" As for the concealed carrier getting shot scenario, sure that is possible. There is a reason police and military have something called friendly fire. However, the possibility of friendly fire is no different than the risk one takes while driving and assuming the other driver(s) is paying full attention to details and does not hit you. There is also a reason the word accident exists. Yes, sometimes accidents will happen. However, accidents do not automatically mean the overall process or the overall system is flawed and should not be in place. There is no system, which is accident-free."
This leaves out one big difference, one that gun proponents ignore totally, and the way this post should have read is “even police and military have friendly fire incidents”, which tells the whole story. People in the military and police are given training where they are drilled in such a way to prevent friendly fire as much as possible, it is literally drilled into them where it is okay to use their weapon and where not. Groups that do anti terrorist activities, like Seal Team 6, spend a ton of time on exercises, and if they off an ‘innocent’, they are generally removed from the team, same for SAS and Delta Force. Joe Average out there with his gun doesn’t have that kind of training, most states don’t have any kind of proof of training to be able to carry, whether concealed or not, even in places like NYC where getting a carry permit is extremely difficult, there are no requirements.I don’t care how many times he goes to the range, or shoots at targets someplace, few if any civilians have that kind of training, and they are going to react out of fear and panic, and that is where the problems come in. I have seen that kind of panic and it was nothing compared to being in the middle of an active shooting, and I would not trust many of the people around me with a gun in that situation.
As far as deadlier alternatives to an AR15 or the like, that is the biggest deliberate misstatement I have seen. Those kind of semi automatics can fire upwards of 100 rounds a minute, and also can have their magazines changed rapidly.A semi automatic handgun has a limited capacity (usually less than 10 bullets), and though you can change the clip in it pretty fast, it still takes a discrete period of time to do it. To get off 100 rounds would take a fairly long while to do it, and in reloading would take time. Having multiple handguns would be an option, but it would be unwieldy to have 5 or 6 guns (to get off the let’s say 60 rounds) and switch them. The other thing with a handgun is they are not very accurate, so when someone starts shooting them off, they likely will miss a lot more than they kill. With something like an AR15, when you start shooting, you are ‘spraying’ bullets and it is a lot easier to kill multiple people, and unlike a handgun, people don’t have time to flee. Not to mention that the muzzle velocity on a AR15 is much higher than a typical semi automatic handgun, so the bulllets will go farther and also will richochet as well. As someone pointed out, Adam Lanza killed 26 people in the space of maybe 5 minutes, unless you had 26 people tied up and could shoot them each in the head point blank range, you couldn’t kill 26 people in that time with a handgun. As someone pointed out, the virginia tech shooter killed over 30 people, but did so over a longer period of time.
There is a reason why terrorists choose guns like an AR15 or an AK47, it is because they are designed to kill a lot of people very quickly. When the crack drug wars were raging in the 80’s, AR15’s, semi automatic versios of the Uzi, AK47’s, you name it were the favorites of drug dealers, those clowns couldn’t hit the side of the barn if you did target shooting, but madly spraying bullets even they could kill people, and they did.
And I’ll give you the counter to all this, some idiot in the London Subway decided to attack people with a knife…3 people wounded, guy was apprehended. If he had an AK47 or AR15 or the like, you would have well over 10 dead and probably several dozen wounded.
Others point out things like pipe bombs, but pipe bombs are a pretty crappy weapon. For one thing, the typical pipe bomb generally uses black powder or smokeless powder, and its blast range is very limited. Not to mention that the detonation of these things is not perfect,and you have a weapon that looks scarier then it really is. Sure, a large scale bombing like McVeigh did in Oklahoma city as the potential to kill a lot of people, but those kinds of acts are extremely difficult to plan and carry out without being detected, and to be honest a shooting spree like this, that could happen anywhere at any time, is a lot more of an effective weapon.
I think I can answer the question about these shootings and who is doing them. If most of these shootings involved illegal weapons, I would expect that the weapons in question would be automatic or semi automatics modified to fire automatically. What that tells me is most mass shootings are not being done by habitual criminals getting their weapons in the black market, because if I was going to shoot up someplace, I would much prefer full automatic action, and I certainly wouldn’t care that it is illegal to have a fully automatic weapon. What that also implies is that if we banned these weapons, that many of the shooters would not have the means or the gumption to buy on the black market, and instead would use less powerful legal guns to carry out what they did. Won’t prevent shootings, but it might prevent two schmucks like these 2 from being able to kill so many and wound so many others, if these two had handguns, the death toll would be a lot smaller.
