Hot Gun on Gun Action! (By Patt Morrison at HuffPost)

Patt Morrison

04.25.2007
Hot Gun on Gun Action! (8 comments )

If it were a TV show, it would be making a fortune for all the years it's been in syndication: the argument that more guns make a safer nation.

They've applied the paddles to it again in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting; former House speaker Newt Gingrich was quoted as remarking, ``There have been incidents of this kind of a killer who stopped because, in fact, people who are law-abiding, who are rational and people who are responsible, had the ability to stop them.''

Let's say every student at Virgina Tech was permitted -- even encouraged -- to carry a weapon. How many students might have been saved from Seung-Hui Cho's rampage -- and how many inadvertently wounded or killed in trying to shoot him down to stop it? For that matter, what might the gunplay death toll have been over the years from accidents, from suicides, from escalating arguments at beer busts, long before Seung-Hui Cho ever went gun-shopping? How many memorial benches and fountains would have been raised up to the memories of those dead?

Ever watch a Western? In those movies, everyone seems to be packing -- and except in Main Street duels, it's the first gunman gets the ambush moment, the surprise drop. He gets off the first shots and has the advantage -- very probably the same advantage he'd have if his target weren't carrying a gun at all. The likelihood of using a bullet to stop a bullet is about the same as the odds of the Reagan-era ``Star Wars'' program's success at stopping the bad guys' missile with one fired by the good guys. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pat-morrison/hot-gun-on-gun-action_b_46823.html

...Let's say every student at Virgina Tech was permitted -- even encouraged -- to carry a weapon....

Let's say instead that the author intended this as some kind of reductio ad absurdum, but it is a failed attempt.

There have been a number of opinions expressed from gun advocacy groups within the last week, all but blaming the student body at Virginia Tech for not being better armed and thus ill equipped to return fire. Just one example I can find quickly and easily, Philip Van Cleave, president of the gun rights group Virginia Citizens Defense League, told the Associated Press:

It's an argument to allow people who already have guns and permits to carry them, to be guaranteed the right to carry them on campus.

If the school wants a no-guns policy that's the school's business, but IMO when you make such a policy you inherit the moral responsibility to protect people.

Gun-free zones that work, e.g. courthouses and secured areas of airports, have extensive security measures in place to make sure that NO unauthorized person brings in a weapon. Without metal detectors, X-rays, and guards, a no-guns policy is worse than useless.

From the point of view of the school, which is theoretically starting out with no guns on campus, or at least only those possessed in violation of the school's rules, opening up campus for anyone to carry a gun certainly would result in more guns being on campus.

On a slightly different topic, do you believe that allowing students to carry guns on campus would save more lives than it would cost? It often sounds like the gun community believes that, if everyone were armed, crazed psycho killers like Cho could be brought down before they had a chance to kill large numbers of people. Okay, that may be true, I don't really know, but, from a macro point of view, how often do instances like that really come up? In comparison, how many drunken brawls at frat parties fail to escalate to homocide because the parties aren't armed with deadly weapons?

This is always the question uppermost in my mind when these topics come up. The assertion that guns make people safe just doesn't sound even remotely plausible to me. You take any community of people and there will always, without fail, be some members who are emotionally unstable, susceptible to rage, prone to violent flares of temper, paranoid, whatever. Without guns, such people express their anger and/or fear primarily verbally and, on occasion, with physical violence which is only very rarely skilled enough to achieve lethality. If you were to add guns to that picture, suddenly anyone who got pissed off could end the life of their perceived tormentor by simply pulling a trigger. Yet pro-gun people seem to expect me to believe that no one would ever actually use their weapons if they had them, they would always be constrained from using them inappropriately by their good common sense and the goodness of their hearts. Pardon me while I guffaw. These are human beings we're talking about, the same species that gave us trigger happy serial killers like George Bush! And I'm supposed to believe that the world would be safer if they were all armed to the teeth?

If they did, there would be clear statistical evidence and abundant anecdotes from the states where permits are issued based on objective criteria.

Guns in the hands of people who are going to carry them regardless of the rules, are not affected by the rules. Those are the people you need to worry about.

On a slightly different topic, do you believe that allowing students to carry guns on campus would save more lives than it would cost?

I think it would cost zero lives in exchange for a possibility, however slight, that it might save one some day.

It often sounds like the gun community believes that, if everyone were armed, crazed psycho killers like Cho could be brought down before they had a chance to kill large numbers of people.... ...And I'm supposed to believe that the world would be safer if they were all armed to the teeth?

There's that old "arm everyone" straw man again. The truth is that in states where concealed carry licenses are required to be issued to any qualified person who requests one, less than 1% of the population even gets one (it's right about 1% in Texas). Some people decide, when they take the training that most states require, that they don't really want to shoulder the responsibility of a weapon. People who have the license don't always carry. I suspect that in an academic institution, the percentage of people who elect to carry a weapon would be lower than in the population at large.

In my experience, people who do carry weapons are very discrete about it and very careful to avoid confrontations. Shooting someone is literally the last thing you would want to do.