Um… Chicago for one, where I don’t have to tell anyone here what our gun violence rates are right now because they’ve heard about it on the news.
(I really shouldn’t say ‘our’ because I live in the 'burbs and know what areas to avoid if I have to go down into the city)
I thought Chicago legalized concealed carry, not open carry, but I have not been following closely.
Atlanta allows open carry.
I looked it up, and Illinois recently legalized concealed carry, not open carry, and it was the last of the 50 states to do so.
Ok, your theory could be tested in real life then. I prefer arguments that are not purely hypotheticals, which is why I asked.
“On a related topic, how would you, as a police officer responding to an active shooting, feel if you ran into ta school and there were a dozen students running around holding guns?”
That is a really good question, and especially in an incident like this, where they don’t know if there is one shooter or many, the cops are going to be on a hair trigger, and I have to laugh when someone said "well, cops will say “drop the gun” and that will solve everything. I think people watch too much tv, where in a shooting scene the cops are all Gibbs from NCIS or some cool, thoughtful guy. I hate to tell you, but cops are scared, too, they are going into a hot scene where they don’t know what the hell is going on, and it is why tragedies happen where some unarmed guy gets blown away, like Amadou Diallo. You think cops are well trained, you think they mysteriously know, but they don’t, and cops from a rinky dink burg like this probably have less training then the local cops where I live, and that isn’t saying much. Put it this way, the Navy Seals are trained for hostage takeouts, they use more ammunition in a year practicing then the whole Marine Corps does.you think your local sheriff and the like have that kind of training.
And this raises an even better question, what about ‘hero citizens’ shooting each other? If supposedly trained cops can shoot someone who is armed, how about another hero? When Gabrielle Giffords was shot in Arizona, a guy carrying was coming out of the convenience store and admitted he had drawn his weapon, and was ready to shoot…the good samaritan who tackled the real shooter, he was stopped at the last instance by someone literally pushing his arm aside and telling him he was aiming at the wrong person. Picture this, you are in a shooting situation like this, you are an armed citizen, you think you can tell the difference? You think you won’t shoot someone if they have a gun and turn around, when you don’t know what happens? Gun owners pretend like they will be the calm, cool joe citizen you see on a tv show, but tv shows aren’t real (and I fault movie and tv producers for so many myths about guns, you don’t shoot a gun out of someone’s hand, Joe Citizen is not going to be calm and collected when the crap hits the fan, panic sets in and what you end up with is people killed who are innocent. Put it this way, in combat in the military, friendly fire incidents account for a not small percentage of casualties, some of them are artillery ind airstrikes and such, but a lot of them are someone being shot by his own troops (Chris Tillman). My dad was a WWII veteran, and he wasn’t one of the VFW back line types, he was forward combat, and he said that probably 30% of the casualties they were taking were friendly fired…and these were combat hardened soldiers who had training, compared to the typical gun owner who is not.
It is also likely that people with guns will be shot with their own guns when they are confronted by criminals, because many criminals are either hardened and don’t give a crap, are strung out, are nervous themselves, and they won’t hesitate when many gun owners will, there are statistics out there about armed people and what happens when they confront a criminal and how often they got shot by their own gun. Why? Because most people will hesitate, one of the hardest things in the world for many people is hurting or killing another person, even when threatened.
I also am getting tired of the gun nuts who say things like “Kitchen knives are weapons, too”, or eve more idotic “nail guns can be used a weapon”. A lot of things can be used as a weapon, but what those arguments are bogus. Yes, knives can kill, but given that you have to get in someone’s face to stab them, get close (and don’t give me the throwing knife stuff, that is more tv BS, there are maybe 1 person in a thousand who can throw a knife like that, and even they would likely end up hitting someone that doesn’t disable them). I have had a knife pulled on me, and I was able to defend myself (it helped the other person was scared hitless, was probably a druggie, and I am pretty big and strong) and the guy ended up running away. If a guy pulls a knife, I can used my arm to block it, I can’t do that against a bullet fired at me from 10 feel away, I also could duck aside, I could roll away from the knife, I could pick up something and use it as a shielf…a knife guy has to pull it then come towards me, gives me time to react, with a gun it doesn’t.
A nail gun? Maybe the 22 caliber ones, but they aren’t going to work standing away, and aren’t accurate, and are awkward. A framing hammer? Guy has to get close to me, and I can defend myself, might get hurt, but have a good chance of taking the guy out or getting away. These kind of arguments are utter BS for another reason, though hammers are quite common, kitchen knives, scissors, and nail guns, show my statistics on how many crimes are committed with them, and how many murders happen with them, given that knives overwhelmingly make the number of guns look trivial (the number of knives alone probably are in the billion + range, and if you add everything like hammers, nail guns, etc,), and the relative numbers of violent crimes, and more importantly, deaths from knives, given how common they are, make that argument idiotic, because they aren’t that effective as weapons. These kind of arguments remind me of the old SNL, where Dan Aykrowd was defending toys like “bag of glass”, saying that kids would pick it up from the street anyway, and they cleaned the glass, or defended flammable costumes, arguing that kids read books and they burned, so why not ban books?
