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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Practically speaking, what measures will gun rights advocates actually tolerate? It seems like the only thing they can countenance is more guns.
It seems to me that there are many ways we could 'reformat' our conception of gun ownership in a way that would preserve the ability of 'the people' to bear arms while making them less available for use in crime or mass shootings (or suicide), but I find it incredibly unlikely that the current American gun culture would find it at all tolerable.
The best you can do is probably something like move to New Hampshire. The most reasonable thing you can do is nothing.
The odds of concealed carry protecting you from victimization of any kind, let alone a mass shooting, is incredibly low, if for no other reason than because a middle class defense contractor is already extremely unlikely to be victimized and the efficacy of concealed carry in stopping mass shootings is... mixed. It's a psychological prop more than anything.
Mass shootings are, frankly, more analogous to terrorism than ordinary crime. Terrorism doesn't kill very many people, but it does scare people and make them feel powerless because it is outside the 'normal' sociology of murder. Nevertheless, carrying a gun because you might get jumped by terrorists is hard to justify.
We also enthusiastically support enforcement of existing laws that target criminal acquisition, possession, and use of firearms. Most such laws, particularly those related to straw purchases on behalf of felons, are essentially unenforced.
Based on what evidence? There have been multiple cases of public shooters ended by CCW response within the last few years, and I'm drawing them only from the cases where they got meme'd into public awareness. General self-defense via firearm happens, at best estimate, somewhere in the range of several hundred thousand times a year.
More generally, the mass shooting meme seems to be getting worse, likely as people get crazier and more polarized. It's hard to tell how much of this is perception vs reality, but I'm very glad my church now has armed security.
True, but firearms don't seem to be a uniquely effective self-defence weapon, or at least there is some tentative evidence in that direction.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743515001188?via%3Dihub#s0010
...Is this not straightforward survivorship bias? A woman who presents a firearm to a would-be rapist very likely doesn't have an actual crime to report. Likewise for a host of other crimes, from muggings to assaults to murder.
More generally, every crime successfully completed is an instance where lawful self-defense would deliver a likely-superior outcome. If self-defense rates are really this low, why aren't we trying to improve them?
Presumably they have an attempted rape/mugging/etc. to report to the survey?
Is it? Maybe I'm just too soy but if an armed mugger demanded my wallet etc. I'd rather give in than take my chances trying to defend myself, a lot of tail risk involved there, not to say that people shouldn't defend themselves though.
Well I guess we can but the point is that increasing gun usage doesn't seem like it would actually achieve that goal.
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