The Utility Of A Good Guy With A Gun

Gun rights activists and the NRA itself have routinely pointed out that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. In the wake of Las Vegas, many are questioning that. After all, there were several armed citizens at the concert and they could do nothing. Nothing at all.

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Now, the gun grabbers are using that fact to try and dispell the idea that a good guy with a gun stops bad people from doing bad things.

Within the Beltway, everyone knows this game is mostly about money. The NRA, like the financial services industry or Big Pharma, is an easy source of campaign cash, and all politicians have to do to get it is master the art of selling purely commercial lobbying as heartfelt ideological advocacy.

This is relatively easy when we’re talking about hunting rifles, gets dicier when the issue turns to concealed weapons, and then becomes an exercise in pure political whoring and pseudo-intellectualism once it comes to making up justifications for selling military-grade weapons to Internet shoppers.

Just a pause here to point out to the ignorant moron writer of this piece that any purchase over the internet has to go through a licensed dealer. It can’t be shipped to an individual, it has to go through the right FFL. In the case of a machine gun, it has to go through someone licensed to sell those guns.

It’s not like Amazon where you can order something and get it on your doorstep in a couple of days.

Moving on…

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Las Vegas is going to provide a major rhetorical challenge on that front. After all, the gun lobby’s consistent response has been to argue that such killings would be avoided, or at least reduced, if more people were armed.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” NRA chief Wayne LaPierre infamously said after Newtown.

But the shooter in Las Vegas, [the shooter], was on the 32nd floor of a casino building, a quarter-mile away from the bulk of his victims down in a concert venue on the ground. Unless the NRA plans on advocating for carry licenses for F-16s or surface-to-surface missile systems, it’s hard to see how the “good guy with a gun” argument is going to fly this time.

So, because we have one instance where it didn’t work–an event so unlike everything else we’ve dealt with before as to boggle the mind–the entire idea of an armed citizenry being a possible bulwark against this kind of thing goes out the window? How does he figure?

First, allow me to point out that the bad guy was, indeed, stopped by good guys with guns. In this case, it was the police, but considering the nature of what happened, that’s hardly surprising. At the range we’re talking about, the handguns most armed citizens carry are woefully inadequate.

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Let’s not talk about how the anti-gun left soils itself every time they see someone with a rifle slung over their shoulder. Yet that’s precisely what would have been needed to have a hope in hell of shooting one person on the 32 floor of a building some 300 yards away.

Yet no one has said that concealed carry will stop every crime. It can’t. I’ll concede that Las Vegas proved that. However, since I never argued it would, that’s not really much of a win for anyone.

Las Vegas was a strange, senseless tragedy, but we already know that these kinds of shootings are atypical. But the gun grabbers won’t let a good crisis go to waste.

 

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