One More Time, with Feeling: Guns are Not Protection

There are reports, as yet still unverified, that more than one Broward County deputy failed to confront the Parkland shooter:

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said it is investigating allegations that multiple deputies failed to enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., after the shooting rampage there, adding to the mounting internal probes examining the department’s response to the attack and its prior interactions with the suspect.

Donald Trump and others are casting this as cowardice. But what it really does is emphasize the fact that guns are not protection.

These deputies were probably armed with handguns and shotguns. I would wager that they could tell that the shooter was using an AR-15. They knew they would be outgunned, and they were probably waiting for SWAT to show up. SWAT has ballistic armor and weapons like the MP5/10 submachine gun, Colt M4 carbine, sniper rifles, etc.

It should be obvious by now that civilians have no business owning weapons that are more powerful than what the police carry. Civilians should not be allowed to own assault rifles like the AR-15, or ballistic armor, or silencers (which the NRA was still trying put into civilian hands, and into children's hands after the Vegas shooting!).

Gun nuts whine that many hunting rifles can be categorized as assault rifles. Read this article about what the AR-15 does when it goes through a human body.

Any weapon that purees your liver when its bullet goes through your body is a weapon of war. Such firearms should not be in civilian hands, any more than civilians should own machine guns, hand grenades or nuclear weapons.