{"id":345,"date":"2018-08-29T13:43:14","date_gmt":"2018-08-29T17:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=345"},"modified":"2018-08-29T13:43:14","modified_gmt":"2018-08-29T17:43:14","slug":"more-guns-more-shootings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"More Guns, More Shootings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another day, another mass shooting, this time at a video game tournament in Jacksonville<\/a>, Florida.\u00a0 Since the shooter turned his weapon on himself before police could arrest him we\u2019ll likely never know just why.\u00a0 He may have had a personal grudge against another player or just got pissed when he lost.<\/p>\n

Of course, the gun nut lobbyists at the National Rifle Association<\/a> wasted no time bringing out the “more guns in the room would have either deterred the shooter or allowed someone to bring him down<\/a>” chestnut. \u00a0(Or maybe they just want to ban headsets in public.<\/a>) \u00a0So I have to express my exasperation with people who believe that mass shooting tragedies can be prevented by creating an armed society and normalizing guns in public places.<\/p>\n

It is obviously impossible to ban handguns, both politically and as a practical matter. Though events occasionally bring gun control back onto policy agendas, there is little support for repealing the Second Amendment. \u00a0Even if there were we are no more likely to round up and destroy all the handguns in America than we are to round up and deport every illegal alien.<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t think of any good reason to think that expanding the pool of Americans walking around with guns in their pockets is a good idea. John Lott\u2019s efforts notwithstanding, no real evidence exists to show that more guns reduce crime, or even homicide.<\/p>\n

Subjecting the idea to a thought experiment might help. Let\u2019s imagine that some number of participants in or spectators at the Madden tournament had been armed. While this may have deterred the shooter (I refuse to use his name\u2014it won\u2019t get a Google hit here), knowing some of his targets were armed might just as likely made things more interesting for him. \u00a0And though an armed citizen in the might have stopped him, think for a minute what this would look like<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Even well-meaning armed citizens reacting to the gunman would likely have little or no training. This means they would probably have failed to stop him and likely succeeded only in getting themselves shot. This happens every day to well-trained police officers and soldiers, and there is no reason to think that untrained Rambo wannabes would be any more successful.<\/p>\n

More importantly, armed citizens in the room would have no way of coordinating efforts with others. As many as five or six people might have attempted to return fire with no idea whom they needed to take out, no idea where he was, and no way to know whether others they found armed were not the original shooter or working with him<\/a>. This seems to me a recipe for a running gun battle, with people shooting each other more or less randomly out of fear, shock, or mistaken identity. With six weapons in the mix instead of one, the death toll would likely have grown much larger before the gunman was taken out.<\/p>\n

And then of course the police arrive to find several armed people shooting at each other.\u00a0 They have no way to identify the original shooter or control the situation without a high risk of killing some or all of the innocent people who took the law into their own hands.\u00a0 More unnecessary death.<\/p>\n

The best research shows that arming more citizens does not reduce crime<\/a>, and that in fact America\u2019s mass shooter problem depends on easy access to firearms<\/a>.\u00a0 The solution then is to make purchasing a gun more difficult and require owners to secure them properly when not in use.\u00a0 Let\u2019s get to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another day, another mass shooting, this time at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, Florida.\u00a0 Since the shooter turned his weapon on himself before police could arrest him we\u2019ll likely never know just why.\u00a0 He may have had a personal grudge against another player or just got pissed when he lost. Of course, the gun […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[93,31,35,43,61],"tags":[30,49,127],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-guns-and-gun-control","category-right-wing-fever-dreams","category-second-amendment","category-terrorism","tag-guns","tag-right-wing-fever-dreams","tag-second-amendment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}