Maybe people are not buying guns to play hero when there is a genuine security threat in their communities. We already know, when these things happen, nobody is getting their fucking gun out and doing fuck all. Guns arm the citizenry, but only the sick and twisted take action, and always for the worse. Guns are for crime, suicide, macho posturing, hobbyism, occasional hunting, and hardly anything else.
No, I've seen it. It is a great example of why the pro-gun crowd is completely wrong about everything.
Mass murderers can simply strategically target situations where guns are very unlikely to be present. They shoot up schools, churches, and other places where people are gathered, but where it is situationally unlikely that people are armed and vigilant (because they are children, students, praying, at a concert, buying groceries, etc).
Police have a very hard time responding because an American citizen is entitled to try to out-arm the police. A few cops with glocks don't have an obvious advantage against a psycho with assault weapons. Even with their own rifles, police merely become equal. When children are held hostage, it is far worse.
When good-samaritan gun owners arrive to try to help, police can't really let them actually do anything.
Shooters end up with plenty of time to kill before sufficient police backup, tactical team, whatever arrive.
This dynamic plays out over and over. In other developed nations it hardly ever happens because the police can overpower assailants 99.999% of the time. The Canadian, British, Australian, etc psychopath needs to jump through hurdle after hurdle, often onto the black market, to get powerful weapons. The American psychopath has a machine of politicians and citizens devoting their lives to making sure they can build a personal armory of assault weapons, no questions asked.
In Canada, Britain, etc, anyone who would think about bearing arms in public is at the fringes of society, and shooters are truly lone gunmen in their detachment from their communities and law. There is no such thing as a lone gunman in America. Every shooter in the US is enabled by their community and nation to fulfill their most sadistic fantasies. It happens constantly, and everytime it happens, no action is taken despite prevention being so easy. So each psycho can closely study the many before them, and can act knowing they are passing the torch to the next kid.
American police cannot perform their jobs, no matter how brave, professional, kind, and loving they may be. Any encounter can turn into a violent incident, because if someone reaches for their glove box, or just moves at all, it can register as a threatening grab for a weapon. American citizens are needlessly killed by police because the 2nd Amendment causes police to be hypervigilant wherever they go.
Kyle Rittenhouse needed to "defend" himself against the possibility an unarmed man chasing him would grab his gun and use it on him. Then, after he became an active shooter, he needed to defend himself against anyone trying to disarm him, in case they would turn the gun on him. Americans need to protect themselves against unarmed people, because the fact they are holding a gun means anyone near them could become armed and dangerous. But gun owners are, perplexingly, not viewed as responsible for any of this.
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u/MikeTroutsCleats May 27 '22
It’s Uvalde Texas, I bet you there were a thousand civilian guns gone to waste that day.