Five Bystanders Injured In Shootout Between Robber and Armed Citizen:
I don’t care if you find my post interesting and it was supposed to be obvious. What I’m after is this not becoming just one more generic gun thread. I’ve already heard all your talking points in many threads like that and you have heard mine. I feel safe saying nobody’s mind will be changed if we cover all that same ground again. Do you have some new ideas on the topic?
So - the armed criminal shoots six people - the sixth one is the one trying to defend himself and others, but gets shot. No indication whatsoever in the article that any of the bystanders got shot by anyone other than the criminal. A shot and a miss by you (so to say) again. Try again. Really, all that googling and this is the best you can come up with?
The armed citizen precipitated the shootout. No bystanders would have been shot if he hadn’t played the hero. The shooter ultimately gave his gun to the hostages. No one would have been shot if the armed citizen would have left his gun at home.
Scumpup, due respect, but I wasn’t talking to you. Terr implied that armed civilians always (or usually) made the situation better, and asked for situations where “armed civilian response made matters worse.” My point is simply that if we’re trying to make a fair evaluation, it’s inaccurate to limit discussion to situations in which there was a shooter and an armed civilian made the situation worse; you’d need to discuss situations in which a civilian armed due to worries about shooters made the situation worse.
A fair response might be that you’d also need to evaluate situations in which fear of armed civilians made shooters rethink plans; I’d agree in that case that that would be fair. But scolding me because you’re familiar with my objection, while not scolding Terr for raising a spurious point, is suspect and tiresome.
No. Do you?
I’ll just point out, for clarity, that although I don’t own one myself, I’m neither particularly anti-gun nor against legal concealed carry. My main point was that the Charlie Hebdo shooting itself seemed to make whatever point this Texas group was trying to demonstrate. In other words, even if prepared, you have an unfavorable chance of materially affecting the outcome of a shooting incident when it’s a single handgun against trained, disciplined multiple shooters with military-grade weapons (I’m not sure why this would even have to be tested). But hey, go armed everywhere you deem it necessary. That’s not a big issue for me.
You’re wrong. You should read your article closer. As in ““He heard the shooting, and before he could ever take a defensive mode or anything, it was right there,” Roger McKown said.”
FWIW, it’s not a big issue for me, either. Probably the single biggest effect this board has had on me is diluting my anti-gun beliefs away almost to nothing: y’all have been pretty convincing in this measure. I just want to make sure that apples are compared to apples.
Do you imagine the bad guys are going to just stand around patting themselves on the back after they kill everyone? Because the ones at Charlie Hebdo didn’t, they killed more people after they left.
…and you’re one of the people I would want having a gun if I was there either armed or disarmed. Even if the result was my death or injury. I’d trust you not to pull the weapon simply because you had legal justification. I’d expect you make a decision based on the odds as you saw them.
Really that’s a point that seems to mostly get lost on both sides of the issue once the debate begins. Carrying the gun does not mean that it must be drawn from concealment every time lethal force is legally justified. It’s an option at that point. Other options aren’t off the table - running, hiding, being a well behaved hostage, etc… It’s a false dichotomy to think that you either go disarmed or have to use the gun. I do know that thinking about whether to use force (not just the legality) gets encouraged by some in the gun community. I know some that choose to carry seem to miss that point or ignore it and never prepare themselves mentally for the decision making needed.
How to socially/legally get after that more grey area is a whole other bucket of worms. There’s some interesting American cultural bits about what seems to be a binary relationship to force instead of a continuum.
This is remarkable and awesome. Now to work on the ‘almost nothing’ that is remaining 
Shit, of course I don’t. After having wasted too much lifespan on participation in threads where both sides did nothing but abuse dead horses, I am pretty sure there are no new ideas. I’ve largely avoided gun threads for exactly that reason for a while now. While this one was focused narrowly on the issue of what, if anything, the simulation in TX proved, it was interesting. If you guys want to hash over “guns r gud/guns r suk” again, have at it. I’ll show myself to the door.
Um, he case he gave you was a citizen defending himself (or at least, attempting to) from a drive-by shooting. Are you trying to argue that a drive-by shooting isn’t a crime, or that shooting back isn’t intervening?
Oh, I was assuming that the standard of “success” was that the armed civilian was able to get away alive. If we’re instead using the standard of “stopped the gunmen”, then the success rate of the exercises was 0/12.
I’m pro-gun and defend the right of anyone to carry, so long as they are properly trained.
That said…
Given the scenario - two armed, armored assailants, highly trained, pumped with adrenaline, looking forward to death… The odds of a single person taking them out with a handgun is close to zero. Even if you’re a great shot and shoot both of them first, unless they are head shots the odds of them both dropping before they can open fire on you and everyone else is very low. Typical carry handguns aren’t powerful enough to knock a person down or disable them from hydrostatic shock. People sometimes get shot with handguns and don’t even realize it - even people who subsequently die. Ronald Reagan didn’t realize he’d been shot until his Secret Service detail checked him.
If you read enough reports of such shootings, a common scenario is that the assailant is shot, sometimes multiple times, and responds by running away, only to be found dead some time later because he bled out internally or externally or succumbed to some other delayed effect. Now replace the frightened robber with a trained fanatic looking to die in a blaze of glory, and pumping a couple of rounds into him probably isn’t going to save you from retaliatory gunfire unless you get very, very lucky.
