Guns Don’t Solve Problems
“The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
That’s what the NRA likes to say. It’s catchy. It makes you feel like you could be Steven Seagal, prowling the belly of a battleship with an MP5, taking out terrorists like a boss. Let’s look at the likelihood of that.
School shooters are almost always caught. They know what they are getting into. Either they don’t mind being caught, or they want to be caught. Some school shooters find it very important that everyone know it is them. Others just want the experience, at any cost. Deterrence won’t work.
Think of it like terrorism, or protecting the President. If someone really wants to blow up a federal building, or run up to the President and shoot at him, they can do it, but they will probably be caught. And they know that. That’s okay with them. So what do we do? We put the President inside bomb proof cars, behind walls of highly trained Secret Service agent, and sometimes in bulletproof, armored suits like Tony Stark.
We can’t do that with all the schools in the US.
If someone wants to walk into a high school and start shooting people, they’ll probably empty one magazine before a good guy with a gun shows up. The NRA argument is thus that about five people is an acceptable loss, and then, hopefully, a good guy with a gun can show up and be a hero. Maybe someone will fellate his heroic penis afterwards. At least, that’s the fantasy. This is idiotic.
The tragedy of all this is in the numbers. The Columbine shooters were a major aberration. They did not have assault weapons, just guns and smoke bombs. They killed 13 children. At Marjory Stoneman Douglas, one man with an AR-15 killed 17 students. The Armalite more than doubled the killing power of this school shooter. It’s that simple.
If someone turns up with a knife, they might take out one or two people, but no more than one can do with a sharpened pencil. A gun changes the math considerably. Let’s say a killer has about three minutes before a good guy with a gun turns up. And let’s say for a moment that the bad guy is calm, because this was all planned out, and the good guy’s pulse is high, like a basketball player. At 150 BPM, people forget how to dial 911, never mind take a good shot, so let’s arm that good guy with an imaginary Gatling Shotgun that will definitely kill the bad guy, and magically no one else.
There’s still time to kill lots of people. With an AR-15, it’s possible to kill a lot of people very quickly, so in those minutes, the bad guy could still corner 30 kids in a classroom and strafe them until everyone is dead. Frankly, I’m shocked these school shooters haven’t killed more people. I suppose if they grow up to be professional gamblers who favor video poker, they’ll have more time to practice.
It isn’t clear how to legislate this problem away. The specifics of legislation are hard to suss out. Legislators have to distill the anger of their constituents into laws intended to do specific things. That’s hard. That’s alchemy.
We could start to fix this problem with an NHS so the mentally ill aren’t allowed to fall through the cracks. We’re still stuck with a problem: the dangerously mentally ill still can’t be forced into treatment until they do something dangerous and against the law. In New York, the mentally ill homeless were often rounded up and put in institutions, until a lawsuit said that until someone hits someone else over the head with a brick, you can’t lock them up. In the UK, the dangerously insane can be “sectioned”, but not here. This end of the problem is like the match that starts a fire. On its own, it’s mostly harmless. In the wrong conditions, it starts a conflagration. This is a massive problem that will likely take a network of laws and amendments to to the constitution to fix. It’s awful.
The second problem is guns.
What is the purpose of guns?
To kill.
So why should anyone in America be allowed to have guns?
Because if you don’t live in a city, help could be far away. If you have someone break into your home and the cops are twenty minutes away, they might show up in time to tag your toe. Because if you go for a walk in the woods and are confronted by a bear, you’d better have a magnum or you’ll just piss it off. If you are a hunter, it is inhumane to wound an animal and leave it to die in the woods when it runs off; you must have a high power rifle or shotgun that will give your prey a clean death. If the idea of anyone being able to control life and death makes you squeamish, sorry, it’s time to grow up. Guns are not going away, and should never go away.
None of these needs call for an assault weapon. None of them.
The law that seems to have really turned around the gun problem in Australia wasn’t so much the buyback program or the ban on assault weapons, but the registration of guns. By making people responsible for the actions taken with guns registered to them, and making under the table sales illegal, gun crimes dropped precipitously.
In the final analysis however, this most recent shooting boils down to the power of assault weapons to inflict mass casualty events. It’s time for them to go.
Also, I hate to say it, but a bad guy with a gun can also stop a good guy with a gun. Because he has a gun.
