Fighting Madness by Arming the Madmen
NOTE: I maintain @couchguy as my personal Twitter account, and a second account under @RPGbricks for my LEGO and game-centered business by that name. Because I am back and forth between the accounts throughout the day, I sometimes manage to follow a non-game/LEGO Twitter account with the RPGbricks account, leading to me replying there.
I managed to do so “bigly" (as our POTUS would say) on April 28, 2018, responding to a post by Aisha Tyler (@aishatyler) from April 24 regarding “The Unarmed Man Who Stopped The Waffle House Shooter”. Her post, along with the linked news item which sparked it, drew a Tweetstorm out of me that may have confused the LEGO and game fans who subscribe to the @RPGbricks feed. (Oddly, though, no one responded in anything other than a positive fashion to the misplaced Tweetstorm.)
In any event, I am posting here Aisha's Tweet and link, as well as a slightly edited version of my reply. Perhaps this essay will finally reach the intended audience from the @couchguy account. I will try hard to keep such opinion off the @RPGbricks feed in the future. Then again, LEGO and game fans are just as concerned about this as everyone else, so I hope they didn't mind too much.
Aisha Tyler (@aishatyler)
http://www.good.is/articles/james-shaw-hero-waffle-house-shooting?sid=sst944570sh
Shaw's actions counter the NRA myth “It takes a good guy with a gun to combat a bad guy with a gun.” An FBI report found that unarmed people took down assailants 4 times more than those with guns.
Aisha is so right in the Twitter post above. This is because guns are rotten at up-close combat & even worse for defense. Only the overwhelming rate of fire of modern military weapons allows mass killings to succeed as they do.
Certainly you can kill with a club, knife, sword or even a revolver. But you can't kill a lot of people fast that way. Explosions or gas will do it, but a ton of things can go wrong for the perpetrator using those methods, too.
The best “tool" to kill a lot of people fast without much skill required (especially if you don't expect to live through it anyway) is a tool designed to do just that on the battlefield. Send a spray of lead out & a lot of people are going to get hit. The denser the crowd, the better. You don't have to be a trained sniper or even a decent shot. That is the point.
As an example, the Thompson submachine gun was popular with both the mob & the law during their Prohibition battle because of the rate of fire and the ability to mount huge magazines. Like most such weapons, it had little accuracy. It was a lead sprayer.
The modern assault rifle is a compromise between a submachine gun and an accurate rifle. You get rapid fire when you need it, but a skilled soldier can actually hit a target at some range, too. This proved effective in places like Vietnam, where the job was as often to keep the hidden enemy's head down as it was to mow down a mass assault of opposing soldiers.
What these types off firearm have in common is they are not very useful for anything but killing people. That is what they are designed to do. After many years of development, they are pretty good at that job.
An assault weapon isn't for sport. It isn't for hunting. It isn't for plinking or shooting the wild paper target. There are better devices for all of those uses. An assault rifle is even inferior to a handgun for self-protection. Readying it and using it in close quarters against an unknown intruder is difficult.
Handguns aren't great at family protection, either. Using one successfully requires skill, the ability to make a cool & rational decision under stress, and - usually- getting the drop on the intruder. The average householder facing an intruder is unlikely to have any of those advantages. They are far more likely to shoot someone they do not intend to hit, or shoot themselves, or just push an armed intruder into shooting first. That's not opinion - it is based on the overwhelming evidence of shooting statistics. The most likely result of an average homeowner having a ready gun is that someone in the house will be hurt or killed with it by accident. That is FAR more likely than it being useful to protect your family.
This is just common sense, An inaccessible gun is useless for protection, but the more accessible and ready you make a weapon, the more likely it will be found and fired accidentally or foolishly with tragic results, either by the owner in an emotional state or another person not trained or authorized to use it.
The old saw "If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns" is 100% backwards thinking. Far fewer people die under the guns of armed outlaws than by accident or design under the guns of family members and friends. The easier it is to obtain a firearm. the more likely it is that the firearm will be used against you, either on purpose or by mistake.
Even if an outlaw does have a gun, you having one as well only marginally improves your chances. Very, very few household gun owners use them successfully to deter an intruder, armed or not. The gun lobby points to the rare occasion when this did happen, and ignores the fact that having a ready gun for “protection” makes it much more likely that you or someone else you care about will be on the wrong end of it at some point.
The gun manufacturers know this stuff. So do real professional soldiers and police. The people who know it best are e-room doctors & nurses. Ask them what they think of our guns-on-demand culture. Ask them how many people they have watched suffer, bleed and die because of a gun kept "for protection".
But the gunmakers don't care. People who think about the real, documented dangers don't buy more and more guns. Scared, panicky people who have been made to think a gun is their only salvation buy those guns. So the gun lobby terrifies you as much and as often as possible.
Gun lobbyists (and especially their bought-and-paid-for tool, the NRA) will tell you that you have to protect yourself from criminals, from foreign invaders, from terrorists, from your own government. And that you can't do that without lots of guns.
The best way to protect yourself from criminals is hiring and training good police officers.
The best way to protect against foreign soldiers is a well-trained military.
The best way to stop terrorists is to quit hating and exploiting people of other cultures, and instead make our intelligence services as good and responsible as we can -- and then listen to them.
The best way to protect against a despotic government is to use the ballot box, and to hold our lawmakers personally responsible for their actions. Taking big money out of the electoral equation would be a damn fine start.
That is truth, and so is this: What you really need to fear are the greedy, conscienceless bastards who profit from keeping us all at each other's throats, so we will not band together in common cause.
That is truth, and common sense, and far more the American Way as visualized by our forefathers than using a self-serving, twisted reading of the 2nd Amendment to feed greed, hate, and foolishness to the point of insanity in the name of selling a few more guns and lining the pockets of gun manufacturers and the politicians they control.
And deep in your soul you know that, if you have the courage to look at yourself in the mirror and any semblance of good will in your heart. You do. But if you don't get wise now and reject the crap you are being sold by the greedy plutarchs that want to own you, your children will suffer. They already are.
You won't save the children with guns, or money, or blaming blacks, whites, Jews, Muslims, gay people, the "welfare state"or "the government" for your situation.
You can only do it by organizing.; by embracing a wide array of people and viewpoints and cultures and situations and working together to improve things for everyone. Everyone! If you seek just to help yourself, you will lose.
And for the sake of whatever God you believe in, whatever philosophy you follow, or whatever makes you a rational human being — stop thinking that you can end this madness by better arming the madmen.
