So if I hear shots and pull out my weapon and run down the hall and through a door and see/hear six people with guns shooting and two people with guns down and there’s lots of blood and screaming, whatever decision I make in the next two seconds is the correct one? And each one of the six armed people still standing is going to be right too? And when the cops get there and we’re all divided up into the guys who know I’m a good guy vs. the guys who know Stewart over there is a good guy (DAMN! Stewie just went down! Oops!), they won’t assume only uniformed cops are the good guys and just, well, you know?* And things will be better because one person shooting randomly or purposefully is much more dangerous than many people shooting out of sheer panic? And the sheer coolly calculated risk of one potentially unbalanced or angry individual bringing a gun on campus is so great that we must vastly increase the number of potentially angry or unbalanced individuals** bringing guns on campus? Okay.
I’ve noticed that the incidence of delusions of heroism is much greater than actual occurrences of heroism. Which is good, I guess. We all need to dream. But we probably shouldn’t do it while handling a loaded gun.
The majority of gun violence is not caused by the obviously crazy guy who wants to kill everybody, it’s caused by the the momentarily angry or frightened guy who happens to have a gun. More guns in more hands, no matter the justification, tends to increase the death rate. It’s probably too soon to say this, but even if (and man, does this ever need a lot of proving that it’s never going to get) you could statistically show that, say, in instances like this, armed bystanders would kill the bad guy after s/he killed no more than ten people and then went on to kill no more than seventeen of each other, with subsequent accidental police-civilian killings averaging around four or so, it still wouldn’t prove that more armed people on a college campus was a good idea, or even a non-sub-moronic idea.
For the record: I can’t support severe gun control because I do not believe the second amendment can be vitiated without damaging other parts of the bill of rights I view as absolutely essential. Yes, I’m willing to tolerate a few thousand needless deaths for the sake of the Constitution. And I admit I have a grudging respect for second amendment fundamentalists: at least they have the sand to never (so far as I can see) restrict the right they claim to protect to people like themselves (unlike, say, some self-proclaimed defenders of freedom of speech or religion). But to defend arming a largely self-selected group of private citizens as a practical matter is just plain idiotic. How many more guns, for example, would be necessary to be certain that a couple of them ended up in the right hands in the right classroom or dormroom at Virginia Tech? Do the math. After that, do more math: multiply the number of gun thefts and gun crimes and accidents and suicides and homicides and see if the number is more or less than, oh, 35, spread out over several years.
*Ask the professional cops of New York and Los Angeles first, and then look at the record, then ask a sampling of average campus and college town cops.
**If you think you’re not a member of this group, you’re not self-aware enough to be trusted with an orange, much less a gun, much less a concealed gun, much less a concealed weapon on a college campus.