Phatscotty wrote:Say it were true 25% of American citizens carried firearms. That's 1 in 4. Plug those hypothetical numbers into a recent shooting such as in California. or really any headline where a mass murderer has shot 17 people, or wounded 25 people. Where 25 people were wounded, the odds are that 6 of those wounded 25 people had a gun on them. How does the number get up to 25 wounded? I think it's easy to say a mass murderer would be stopped by one of the wounded people far before the number got to 25.
Of course the caveat here is that this situation concerning location would not apply in places such as schools or court houses, but we can assume that if
This is a very old debate. Actually, the one place that I think we might use more guns is schools (WELL trained individuals ONLY who volunteer to do so), and court houses (again, trained, but should be mandatory for more people working there).
Per the rest, I cite the owner of Red Jacket (an arms manufacturer, aka show Sons of Guns -- definitely NOT talking a liberal gun phobe), when he took a prospective
client down to the gun range before selling him a gun, to show them what might happen if they had a gun and tried to face an intruder.
The real issue is that anyone having a gun has to either be lucky or have some pretty serious training to be effective in self-defense. And that means something well beyond simple target shooting or even shooting things like trap/sporting clays and even hunting. None of those have much potential to shoot back. Also, there is a definite difference between shooting a rifle/shotgun and a pistol on top of that. Sadly, those using guns for evil tend to have that training and most of the general public, regardless of their opinion about guns, just does not have the ability, the time and money (we are talking about some serious time and money) or they lack the desire to do it.
When you talk about prevention, there are really 4 different situations:
1. intentional, planned terroristic type individuals. The answer here is largely for people to pay attention to things happening around them, get to know their neighbors, etc, BUT NOT to be assuming that they need to be suspicious of "certain individuals". Ironically,research shows that this pushback may well be what terrorists intend, because their whole goal is to create division. Put it this way.. I may not go to church every Sunday, but nothing would get me there more quickly than being told I cannot go or that Christians as a whole are bad people, etc.!
2. psycopathic killer (using this as a generic term, not a clinical term, to mean any wacko who decides to go shoot people). The best defense against these people is a combination of better psychological services and specific, directed and limited legislation to prevent those with very real issues from buying guns. Thankfully, even the NRA is just beginning to come around to that, though some of that is just lip service.
3. People involved in domestic violence/ prior attack situations. This is tricky because many of these can actually be perfectly OK. Also, in many cases these people have legal firearms already, show no real indicators that they might "blow". Also, its very easy for people to make false "victim" claims in disputes and it can be tricky to distinguish that type of situation from real threats. Most people with protection from abuse orders and such already are prohibited from buying guns, but they don't always have to relinquish guns they have in their possession already.
4. The random act. Too often there is just no real, outward predictor. More research might help. Sadly, the NRA pushed through rules that have heavily stifled the collection of information, stating that the plans to collect were basically just a liberal political plot. We need data, real, scientifically base data that shows real information, and that data needs to be collected without regard to the political implications, just science.
