"I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, 'Hey, guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.'"Okay, fine; you first, asshole. I'm going out the window.
This latest incident of what Jim Wright over at Stonekettle Station likes to call Bang Bang Crazy has brought all the usual idiots out of the woodwork to recommend that the solution to moar gunz is...wait for it...moar gunz! Because...
Sheesh.
Look, I may have been just a simple grunt medic, but I was smart enough to figure out that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a fucking battery six with HE-quick in effect. Except you can't fucking do that in a shopping mall or a theatre.
And short of that, you're pretty much just tossing the dice.
Teaching a human being to take effective deadly action is a damn difficult thing. We spend weeks and months training Joe and Molly to do that and the statistics show that we only succeed in about 30-50% of the time. Most people - even most trained soldiers - react to danger by getting their heads down and trying to stay in defilade.
But let's assume that the training works and our hero heads towards the sound of shooting.
What does he or she encounter?
Fucking chaos, that's what. The nutter is the center of it, shooting left and right...but everyone else is amplifying the chaos; screaming, running, dying...it's total mayhem. Into this comes our hero, trained but not experienced - one hopes - in this sort of bloody mess. How's that likely gonna work out?
First of all, one of the hardest parts of learning to be lethal in combat is making sense of it. We humans are used to an orderly world, a world that moves in a linear sort of way at a relatively leisurely pace. Suddenly - and with our own reactions and judgements spazzing as adrenaline turns our brains into an arcing circuit board and our firing arm into a licorice whip - we step into a world gone mad.
Is this guy running screaming at us the shooter in a kamikaze rage or a target trying to escape? Is the dude over by the wall still and silent with terror or does he have his pistol down by his leg waiting to fire again?
Noise, random movement, incoming fire...it takes an assload of training to even begin to sort this stuff out, and without experience the likelihood of sorting it wrong is damned likely; that's why we try and make veterans into our combat NCOs. Because they've had to sort through this gibbering chaos and hopefully - seeing as they're still alive - have gotten it right.
But there's another, even more complicating and difficult factor here.
This isn't a straightforward military red-on-blue. There's at least four factions; the "bad guy" shooter(s), the prospective "good guy" shooter(s) - if more than one made more fraught by having no connection or experience working together, meaning just as likely to mistake each other for the "bad guy" - the people being shot at...and the police.
The coppers have NO idea who the "bad guy" is. To them anyone with a weapon out is just as likely to be the murderer, which has, in previous massacres, nearly led to blue-on-blue gunfire.
So. You have a nutter firing right and left. You have "good guys with guns" firing at the nutter...but also possibly each other, seeing as unless they were on-scene when the shooting started don't know which armed citizen is the nutter. You have the coppers, when they arrive, shooting at the nutter...and possibly at the "good guys", since they have no way of telling that they are good guys when they roll up.
I'm sorry. That's fucking nutzoid land. Makes the Battle of Ia Drang look like a sorority pillow-fight.
The idea that We the People are happy with one of these nutter shootings happening every month or so seems just as nutzoid. If you told me that without my knowing anything about this country I'd laugh in your face.
At the same time I have the utmost confidence in my fellow citizens to do absolutely nothing to change anything. And that's just really, really depressing.
Update 10/12: As you might expect, Jim Wright takes down the Mad Doctor more completely than I ever could.
7 comments:
And this is what you get:
http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/texas-good-guy-with-a-gun-shoots-carjacking-victim-in-head-then-runs-away/
The other problem with the 'if guns are taken away only criminals would have guns' argument is that (as I seem to remember) pretty much all the recent mass shootings have been by people who weren't prior criminals. Would any of these wankstains even know how to acquire one? About as well as me (i.e. no, no fucking clue).
But guns are so ingrained in your culture that I don't think it will ever go away no matter how many die in massacres or confused 'good-guy with a gun' shootings.
I'm waiting for the next movie theatre shooting where there are two or three other guns in there with the perpetrator, blazing away in the darkness and smoke at the other gun flashes and sudden movements. Should at least triple the body count.
The most recent shooting at Umpqua had a couple of witnesses who were packin' (concealed carry) but one of them, who actually had some training, said that their choice was not to get involved because the shooter was in another building and they weren't sure if SWAT was arriving, and if they had had their weapons out they would have been targets. Proper thing.
Youtube link to guy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK-Ht57AdBA
(dammit, the very next video that plays is some dumbass saying the shooting was a hoax)
Brian: I saw those quotes and that factored into this post. Yeah, frankly, it's no different than being down behind your M-60 when the other side of the perimeter lights up. Do you grab the pig off its tripod and dash to the other side of the position? Fuck, no. You scan your sector of fire and wait for your orders. The GI had it absolutely right; a bunch of "good guys with guns" running in there would have just made it harder for the police reaction team to figure out who to drop.
Leon: Damn. That's just pathetic - I like the part about picking up his spent brass before he beat cheeks. What a fuckin' hero.
Here's another well-regulated militia-woman for you, Leon:
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/oakland/2015/10/06/cpl-holder-opens-fire-shoplifter-home-depot/73468588/
Nimrod sees a couple of retail robbers (i.e. "shoplifters") making a getaway so she drags out the hogleg and starts blasting...in the Home Depot parking lot.
The Wyatt Fucking Earp is strong in that one...
I'm curious why you deleted my comment. I signed in as "anonymous" but did leave my name. MichaelG. I know you read Nancy Nall's blog and figured you would recognize my name from there. I don't have any of the associations or IDs that seem to be required by the various "identities" listed. As to the subject matter, I left a link to a product that assists a person in pulling on socks. From your post I thought you might be interested. Or was there some mistake?
MichaelG
Oh, was that you? Sorry! I've had real problems in the past with anonymous spambot comments getting past the authentication gimmick - one of my older "battles" posts is up over 200 and counting - and I just saw the link and figured that's what it was. My bad!
And thanks for the sock-puller-on thing; I've seen them occasionally and have been too proud and stubborn to get one. But the damn hip is really griping me now. It's time to quit kidding myself...
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