To be an advocate for gun rights in America here in the early 21 Century is to be like Tom Cruise in EDGE OF TOMORROW… each day you wake up in a world where no one has any idea what you’re talking about and you have to start the conversation all over again at the very beginning, explaining the facts of life to the other side as if they were children.
And dear god is it tedious.
In EDGE OF TOMORROW we all understand on an intellectual level that Tom Cruise must’ve been forced to spend at least part of every single day explaining what was happening over-and-over again to Emily Blunt, but at some point in the movie, the filmmakers wisely chose not to continue making us watch what would surely have been an interminable drudgery for Cruise’s character.
Which is just as well, because as someone who has been forced to start over at the beginning as each new gun control debate of the last twenty years came online, I can assure you that it is every bit as frustrating for us on the pro Second Amendment side as you imagine it would be… to wade into every new debate knowing that before you can advance the cause even one inch into new territory you must, once again, start at the top and re-cover miles and miles of well-tread-upon ground.
I only wish I had access to Cruise’s editors.
You can see the same “Live, Die, Repeat” template play out each and every time there is a big new “gun story” in the news.
I remember watching live videos from the scene of the Las Vegas massacre back in 2017 and thinking “hmmm… that sounds like automatic gunfire.” Then I saw an early law enforcement press release reference “bump stocks” and I thought to myself “Self… Twitter is about to produce a bunch of overnight experts in ‘bump stocks’.” And no, Twitter did not disappoint me, either. For a couple weeks, “bump stocks” were all anyone in the press or on social media was talking about, despite the fact that the vast majority of those who were talking about them had only just heard about “Bump Stocks” for the very first time that week.
And this sort of uneducated moral certainty can be incredibly effective for the cause of Gun Cntrol activists, which is why they enthusiastically encourage and harness its dissemination. To this day there exists a tremendous amount of unearned certainty about the dangers of bump stocks amongst the Progressive anti-gun Left’s civilian population. Don’t believe me? Try this simple experiment. Find a local Progressive and ask them this simple question:
“Should there be a Federal ban on Bump Stocks?”
They will say yes because… well, because Progressive, duh!… And when they do, you need to ask them two critical follow up questions:
“Are you aware that there is already a Federal ban on Bump Stocks?” and…
“What is a Bump Stock?”
And while you might get a “yes” in response to question one… gun control advocates may be ignornant about guns but they’re not stupid and they can generally spot a leading question when they see one… you are definitely not going to get a coherent answer to the second question, because none of them has any idea what a “Bump Stock” is, even though “Bump Stocks” spent a solid year atop the list of “current things we are angry about.”
A few weeks ago I was talking about gun control with a Liberal friend in my office. He’s a classic California Liberal, as opposed to a rigid #Resistance Progressive, and so the conversation was calm, civil, and logical. But at some point during the conversation I realized he did not understand that there are different bullet calibers/sizes, and I had to restart the entire conversation from the beginning.
To help me do this, I produced several different kinds of bullets and handed them to him so he could get an idea of the actual size differential between different calibers and types of bullets. He held up the .223 round I gave him and said “Imagine this thing entering your body…”
There was a long beat, at the end of which I somehow managed to ask, “Do… do you think that the entire bullet comes out of the rifle?”
And he responded “…it doesn’t?”
Look, I’m not kidding when I say the people you are debating gun rights with do not have even the most rudimentary understanding of what guns and ammunition do, or how they function. They literally know nothing. You cannot assume that you are debating with people who have even a basic grasp of the same set of facts that we here on the Pro-2A side do.
And we are seeing the same problem poison the debate in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, TX. The “Know-Nothings” are proposing solutions before they fully understand the problem… or indeed, before they understand it at all.
As the truth about the police repsonse (or more pointedly, the lack thereof) in Uvalde began to leak out, the MSM “Journolist” leapt into action, siezing on the details of the developing story as proof that one of the most effective gun rights slogans was, in fact, a lie.
The fact that 19 Police Officers were immediately on the scene in Uvalde, but waited 78 minutes to act and made very little difference in the outcome once they did, proves that the Pro-2A side’s “good guy with a gun” argument is a fallacy, they assured us loudly and publicly… or, as Chris Murphy the Democrat Senator from Connecticut put it in this July 12th tweet.