I think personally one of the biggest factors with guns and their role has been influenced by tv and movies going back a long time. I remember seeing a show about tv violence, and a street cop was commenting, and he said the problem was that the violence wasn’t real and that it would be better either to have realistic violence, or none or at. He said if someone was shot, you don’t have someone continue to fire, they would likely be on the ground screaming, because it hurts that bad. You don’t have a cop firing at a suspect from 30 yards away and taking him down, that is bs, and you don’t have them taking out the guy with one shot, and you certainly don’t have them “shooting a gun out of their hand”. Cops in the show should be shown pumping 30+ shots to take down a suspect, and it also should show accidental shootings, when someone with a gun or a cop shoots the wrong person. A lot of the pro gun arguments (and more than a few of the anti gun ones) are based on myths promulgated on tv (my favorite anti gun/anti cop one? “Why did they have to kill my son, why didn’t they just shoot the gun out of his hand?,” or on a tv show showing that totally banning cungs would prevent crime, it won’t), or showing joe idiot, who picks up a cop’s gun who has been shot and kills all the bad guys, that is about as realistic as Stallone in Rambo movies picking up an air cooled machine gun in his hands, holding the barrel with one hand, and killing a platoon of North Vietnamese, he would burn his hand off doing that, the barrel is red hot.
Sorry, was trying to respond from my phone while waiting in line at the grocery store, which never ends well. Yes, it’s concealed carry.
Anyone remember this? http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/4/jim-cooley-open-carry-activist-carries-loaded-ar-1/
As an aside-- had to laugh. Looks like its visiting day at the pokey in this thread today 
No prob, terriwtt. Concealed carry is quite common, while open carry is unusual, especially in urban areas, which is why I questioned it.
I apologize for my last post, I would blame auto correct for the mistakes, but that was typed on my mac, lot of misspellings and such…I just cringed reading it, and too late to correct it.
“Why do you think those “Good Guys With Guns” didn’t bother to go in?”
Good question. If the reports are accurate, at least one armed (gun permit) student was on campus. It is a community college so the acreage probably isn’t terribly large, so the armed student could have made his way to the madman Mercer and engaged him. But really, no. I think we know that is overly optimistic speculation, no matter what Donald Trump thinks.
I feel like if I had a gun in that classroom I would have shot the gunman before he killed so many people. But of course he might have been quicker to shoot if he suspected some students were armed, but we will never know.
No worries, musicprnt, we got the gist. The argument that we need more guns because good-guy citizens will take down the bad guys is just bogus and wrong and dangerous.
LakeWashington, well then obviously, the answer is to make sure every human being on campus is armed. Make it a requirement, so that no matter where the bad guy opens fire, there will be plenty of good-guy guns around. If you want to attend any school in the US, if you want to teach at any school, work at any school, visit any school, you have to prove you have a loaded gun. Students, parents, prospies, faculty, admissions people, healthcare staff, kitchen workers, janitors, visiting football teams, visiting lecturers – all of them should carry a loaded gun. So simple and obvious, isn’t it?
If someone wants to legally and safely carry (as much as is possible), then fine. But engaging with crazy shooters? Unless it is a 100% sure situation, that should be left to professionals!
@bay, we’d all like to think that, so your feelings are very understandable. But the fact is that most people in situations like that don’t react in that way. That’s precisely why police and soldiers have to train so much: in stressful situations, most people don’t do the right thing to handle the problem. If most people did automatically act appropriately, training wouldn’t be so necessary.
Someone on CC some months ago linked to a study in which all the students in a class were told what was going to happen except one who had a gun which, although he didn’t know it, was unloaded. A “criminal” ran in brandishing a gun. IIRC the armed student tried to do something but got the gun tangled in his tee shirt.
Beside which - how do we know no one in the classroom had a gun? Do you think someone who was armed, but who froze, would now come forward and say “I had a gun but I froze and let 9 people get shot. My bad.”
Untrained people do the wrong thing all the time but we often don’t hear about it because they don’t publicize their error and because no one wants to hold them up to needless ridicule. Recently an armed bystander tried to stop a crime and shot the innocent guy instead of the criminal. That well meaning but wrong shooter didn’t spend time with the media explaining himself. In the airplane landing on the Hudson, a passenger tried to open the rear door, which would have flooded the plane and drowned many, and that disaster was averted because the passenger was wrestled to the ground by the trained stewardess. You sure didn’t see interviews with that passenger after the event.
Why do you assume that people with concealed carry permits are untrained? I’ll bet many of them go to shooting ranges and have taken required training classes. Survival is a very strong instinct for most people.
Even if you’ve had excellent firearms training, you don’t know how you would react in a real emergency.
WA is an open carry state and I haven’t found anything yet to say that doesn’t include within the Seattle city limits. It creates issues when open carry people forget that you can’t do it while attending your kid’s Little League baseball game at the school field or similar events. When DH used to umpire it was a sticky situation telling people that they would need to leave the game per the school rules and safety rules of LL.
Let’s remember here that the shooter and others like him had body armor. They are not complete sitting ducks for the amateur marksman.