Agree, but edge case. Maybe you're armed, maybe you have the training, and maybe you're not going to panic. Can't base sound policy at scale on the stars aligning.
What range training features people who are bent on killing _actively shooting back_ at you?
_You_ don't want to harm anyone else, you only want to protect yourself (and possibly others). They have no such compunction.
Being able to put a few downrange with a Glock is not an active shooter situation, and honestly, as a first responder, most people in such situations find themselves vomiting, urinating in terror (and reasonably so).
I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.
However, overall, it would be terrible policy because such a proliferation of arms in public would result in all kinds of extra mass shootings, suicides, homicides, accidents, etc. that would cause more deaths than any reduction in the lethality of a given mass shooting.
I grew up with gun culture. I was taught you don't pull a gun unless you are genuinely ready to kill someone. If you aren't prepared, both logistically and psychologically, to actually kill someone, this goes very bad places.
The idea that we just need to arm everyone pretty much guarantees that most people won't actually meet that standard. It goes all kinds of bad places.
The other thing is you don't find your way to a more peaceful civil climate by escalating the violence. That's so very much "Going to war to protect the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
We need to be fostering a more civil climate where Americans are better cared for. That's the real solution here. We need to be fixing healthcare and housing and the extremes of poverty in this country that are appalling for a first world country.
And I think that most of the discussions of gun violence overlook that larger reality and see it is as not relevant. But there are reasons people go postal here, and it isn't because a side effect of gun ownership is insanity.
> I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.
I don't think you've thought this through. You hear one, then two gun shots coming from two different people in a plaza with a bunch of people. Who's the real attacker?
Say you actually witnessed it, what about the 50 other people around you who now see you brandishing and firing a gun? Are you now the threat?
If everyone is shooting back at everyone else, the death toll will be WAY higher than just ducking and hiding with only one shooter. The real threat is clear in this scenario. The police know who to take down.
> I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.
It's probably much easier, if you count the deaths you cause and not just those from bullets you fire. When there is one person shooting, there are myriad reports from eyewitnesses with different numbers and descriptions of the shooters. When you've got multiple people shooting you are going to have multiple people perceiving who started the shooting differently.