Wednesday, June 11, 2014

The Only Way to Stop a Bad Guy with a Gun....

Ok, so the last few days have seen a rash of random mass/public shootings or attempted mass shootings...As opposed to domestic killings and gang killings.

The last one happened in Oregon on Tuesday the 12th, three people (including the shooter) were ultimately shot by an angry, white, Mormon kid who loved weapons and thought Obama was coming for them. The shooter and another student is now dead.

On Sunday in Las Vegas, an angry white couple with possible white supremacist connections and other anti-government connections shot and killed 2 armed police officers then fleeing into a Walmart where the male was confronted by a civilian who was armed and had a conceal carry permit. That citizen was shot and killed by the male's wife who eventually shot herself after her husband was shot and killed by a possible combination of her guns and the ones fired by Police.

On Thursday the 5th on a college campus in Seattle, a gunman fascinated with previous school shootings and a history of mental illness a mile long and armed with a shotgun, shot 3 students, killing 1. He was subdued and apprehended by a volunteer student security guard armed with pepper spray.


On Wednesday the 4th, Canada tried to copy the US and had their own version of the angry white man with guns when a loan gunmen targeted and shot 5 police officers, killing 3 of them.

And this is older but still pretty sweet. Two conceal carry permit holders get into a road rage shooting and kill each other.


Here's what I am getting from all of this and why all the most solid arguments by the NRA are crumbling at their feet:

A. After Sandy Hook where 26 people, mostly children, were killed by legally purchased guns, Wayne LaPierre the President of the NRA, claimed that, "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun," Well, seen in Seattle and in Las Vegas, that couldn't be further from the truth. In Seattle, the bad guy with a gun, a pump action shotgun which presumably holds anywhere from 3-5 rounds, was stopped by a good guy without a gun when the bad guy stopped to reload. And in Vegas, the "good guy with a gun" didn't have the training necessary to engage the situation and was in the end, shot by a bad guy(girl) with a gun. Since he was the only victim in Wal-Mart and the couple were merely firing shots into the ceiling, he likely would still be alive had he laid down and not confronted them and didn't have a gun.

B. The other thing the NRA will tell you is that the reason we need conceal carry and hand guns is that no one in their right mind would try to rob or harm you if they think that you are armed and that mass shooters only target "gun free" zones. Forget the fact that almost no drug corner in the inner-city is a "gun free" zone nor are anyone's homes where most domestic gun violence occurs but in both the Las Vegas incident and the Canadian incident, the perpetrators specifically targeted armed cops and got away with shooting several of them. Perhaps only one of the three were even shot by the police they attacked. So now we know that you aren't going to deter violence by being armed.

C. Along with notion that the "chance of someone being armed" will deter others from attacking them, you can add the two conceal carry Darwin Award winners to the "not true" list. This also dispels the notion that only criminals shoot each other and that only sane, rational people can pass a background check and obtain a conceal carry license and that all conceal carry permit holders are responsible individuals who won't shoot someone over texting in a theater.

D. The Seattle shooting also highlights how limiting the amount of ammunition clips and guns can carry CAN save lives. If the Seattle shooter had 30 clip AK-47, the results would have been very different.

Literally every thing the NRA has told you has been shown to not be true in one week of shootings.

What else are they lying about?

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