Zymunn wrote:
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Tyler Texas Courthouse shooting I believe. While the civilian didn't kill the shooter (and was actually killed himself), his action is why the shooter stopped shooting random people and attempted to flee. Police caught up to him later. The point being that no one else was killed after the civilian took action (well, except himself). There's no evidence that the shooter would have stopped shooting people if not for that intervention.
This makes no sense. The shooter is randomly shooting at people, assuming he is killing them. All of a sudden some random person dies due to the random shooting and the guy freaks and runs away...
Huh? It wasn't random shooting. The civilian shot the shooter and interrupted him (while he was actually attempting to kill his son, after already killing his ex-wife). The shooter was not able to kill the boy, but instead focused his attention on the civilian, eventually killing him. At that point, more police had arrived and he choose to flee. The point being had the civilian not intervened, it's almost guaranteed that the boy would have been killed and possibly several other people.
Point being that there's no way to prove what would have happened otherwise, but you also can't assume that nothing would have.
I've already posted a list of shootings that were interrupted by armed civilians. How about you go look at them instead of just pretending that none of them prevented additional loss of life. There's the New Life Church shooting, in which a heavily armed man, intent on killing as many people in the church as possible, killed two people and wounded 3 others in the process of entering the church, and was met by an armed civilian with a concealed weapon, who shot him and stopped the shooting. Given the amount of ammunition he had, it's not unreasonable that dozens of people could have died that day had the civilian not stopped him.
There are a number of cases where random people who just happened to be in a location with a concealed weapon have stopped a shooting incident cold. They just don't get much (any) national news coverage because usually few if any people are killed, and frankly it doesn't play into the anti-gun narrative that most people in the mainstream media want to tell the public.
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Link this story so that facts you are not mentioning can be read. Try not to ignore this post, normally you are all about creating more hypotheticals but ignored my last post completely.
Sigh. I've already linked to a site with a whole list of other links (twice).
Here is it again. And these are just the cases where the shooting was public and it's pretty clear that more people would have died if not for the intervention. We can't know at all how many individual cases of self defense with a weapon prevent victimization, but as I pointed out earlier in this thread, the absolute lower bounds for that is 800,000 a year, with upper bound studies predicting more like 5 million, and the more moderate studies coming in around 2.5-3 million
per year.
Again though, all of this is somewhat moot. The statistics are just that: statistics. I'll again point out that absent a removal of the 2nd amendment, people in the US will always have access to firearms. Given that most mass shootings are committed by people who do not have criminal backgrounds and who obtain their weapons legally, the most gun control efforts can do is limit the type of firearms they can use and there's no evidence that this will actually reduce the number of people they'll kill *or* the likelihood of a shooting happening in the first place. We can certainly look at better psychological screening methods and whatnot, but that's never going to be anywhere near 100% either (and opens up a whole privacy can of worms as well).
I think it's reasonable to not just focus on prevention but also mitigation. How do you minimize the harm caused when someone decides to go on one of these shooting sprees? None of that other stuff stops the killer once he starts shooting. The only thing that does is if someone stops him. And the one thing that the statistics do absolutely show us is that civilians will always be present at a shooting before the police arrive (obvious, but there you have it). So if some percentage of them may be armed in the area where the shooting occurs, the odds of stopping the shooting earlier and with fewer deaths is increased.
This is really not in question. If just one of the faculty had been armed at that school last week, we'd likely have far far fewer dead children today. People look at events like this and become outraged that they happen, but they fail to point any of that outrage at the lack of an incredibly simple legal change which would almost certainly save many lives and might even deter these sorts of shooters from picking schools as their target of choice in the first place (although perhaps not in this case). The unfortunate reality is when you support the laws which enforce gun free zones around schools, you are basically contributing to the deaths of those children. And the next batch. And the next. And the next. Shooters have shown that they don't care what kinds of weapons they can use, or how much you tell them it's wrong, they'll still attempt to do these kinds of things. The only thing that stops before they kill as many as they can is someone stopping them. And the odds of that happening increase dramatically if there are armed civilians in the area.
It should be a no-brainer, really.