There have in fact been instances in which armed individuals have interrupted spree killings or apprehended the killers. These seem to have indeed flown under your radar.
I don’t claim this to be an exhaustive list, but these come to mind:
The Pearl, MS school shooting- the shooter was stopped by a principal who retrieved a firearm from his car.
The Edinboro school dance shooting was stopped by the banquet hall owner who grabbed his shotgun.
Neither of these shooters was stopped mid spree. Both were apprehended after they’d already finished and fled the scene.
It’s also not clear having a firearm was the primary cause of the apprehension.
[excised; redundant with DtC’s post #62.]
The premise of this thread is that Saturday’s shooting is one data point in contradiction of the theory in question, not a disproof of it.
But in addition to asking whether there are any data points in support of the theory that I may have missed, I did raise the question of whether one of the takeaways from Saturday is that the theory really doesn’t make any sense to begin with.
Some good points raised upthread:
Reviewing the bidding:
People can get off a lot of shots pretty damned fast with a semiautomatic pistol, so it’s hard for Joe Citizen to shoot the shooter before he’s gotten a lot of shots off in the first place.
If you aren’t expecting trouble, it’s going to take you a few seconds, or longer, to go from ho-hum to WTF?! to pulling out your weapon to try to respond anyway.
Hell, you might not have your weapon on you anyway, unrestricted carry notwithstanding.
But assuming you do, your chance of a clear shot is small; your chance of hitting an innocent person is substantial.
IOW, the likelihood of a given murderous rampage being stopped, mid-rampage, by a good citizen with a handgun is pretty small, no matter how unrestrictive the carry laws are. It’ll happen sometime, no doubt, but it’s a pretty weak argument for getting rid of restrictions on carrying firearms in public.
I don’t see how #3 is relevant. You might as well say airbags are pointless because you might roll your car and die anyway.
+1 Yeah.
That said… If Gabrielle had held her Democrat town meeting at a gun show instead of a supermarket, Loughner would also have been shot as soon as he showed up.
Moreover, keep in mind that Loughner was going to reload and attempt to shoot lots more people. It could have been 60 or 90 people shot, who knows how many if he had continued to shoot? Loughner could have been shooting for 20 minutes until someone with a gun showed up to stop him(cops/whatever)?
I would say an armed citizen friendly to Gabrielle could probably have easily have taken out Loughner certainly before Loughner could reload, if not before.
It actually is a miracle that Loughner did not reload a second, third, fourth, fifth magazine
Because he was tackled by some cowardly pussies.
And because he was such a fearsome gun-totin’ gunslinger, he fumbled the reload.
I am sure we can all agree that Jared Laughner is not a responsible gun owner.
So your position is that for concealed carry to actually be effective, crimes must be attempted only at various conventions, gatherings, congresses, or other large assemblies of gun-owning individuals?
And then in such gatherings, people are sometimes summarily executed “as soon as he showed up?”
Veeeery interesting. On one hand, I’m tempted to publicly wonder what world you live in; on the other, I think I must ask if pre-cogs typically work security at gun shows?
And thank god we live in a country where irresponsible gun owners still have Second Amendment rights. Give me liberty or give me death!
Uh, wait… that didn’t come out right.
Of course, if it happened at a gun show, than 60 or 90 people would surely have been killed when everybody else whipped out their firearms. I’m sure you were just getting to that, though.
No, it’s not a miracle. He was jumped by someone when he paused to reload. No need to invoke a supernatural cause for a simple human reaction.
If only Loughner had followed Sarah Palin’s advice…
This storyis one. The shooting rampage was stopped when the gunman was cornered by an off-duty cop from another city. I had thought that same officer had killed the gunman, but according to Wikipedia he kept the gunman cornered until SWAT arrived.
it appears that at least in arizona, senior citizens are the most effective weapon in stopping a gunman.
a woman in her 70’s knocked the magazine, and a retired soldier was one of the tacklers.
According to that story, he was already cornered by other officers. Law enforcement doesn’t count anyway. We haven’t seen civilians with guns stop a shooting spree.
Well, shooting sprees are pretty rare and the vast majority of the populace still doesn’t carry guns, so it isn’t all that surprising that none have been stopped by civilians with guns.
It’s just not very plausible that a civilian could stop a spree. Real life isn’t the movies. It’s not that easy to identify and drop a moving target in the middle of a crowd. Most likely, they’re just going to cause more problems, injure more people, cause more panic and confuse law enforcement. No responsible gun carrier is even likely to attempt it unless the first shooter moves away from the crowd, in which case it’s already too late.