Here’s a quote from the link: Mina said the off-duty officer engaged in a shoot-out with Mateen up until more officers arrived. Additional police officers arrived and also engaged the suspect, and “forced him to stop shooting and retreat to the bathroom where he had some hostages.”
So, here is a case where an off duty police officer was doing security at a club. Gunman starts firing, off duty police officer on scene calls for back up and engages in an exchange of gunfire with the perp. Back up arrives soon thereafter.
This seems like a case where a bad guy with a gun is met by a good guy with a gun (no less an off duty LEO). On duty police arrive, perp retreats into the bowels of the nightclub with hostages. We know the story.
IMHO, this appears to be the case where there is a good guy with a gun, and it didn’t really prevent any of the tragedy. In fact, the good guy with a guy should be at least better trained than your average “good guy with a gun.”
I don’t really see this as an example of why there should be less restrictive gun laws? In fact, the opposite seems true to me.
2nd enthusiasts, please educate if you have a differing opinion on how making gun control less restrictive (and Florida is one of the more accommodating States in terms of access to firearms), would have helped this situation?
For any historical event which unfolded in a particular way, we can speculate that if we changed this circumstance or condition, it might have unfolded in that slightly different, or hugely different, way.
Well, yes, it might. Or it might have unfolded in some other way again. As you point out, this is a case where a good guy with a gun didn’t pan out the way we might have hoped. The circumstance of having a good guy with a gun on site may in fact have made matters worse.
In general, my sense is that the more guns you have around in society, the more gunfire there will be, the more gun battles there will be, the more people will get hurt. So my gut feeling is that, whatever might or might not have happened in any particular incident if someone else had had a gun, the more someone elses that we encourage or enable to have guns, the more people will get shot.
There’s an ongoing thread here in the Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share forum that’s filled with stories of good guys with guns that prevented tragedy. I know that if I were one of the hostages, I would prefer to be armed and have a chance to defend myself and others rather than be powerless to do anything, even if I were unsuccessful.
“Fallacy” strikes me as a bit highbrow, and gives the proposition a little more respectability than it warrants. I like “sound bite” better (and “simplistic whinge” even more).
One problem with the GGWAG is that these events are pretty rare. We’d probably need to have 10-20%(?) of the population carrying to ensure that a good guy is there to stop them. However, good guys aren’t necessarily good guys all the time. They are humans and may get angry and snap just like anyone else. They may not go on shooting rampages, but they may pull out their gun if someone makes them mad, cuts them off in traffic, is rude to them, has more than 10 items in the express lane, etc. I suspect that the more people are carrying, the more there will be shootings of 1-2 people in a moment of passion.
I think if the GGWAG were just people who were well trained (like military, police) for these situations, then it would be a good thing. But the reality is that you’d have a lot of people who want to feel tough (George Zimmerman) who wouldn’t always use their guns responsibly and wouldn’t be trained in how to react in those situations.
Ultimately the argument fails because the good guy can’t act until after the bad guy starts shooting. Until then, you don’t know if he’s a bad guy or not.
Even in the best case scenario, people are going to be hit by the bad guy’s bullets. Further, the more guns firing, the more people get hurt. It could be the bad guy. It could be an innocent bystander who you kill when your first shot misses the bad guy. Or those killed because the good guy mistakes them for the bad guy. It’s a chaotic situation, and the more bullets flying, the more likely it is for someone to be hit by one.
At one of these, there was an ex-soldier who had a gun with him in the crowd. He did nothing because he didn’t know what his target was, and because when the police arrived, they might think he’s the shooter.
Further, there’s a direct correlation between the number of guns and the number of gun deaths. Maybe having a good guy with a gun might be useful occasionally, but the tradeoff is more accidental gun deaths, more guns shot in anger, and more deaths.
And what happens if the GGWAG is a bad shot?
If the GGWAG shoots innocent bystanders and then the BGWAG shots the GGWAG, does that make the BGWAG a GGWAG?
If GGWAG1 starts shooting at BGWAG, then GGWAG2 walks out of the bathroom, how does he know who is the bad guy (aside from the black cowboy hat and bandanna over his face)?
Exactly my point. It gets harder to tell who is the “good guy” the more guns that are in play, and who you’re shooting at. It’s not something the “armchair heroes” consider in their action movie playthrough of the situation.
And the Good Guy has only one target that he absolutely needs to hit, and a lot of targets he needs to miss. While the Bad Guy can shoot absolutely everywhere.
