of factors and unlike some, I don’t pretend to know what I’d do in that sort of circumstance. Only a few states, and CO isn’t one of them, have magazine bans of any type. Not that it would matter since a person intent on killing a lot of people isn’t going to care about bans on anything.
And yes, someone who goes to the lengths it appears this guy did, is going to be almost impossible to stop before he acts.
Hell, Bloomberg of NYC is now saying that cops should go on strike until the US public are terrorized into demanding more gun control. What a fucking idiot.
I wonder what would happen if the cops went on strike and crime went down?