Why Carrying A Gun Accomplishes Nothing

From a recent question of mine on Quora...

Bo Schembechler, storied football coach of the University of Michigan was once asked why he ran such a conservative offence rarely throwing the football. His answer was, when you throw the football there are three possible outcomes, two of them are bad. Now this story may be apocryphal but the point is that when assessing options it wise to understand the odds you are up against. 

The notion that more guns in the hands of good people as a general solution to gun violence is crazy in this context. First of all the odds that one will ever get in a situation where having a gun has even the most remote possibility of being useful while you are out in public (let alone saving your life) is spectacularly slim. 

The first rule is, if a place is so dangerous that you feel you need a gun, then it's not safe to be there even with a gun. People carrying a gun tend to feel as if the gun the gun will protect them. Further, most gun crime is criminal against criminal or between two people who know each other. In the first situation "good guys" don't have to worry. Sure you could get caught in the crossfire but your gun won't help you against a random stay round. In the second scenario you are dealing with a friend, family member, acquaintance where you won't really feel threatened until things turn seriously bad. In the overwhelming majority of these situation you are in them because you have failed to extricate yourself from it before things got out of hand. The psychology of domestic violence is only exacerbated by the presence of firearms; firearms are almost never the solution. As all things with guns you can point out the few and rare situations where someone defend themselves successfully from a domestic violence situation but these are not the norm and only serve as the rare exception that proves the rule.

But let's say you find yourself alone, at night, in a bad part of town (this is your first mistake by the way) and all of a sudden you are confronted with a bad guy holding a gun. Here is where the good guy with a gun logic gets turned on it's head. A good guy with a gun is pretty useless if he or she can't shoot. One of the most egregious troupe of films is that one shot from a gun stops an assailant cold. It won't, unless you are a point blank range it's pretty difficult to get off a shot that will stop someone allowing them to shoot back. Most people who carry don't spend an awful lot of time at the range and even fewer have actually shot someone. It very difficult to understand how your emotions will not serve you well when you find yourself in an actual life threatening situation. It is almost inconceivable that, without intense training, most people will do anything other than soil themselves when confronted with an actual life threatening situation. The assailant is probably a sociopath and cares not for you life, or his for that matter. Maybe he or she is a drug addict and is high right now. The point is here are all the things that can go wrong for the "Good Guy"

• You could shoot and miss, and you get shot
• You could shoot and not bring the perp down, and they shoot you back
• you could shoot, miss and kill someone else
• Someone else with a gun could come along and mistake you for the bad guy and shot you
• The perp could take your gun away from you and shoot you with it

One the other hand you could take the assailant down, but statistically the best you will do is frighten them off to try again. The problem of the good guy is that 9 times out of 10 the bad guy will have the drop on you and then you have to count on the assailant  being mind-bogglingly careless to even have a chance. Again people do actually succeed at this and those are the stories you hear about you rarely hear about the other side where the good guy get's it (the media loves a hero).

But let's say you carry a gun all the time and come accross a crime in progress. This is where you can be the hero right? Well first of all carrying a gun is a staggering commitment. Right off the bat let's all hope you actually know how to shoot. I will admit that most people who do this are committed people who follow safe shooting procedures, and sped at least some time at the shooting range. You have to have your gun with you at all times wearing clothes that will conceal the gun. Remember when we talked about the likelihood of being the victim of an armed assailant? Well just randomly coming across a crime in progress is makes the first scenario look like a daily occurrence in comparison. Not bloody likely.

But lets say you do come across a crime in progress, it does happen. Again your heart is pounding, you have to think quickly and clearly (yes I trust the random untrained guy on the street to get this right) but in addition to all the possibilities in the first scenario here are some additional things that could go wrong when coming across a crime in progress (say a hold up):

• You shoot the wrong person (maybe a guy who works there came out of the back)
• Much more likely to shoot an innocent bystander
• You don't know if there isn't another shooter you can see and you get shot (this has happened recently).

In fact in the best case scenario you will only get a shot off at a fleeing suspect which is moronic in the extreme because a fleeing suspect isn't a danger and would never justify deadly force.  But all of this is beside the point, a "good guy" with a gun whose first thought is about trying to defuse the situation themselves is more often a menace to himself and those around him.  He should be using that time to call the police. Any trained officer knows that the first thing you do is call for backup, not pull your gun.

Once again do not misunderstand me, I am completely aware that people can, and do, stop crime with their guns. My argument is that those cases, though they seem to happen pretty regularly, when you break it down on an incident per 1000 basis it's just not all that common; not close to anything like common . Further when you take into consideration whether or not they actually saved a life, even rarer still. Criminals are every bit as stupid as everyone else. Most of the time they are just as untrained as the guy who carries a gun, but rarely, if ever, actually spends time at the gun range. The Media loves to glorify these accounts due to the obvious heroics of the people involved (which is why you can find a lot of stories like this which make it seem like it's happening all the time in the aggregate)  but on careful reading  of these accounts you find some similar threads:

• Involvement of active duty or ex military or law enforcement
• Shooting at fleeing assailants
• Shooting at unarmed assailants (or at least those without a gun)
• And the fact that they are very very rare in the overall scheme of things
• or mistakenly innocent people which are almost never reported in the media (but in fairness these cases are pretty rare too)

The cases the media doesn't like to report are situations where the good guy loses like this: Family mourns man killed while trying to stop shooting spree. Or the cases where no one was really in danger as they were fleeing at the time  (they do get reported but they understandably tend not to make headlines 86-year-old won't be charged in concealed carry shooting, prosecutors say).
 
The point of all of this is that whatever the solution to gun crime in america is, it's definitely, most assuredly not putting more guns in the hands of untrained citizens who have no background in dealing with high stress situations with dangerous tools that they are ill prepared to wield safely and accurately. Google Gun went off at gun safety demonstration.

I believe, and current 2nd amendment jurisprudence backs this up, that states have the right to set the terms and conditions under which a person can legally carry a firearm in public. And that those conditions should be strengthened not relaxed as the current trend seems to be.  Guns may not be the problem per se, but I'm pretty sure they aren't the solution are not the solution. And the idea that founding fathers thought that strolling around target with a loaded AR-15 slung around your back is an appropriate expression of your 2nd amendment right is just off the scale crackers. 

People ask me if I think gun control (whatever that means) is the answer. I think that is a complex question given the penetration of firearms in this country. But here are a few things I do know:

• If you look at all of the mass shootings going back to the 1966 clock tower shooting at U of T, not one of them has been perpetrated with a very heavily regulated fully automatic weapon. Not one and that God.
• The best defense against being the victim of crime is Situational Awareness is Everything. This one thing will cut your chances of being a victim in half or more.
• We simply cannot not and should not accept a world where carrying a gun is the solution to crime. That is the mindset of surrender

Finally (Did you think this was ever going to end?), Crime is down, vastly down, we are living in an era that has less overall crime then at any time in recent history while at the same time individual gun ownership is at an all time low (gun sale are conversely at an alltime high, chew on that for just a moment and draw the inescapable conclusion). I'm not in anyway saying that this is the reason for lower crime, that would be nonsense,what I am saying is that the problem of crime tends to stem from culture and you can't fix that with more guns.

And my comment...

Fantastic points! They really align with objective reality. Unfortunately, reality is not where gun rights folks live. A tremendously insecure lot, the gun gives them the illusion power they so desperately need. This fantasy continues as they all believe they can be Jack Bauer or John McLean, saving themselves or others in an active shooting situation. 

But when you break it down so logically as you have here, their illusion shatters