I agree with RealityChuck, that it is likely that a few mass shootings or other crimes would be prevented or stopped if there were more people armed. But there would also be other mass shootings or crimes where the Good Guys would accidentally shoot bystanders, and also an increase in accidentally shootings, suicides, domestic disputes, and other gun violence. It wouldn’t be worth the trade-off, and there are better ways to decrease gun deaths.
This situation, ones like this, it probably won’t in the vast majority of cases. Or like here the differences will be minor and debatable. Here you had a planned attack with no intention other than killing from a person (or persons) who scoped things in advance and took time to select the method in how they wished to commit the act. I know others who enjoy and believe in firearms would like to think we could make a difference here but its like saying I can stop SEAL Team 6 – it isn’t going to happen. But remember how rare these kinds of attacks are.
Where private ownership and carry does sometimes make a big difference is where there is a separate crime with the potential of death to others such as a robbery or home invasion. Or an unstable person is trying to terrorize someone with the threat of death. Since the primary goal of the perp isn’t planned mass carnage there is more likely to be the opening for an armed citizen to intervene. And judging from the one thread here and other reports, those cases are much more common.
Homeowners with guns stop crimes quite often. Sometimes without firing a shot. Other times they do have to shoot to defend their home and family. The News covers these stories every week. The thread in mundane us packed full of them
A gun doesn’t make anyone a superhero. A single person can’t stop every crime they witness. That’s why the police send a lot of officers to any violent crime thats taking place.
A gun gives a homeowner a better chance of surviving. It’s better than the alternative of throwing spitballs at the bad guy.
I agree with all that, but there are also the downsides that must also be considered. Homeowners have shot family members late at night thinking they were burglars. Kids have found their parents’ guns and shot themselves and others. People have been killed cleaning their own guns. People have shot their spouse after finding them in bed having an affair. Homeowners have shot at people who mistakenly pull in their driveway. And yes, homeowners have shot at bad people meaning them harm.
A person will need a gun to defend themselves very rarely or never in life. To have a gun when you need it means you have to have the gun for a very long time–years and years. All that time you have it is time that you can be injured with it.
There are absolutely times when it’s better to have a gun, but you should carefully consider all the downsides and think about if you’re overall safer. If you’re the type of person who will do the training and is calm in a crisis, you may be safer with a gun. But if you’re quick to act, impulsive, scatterbrained, and can’t think in a panic situation, you may be putting yourself in more danger by having a gun. And one huge problem is that people who are unqualified to responsibly have a gun often don’t consider themselves unqualified. They think they’re awesome at everything. They greatly overestimate their capabilities and may not correctly consider the downsides to gun ownership.
While FL is indeed one of the better states regarding gun rights, their laws do not allow concealed carry in bars (establishments serving alcohol where food sales constitute less than 50% of revenue). So, this nightclub is another (politicians’ oxymoronic) “gun-free zone”, where the vast majority of people, being law-abiding, are not able to carry a gun to defend themselves.
I have to admit when I first heard of this horror, I wondered why nobody there shot the terrorist/lunatic, knowing that FL is pretty lenient with carry permits. Then I read about the restriction against (legally) carrying in bars. The law itself is partly to blame, IMO, in this instance. I suppose it is debatable whether the bar restriction ends up reducing or increasing shootings overall, but I am highly skeptical because it is exceedingly logical and evident that criminals/terrorists/lunatics don’t give a shit about laws and restrictions, unlike everyday Joes.
People seem to want to make this like the Old West in the movies, where the cops and robbers are shooting at each other around the corners, while the poor civvies run and hide, and most likely, get shot. Your good guy with a gun scares me almost as much as your bad guy with the gun because I have NO WAY of knowing:
is that good guy crazy? considering how easy it is to get a gun
is that good guy a good guy at all?
I have a gun. I got it in NYS. It’s one of the more restrictive states and I am fine with that. I had to undergo a background check, etc. I had to show them my ID, and had to jump through a few hoops.
What I did not have to do was demonstrate any level of competence with the gun. That’s all right, I’m not exactly going on a killing spree with my bolt action .22. But it’s ridiculous that people always seem to equate “Guy who can get a gun” with “good guy who has a gun”…unless they are Muslim.
How is that accomplished? Recent mass shootings in France, London, Brussels, Chicago and elsewhere where gun laws are stringent strongly indicate that laws do nothing to persuade nutjobs from willingly breaking gun laws as a preliminary step in their murderous carnage.