Criminy wrote:
Gbaji wrote:
Why not allow someone the chance to intervene? Why not give those people the best chance possible of successfully intervening?
Time and time again that rambo thinking ends up getting the would-be hero either wounded or killed. We have pointed this out to you but you keep ignoring it.
Um... Because you're wrong? Do you have any source showing that armed civilians intervening in a shooting increases the number of fatalities? At all? Repeating a false assumption doesn't make it true.
The most relevant statistic is that when someone with a gun (whether civilian or uniformed police) arrives on scene and confronts a shooter during a mass shooting (or potential mass shooting), the number of random civilians deaths after that point drops to zero. We can sit her and speculate about what might happen, but in every case I can find (and that others on the internet have examined), the death rate for anyone not either the shooter or police (or armed civilian) in such cases is zero once an armed person confronts the shooter. I can find no case of mass shooting (or potential mass shooting) where the shooter continued to kill random victims in the area after being so confronted.
So it doesn't matter what you think might happen. The data tells us that the faster we can get any armed person to confront a shooter in a situation like that, the fewer people will die. Period. When shooters are confronted with armed opposition they tend to do one of four things: Flee, surrender, fight with the other armed person (incredibly rare btw), or kill themselves. They do *not* ignore the armed person and continue shooting at random people in the area. You're arguing for a statistically unsupported assumption.
It's interesting because there's this great fear that if faculty were allowed to bring guns to school it would cause all sorts of problems. But do you have anything other than your own fear to support this? Is there hard data telling us how likely those guns might be used in some harmful way? I hadn't even thought about it at the time, but when we first started talking about this topic (in the other thread), I checked out a site that contained a list of all the school shootings in US history. I think it was
here. Interestingly enough, while there are a hell of a lot of "guy kills his girlfriend and himself" type incidents back in the day, I think I only found *one* incident where a shooting occurred because a teacher had a gun in school at it was either taken and used, or accidentally went off (it was the latter IIRC). That's one time in the entire history of the US.
Yet, despite the absence of any evidence to support that fear, it seems to drive the entire argument. I just find that bizarre. There's tons of evidence of armed civilians being able to stop or reduce the number of deaths in a potential mass shooting, and pretty much zero evidence that they're presence will somehow make things worse, yet you assume the latter and dismiss the former. Again, that's just bizarre. You're willing to oppose action with a well founded track record of helping in precisely the situation we're discussing (mass shootings at schools) because of a completely unfounded set of fears. That's totally irrational.
Edited, Jan 23rd 2013 4:16pm by gbaji 
