I mentioned in a previous post that The Economist seems to lose all rationality when a specific subject is discussed. The author of the magazine’s April 20 newsletter “The World in Brief” gave another illustration in “The Day Ahead” section: he couldn’t bring up the 25th anniversary of the horrific school massacre of Columbine without doing the rhetorical equivalent of a child hiding behind the couch to stop watching a horror movie – which is the horror of guns in the hands of peaceful citizens:
Gun rights supporters often say, absurdly, that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun.
It is not the only way, but often the most effective. This is why cops are armed (increasingly apparently even in the UK) and why mass murderers never attack shooting ranges or gun club meetings. It’s a simple question of incentives. Even if you want to die killing people, you still want to kill. The effectiveness of weapons against violent criminals comes not only from their deterrent effect but also from their usefulness in self-defense when deterrence has not worked perfectly.
“Absurdity”? We know of many documented cases where an ordinary armed citizen saved his own life and the lives of others. The FBI publishes an annual report on events in which “one or more individuals were actively engaged in the murder or attempted murder of persons in a populated area.” Many of these cases fit the federal definition of mass shootings. The last of these reports covers the year 2022 and the 50 cases that occurred that year, with 313 victims injured or killed. (Hundreds of mass shootings per year in the United States include many other types of gun-related incidents.) Three or 6 percent of the 50 cases documented by the FBI were arrested by an ordinary citizen armed. In two of these cases (4% of the total), a mass murderer was shot and killed by an ordinary citizen, compared to seven cases (14%) by law enforcement. Both cases are summarized as follows in the FBI report (p. 11):
In one incident (in Charleston, West Virginia), an armed bystander attacked the shooter, killing him, after the shooter fired into a crowd attending a party outside an apartment complex.
In one incident (Greenwood, Indiana), an armed citizen killed the shooter as he began shooting in a shopping center food court.
In this latest incident, Elisjsha Dicken, 22, had just gone to the mall with her girlfriend when a mass shooting began. Three people had already been killed and two injured. Dicken drew his pistol and exchanged fire with the mass murderer, whom he shot. Greenwood’s police chief said “many more people would have died without a responsible armed citizen who acted very quickly” (“Elisjsha Dicken stops mass shooting“, Wall Street JournalJuly 19, 2022).
There are more reported cases of armed self-defense in individual attacks. Note that all of the school shootings took place in places where teachers or staff were prohibited from possessing a firearm under penalty of a crime.
We also know, from following murder cases and their investigations in the press, that in at least some of them, murdered peaceful individuals could have stopped their murderers if they had been armed. One suspects that in many cases the victim’s last thought must have been, “If only I had a gun.” There are real, identifiable individuals who lose their lives or are seriously injured and who have been prohibited from wearing protective gear by their own benevolent governments.
An intuitive objection claims that, even if armed self-defense works, the greater availability of the weapons it relies on will lead to more murders or assaults with firearms. There is historical and empirical evidence against this objection, but let us assume for a moment that it is valid. Consider what this amounts to: that it is morally acceptable to prohibit a peaceful, innocent person from defending themselves against a violent attacker in order to reduce the likelihood that a stranger will in the future be the victim of a criminal armed with a gun. This is analogous to a policy that would imprison all young men between the ages of 17 and 24 in order to prevent 39% of murders (see my post “A simplistic model of public policy» ; see also “The purpose of a gun is not to kill. “)
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Hide behind the couch so you don’t see the non-horror movie
