Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Jophiel wrote:
You know, the event that ended here with the gunman firing at the police.
Was there additional information that he actually fired at the police?
Yes. He fired at the police.
Hence, my question. All the earlier reports (and the info in the OP) only said that he pointed his gun at police, not that he had fired at them (him, as it turns out). And for the love of God, when you quote a news article, could you link to it too?
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It matters because the Pollyanna notion that just seeing a gun will terrify shooters into standing down isn't actually accurate.
And the Pollyanna notion that my entire argument rests on this is even less accurate. I never said that seeing a gun will
always terrify the shooters into standing down. I said that the fact that there
might be an armed person in the crowd will influence the decision of a potential shooter to go through with it in the first place. I also said that in most cases, the mere presence of an armed person is sufficient to end the shooting event (I never said how though). There are plenty of examples of a shooter being confronted with an armed person and choosing to flee rather than shoot it out. That this case appears to be an exception to that rule does not change the rule. And when it does get into a shoot out, this does in nearly every case end the shooting event (one way or another).
The fact is that in the overwhelming majority of shootings, the shooting ends shortly after the first armed person (other than the shooter) arrives on scene. Whether that person is an armed civilian or law enforcement does not seem to make much difference. The number of innocent bystanders who die *after* the first armed person intervenes is almost always zero. One can conclude from this that the best way to minimize the number of fatalities in a shooting event is to minimize the amount of time it takes for that first armed person to arrive. And the best way to do that (barring a police station being 1-2 blocks away), is to allow and even encourage concealed carry by civilians.
That's this thing we call logic. I get that it violates your emotion driven agenda, but it is the truth.
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Well, I guess it is in the fantastical "we'll never know how many shootings were stopped..." unprovable way.
The exact number of shootings prevented because of the potential of an armed person in the crowd can't be proven (duh), but we can point to the significant rise in the rate and severity of such shootings right after we started creating "gun free zones". Which should give us an idea. I mean, I suppose we could just speculate that there was some significant social change that just happened to occur right around the mid 90s, that more or less doubled the rate of mass shooting events. We don't know what that could be, but maybe there's some magic involved or something. Or... We could make the much more reasonable leap that the rate of disturbed individuals who might contemplate such a thing has remained relatively constant, but the ease of committing such an act has increased with the creation of gun free zones, and that's why we've seen the increase in actual shootings.
So yeah, we can't say for 100% certain which shootings may or may not have occurred if there weren't gun free zones around, but there's strong evidence to suggest that we've suffered more of them as a result of those zones. I'm not sure how one can rationally discount this as a factor.
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Or, hey, maybe this guy wasn't aware that police had guns. I bet if he knew he never would have shot!
Or maybe he's the exception to the rule. Most shooters don't wait until the cops arrive and then get into a shootout with them. Most shooters kill themselves as soon as they believe that police have arrived on scene. Because most shooters don't want to or intent to survive the incident, and the last thing they want is to be merely wounded by the police. This guys shooting was a personal vendetta, so it's not a great case to use. Most mass shootings (which this one wasn't, although I suppose it could have been) are less about anger at the people personally, and more a desire on the part of the shooter to show power and control over others that he lacks in his day to day life. That means minimizing the odds of anyone challenging that power. Hence, why they usually go to great lengths to avoid encounters with anyone who is armed.
Again, this shooting was an exception, not the rule. Um... But even as an exception, it's pretty clear that had one of the many people in the area been armed, the risk to bystanders would have been much less than it was. Imagine if the guy who got the attention of the shooter had been armed? Instead of throwing rocks at the shooter to get his attention, and then running around hoping he or someone else didn't get shot, he could have simply shot the guy immediately and ended the danger. Same ultimate result, far less risk to others.
Oh. And I'm still waiting for you to provide data on the number of times in the history of mass shootings in the US that an armed civilian intervening with the shooter has accidentally shot an innocent bystander. You know, since your entire argument rests on the assumption that they would make the event more dangerous to bystanders rather than less so. Can you do this? Cause we do have stats on how many shootings that sort of intervention has ended (prior to police arrival). Would be helpful to have some sort of data on how many times the presence of such a person in the crowd did actually make the situation worse. I've yet to find a single case of this happening, but perhaps your superior interweb research skills will find something.