Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Because the odds of a person who has spent the time and effort to obtain a concealed weapons permit also spending time and effort becoming a proficient shot with his weapon is pretty high.
Most shots fired by trained police officers miss their target. Which is (part of) why police officers aren't supposed to fire their weapons unless absolutely necessary.
And that's relevant how? Seems like you're suggesting that a random guy with a concealed weapon isn't likely to do any worse than the police in a situation like that.
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But, sure, random guy with a gun will be the crack shot during an active situation who saves us all. Why not.
Yes. Why not? I also love how you've excluded the middle between "untrained hillbilly with an itchy trigger finger" and "crack shot". In most cases, an armed person only needs to be present. And in a case where the shooter is so incompetent that he shoots one person by surprise point blank and fails to kill him, and then runs around chasing the second person while blasting away with 13 more shots and fails to hit him, I'm thinking "moderately capable of hitting a barn door" is more than sufficient.
I'll also point out that the mere potential for carry (concealed or otherwise) acts to prevent shootings like this. This is one of the factors that gun stats can't show us. How many people don't go on a shooting spree because they are afraid they'll have to deal with armed resistance to their rampage? We can't say for sure, but the stats on mass shootings since we created "gun free zones" seems to suggest that this does have some effect both on the rate of such shootings as a whole, and certainly on the choice of where the shootings occur.
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Or he's just known a shit ton more "gun people" than you and is considerably better informed.
No. More likely he's playing to a narrative despite personally knowing better. Is every gun owner a paragon of safety and responsibility? No. Of course not. Would I rather that there be a chance that an average "gun person" was in the area and armed if/when some crazy person started randomly shooting people? Yeah. Absolutely. My odds of survival are much higher if that person is there than if he is not. I'd have to dig up the source, but I recall someone doing research on this and concluding that the average number of victim fatalities in a mass shooting or potential mass shooting even (and he used far more stringent criteria for "potential mass shooting event" than I would have), was like 6 times higher when the shooting continued until uniformed security/police arrived versus when someone in the crowd intervened.
Intentionally ensuring that there can't be an armed person in the crowd other than the shooter is just dumb. It's fearful knee-jerk legislation that has done us more harm than good.
Edited, Mar 15th 2016 7:50pm by gbaji