A (DU) minority view on guns.

[krispos42]

86. Well, there's a couple of fundamental issues there.

First off, many mass shootings occur in places where CCW is illegal. So, for example, at a school shooting, there is exactly zero change for a legally-carried pistol to be used to stop the shooting. So when you say "not a single CCW holder stopped a mass shooting", you're forgetting that this is exactly what the law is doing. It may not be the intent of the law, but it is a by-product of the law in that if one person breaks the law, there is not anybody else there with a gun.


Second, if a CCW pistol is used to stop a person hell-bent on committing a mass shooting, then, logically, there is no mass shooting to report on.

Example: man walks into a McDonald's with a gun and starts screaming for the employees to empty the registers. CCW permittee promptly draws pistol and shoots the armed robber. Did the CCW permittee just stop a mass shooting?

We don't know. Probably not, but there is a percentage of times that such a robbery would have gone bad and a lot of people would have died.




I'd also like to note this:

Most times when a gun is used for self-defense, it is not fired. The mere action of being seen (or heard) to possess a gun acts as a crime deterrent.

Most of the time when a gun is fired in self-defense, the shooter misses or wounds his or her attacker.

There are about 200 or so legal self-defense murders a year in the US. Obviously, this can only be a tiny fraction of the number of cases where a gun was employed in self-defense.