Some thoughts on the "If someone else had a gun" argument re: Aurora

[booley]

233. it's the wonderful world of wishful thinking

Normal in any horrible circumstance where people engage in "woulda coulda shoulda's", casting forth hypothetical situations that conveniently reinforce what one wants to believe.

It's human nature., We want to take horrible events and make them less horrible by thinking there's something we could have done. It lets us pretend we don't live in a chaotic and rather unfair universe.

And gun fantasies are especially common in these cases because the whole selling point of guns from a defense stand point is gun defend you and keep you safe, especially from others with guns. Guns give you power in an unsafe world.

But clearly that's not the case. We have more guns per capita then any other country AND several orders more gun related homicides then any other country not currently involved in a war on it's own soil. If the gun lobby apologists were right, we should have less gun violence, not more.

And these shootings just take that ugly fact and shoves it our face. Reality doesn't give a crap what we wish as true.

The fact is even if there had been someone else with a gun, people were still going to die the moment Holmes decided to start his attack. And the reason he could kill so many is because he had a gun that was well designed to do just what he used it for.

No amount of wishful thinking is going to change that or stop the next mass shooting.

Alas, I would not be surprised if the fear of this doesn't prompt people to buy more guns.