Hell, I remember reading of an assailant who was shot by a cop six times with a 9mm handgun, and he literally ran home to his mother. Can’t remember if he died or was taken to a hospital. But even with six bullets in him he was capable of running away from the cops and making it home.
On the other hand, our recent shooting in Canada’s Parliament was stopped by a Sergeant At Arms who had to run back to his desk to fetch his old service weapon, but he did bring down the assailant. That could easily have been a civilian, had we allowed concealed carry.
So… I’d say that it’s situation dependent. Honestly, the people who I think benefit the most from gun ownership are women facing a specific threat - a raging ex-husband, a stalker threatening to kill them, etc. A handgun certainly helps level the playing field. At the very least it might give her some additional peace of mind in a really shitty situation.
Is there a downside to concealed carry? Absolutely. I am reminded of the protagonist in Robert Heinlein’s “Tunnel in the Sky”. In the book, he’s part of a survival class that will be dropped in an unknown hostile environment, and has to survive. He’s allowed to take any weapons he wants, but chooses to go armed only with a knife. Why?
I saw this myself when teaching martial arts. Our school emphasized over and over again that the student’s obligation was to avoid a fight whenever possible, to be humble, etc. And yet, young men with just enough training to be dangerous but who think they are death with both hands have a really hard time ignoring situations that other people would reflexively avoid. And usually, those situations would not turn out well for our would-be defender of justice. The fact is, the person who wins a fight is usually A) the one who starts it, and B) the meanest person. Usually the same.
In those cases, you could certainly say that the martial arts training was a net negative, because it caused the martial artist to put himself into a bad situation that he otherwise would have avoided. Guns can be like that, only more so. And once you’ve put yourself in a situation with guns involved, bad shit is going to happen to someone.
Training in a controlled environment is far different than trying to act and use your brain in a chaotic situation where your life is in danger, gunshots are deafening you in an enclosed room, etc. When panicked, the brain stops being able to think laterally and you tunnel focus on something - which is why people die in fires by pushing on doors that need to be pulled open. Rational thinking goes away, and blind panic is not compatible with logical decision making (or accurate gunfire).
Soldiers and serious martial artists get around this by training so much, and so hard, that thinking doesn’t enter into it - you just react, but your training causes you to react in a productive way. The REALLY serious ones train in physically punishing and painful ways so that they won’t panic under duress. But that’s a rare breed of cat. And I still would not give that person good odds of surviving a gunfight with someone armed with a heavier weapon, body armour, and who will actually enjoy the fight.
One last thing: Any talk of innocent people being injured by gun owners protecting themselves has to be balanced by the fact that the cops are no better, and perhaps even worse because they often enter a situation without knowing who any of the parties are.
There are a LOT of innocent people killed by police officers, and a lot of instances where cops have opened up on people with massive firepower, spraying an entire neighborhood with bullets unnecessarily. In many areas, police offers get terrible training, and often the training is years or decades in the past. Most cops never pull their guns out of their holsters over their entire careers other than at the qualification range. So when the time comes to use their weapons, they may be less trained and more nervous than a civilian who regularly practices with his or her weapon. So it’s certainly possible that gun owners are preventing accidental deaths by dealing with the situation before the cops do.
This is also another of many reasons why the cops should not be getting hand-me-down military-grade weaponry. They aren’t properly trained in their use. In Ferguson some of those idiot cops were pointing their military rifles AT the crowd, with their fingers inside the trigger guard. Something a National Guard soldier learns not to do on his first day of weapons training. There’s a video of one of them walking around inside the crowd, pointing what looks like maybe an AR-15 or M-16 at anyone who got close to him - with his finger inside the trigger guard. All that was needed was for someone to bump him, or for him to stumble, and bullets would have been flying.
Every private gun owner I know would not have made those mistakes.
***ONE ***defender armed with a (presumably holstered) handgun is suddenly attacked in a closed room by two men with automatic weapons? I don’t care if you’re the national quick-draw champion, that’s unsurvivable. The only lesson I take away from this is automatic weapons are great for clearing a room at close quarters.
I’m reminded of an ABC 20/20 segment devoted to handguns, which set up a no-win situation for a would-be defender.
No. Set your gun down on the pavement, gently so as to avoid accidental firing, and then put your hands up. That’s what you should always do anyway, if the cops arrive on a scene and you happen to be armed, no matter what just happened.
If you’re white, it should work just fine.
Why only one armed civilian?
If a company in the US was threatened then it would be simple to just let the CCW employees bring their weapons to work. Then it’s 2 gunmen against many.
Many? How many employees at a typical American company have CCWs? What percentage of the population at large has a CCW?
In my building, 9 out of 36 employees have carry permits that I know about. Of course, as teachers, none of us actually have a gun on us at work. In PA, permits are shall issue and inexpensive. I know a lot of people who have permits. In other states, the law makes it so difficult or even impossible to get a permit that virtually nobody has one. The answer to your question, therefore, would depend heavily on where the company is located and what they do.
In my immediate office area, four of eight of us have concealed handgun permits.