Not As Seen On TV

Last week’s shooting in Colorado was a horrible, stupid tragedy. Emotions are understandably running high here, but I’d like to try to step back for a minute, and take advantage of the cool distance that reading about this on the internet from the other side of the country affords me.

In response to the shooting in Colorado a lot of folks have been saying if only someone there had a gun, they would have stopped it. In fact, this gets said anytime something like this happens. This isn’t going to become a post about gun control. I just find it hard to agree with this reasoning. I simply want to ask anyone who had this reaction to take a hard look at the situation. Would someone actually have been able to stop this tragedy, or lessen it, had they been armed?

Maybe. Or maybe not. Of course we don’t know and we can’t say for certain either way. But I suggest that its unlikely.

Our hero would have had to decide to act very quickly, fire accurately (at the shooter’s head, his body was protected) through a panic stricken crowd in close quarters, in a dark room, while incapacitated by tear gas and possibly confused by the audio from the movie. It’s certainly possible. But I find it more likely that the hero would have missed at best, or missed and hit someone in the crowd at worst. All of this presupposes that our hero succesfully fought panic and the instinct to take cover or run.

Now let’s assume that our hero is joined by five others. All the same circumstances apply except that this time instead of our hero vs. the shooter, we have five people, randomly placed throughout the room, vs. the shooter. Now the best way for our heroes to identify their target is to shoot at the guy with the gun. But they all have guns, and they’ll just as likely fire on each other than on the actual shooter.

I’m not saying that people can’t or shouldn’t have guns. I just think that people aren’t thinking realistically when they say that it wouldn’t have happened if someone had a gun.

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