As the kids on Twitter say… “tell me you don’t understand the ‘good guy with a gun’ argument, without telling me you don’t understand the ‘good guy with a gun’ argument…”
Just as Tom Cruise is cursed always to start at the beginning with Emily Blunt, we too shall have to start at the beginning with all the newly minted “so much for good guy with a gun” Blue Check Mark Experts on Twitter, if we are to engage this ridiculous talking point head-on.
To do so, let’s begin with another effective pro-2A message… “When seconds count, the Police are only minutes away!”
Why do we say this?
We say it because as gun rights advocates, we understand that violent life-threatening altercations do not last minutes, they last seconds. When a guy starts shooting in a public place, whether or not you will survive is determined in the first few seconds. The Police cannot affect the outcome, they cannot help you, because those few seconds will be over long before the Police can even arrive on the scene.
In these kind of “active shooter” scenarios, therefore, a good guy with a gun… meaning a good guy ALREADY ON THE SCENE who has a gun… is the ONLY thing that can improve your chances of survival.
The only thing.
So when a very online Blue Check Mark on Twitter tells you that the behavior of the Cops in Uvalde, who did not arrive on scene until AFTER the shooter was already barricaded inside a classroom, is proof the the “good guy with a gun” argument is a fallacy… they are getting it exactly backwards… and they’re doing so either because intentionally getting it backwards helps their cause, or because they never really understood the argument in the first place.
Neither explanation is a reason to trust that The Left is arguing Gun Control in good faith.
For instance… does The Left believe that only the Police should have guns? Or do they believe we should defund the Police entirely and send Social Workers to respond to crimes in progress? Do they believe that Americans with AR-15s could never hope to overthrow a Government in possession of F18s and Nukes? Or do they believe that a small group of idiots led by a man in a Chewbaca costume and a viking helmet almost overthrew the Goverment of the United States in a coup on January 6th?
I dunno… but what I do know is that when it comes to reducing gun crime in America, The Left has no new ideas and they are completely unwilling to listen to those of us who know the most about what is possible, and what is not… what is Constitutional, and what is not… what is politically doable, and what is not.
Because Good Guys with Guns DO stop Bad Guys with Guns… all the time. It literally happened this past week in Indianapolis where a 23-year-old with a concealed weapon took out a shooter who was in a position to do an incredible amount of damage (he did manage to kill three people because that’s the other thing about Bad Guys with Guns, they get to set the terms of the engagement and they get to make the first move). This hero, Elisjsha Dicken is his name, was able to end the threat decisively not just because he had a gun, but because HE WAS THERE… and the Police were not.
Another Good Guy with a gun, a woman this time, stopped a Bad Guy with a gun in West Virginia back in May, after the would-be killer opened fire on a birthday party with an AR-style rifle. If the people being targeted had been forced to wait for a Police response, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that many of them would now be dead.
Ditto for a Texas Church back in December of 2019, when a Churchgoing Good Guy with a gun took out a Bad Guy with a shotgun who opened fire on the Good Guy’s fellow parishoners during Sunday service.
And that’s all just off the top of my head. If you’re a Gun Rights suporter, then you’ve no doubt thought of three, or five, or ten more that I missed, just while you were reading this.
It happens often enough that, were The Left really interested in “following the science”, it seems to me that all the available evidence (from Parkland to Uvalde to Indianapolis) shows that the best way to reduce deaths from gun violence is to get as many Good Guys with guns into as many places that might be targeted by Bad Guys with guns as is humanly possible.
But they won’t do that… they are not doing that… and in fact they are doing the 180 degree polar opposite of that. What the Anti-Gun Left has decided instead, is that the most unfortunate thing about the Indianapolis Mall incident is that it’s finally given the Pro-2A Right a “Good Guy with a gun” fantasy to get aroused by. I’m not kidding, that’s their position… that this is the one time a Good Guy with a gun happened to be in the right place at the right time and whatever else we do, we must not use this one “Good Guy with a gun” result as a model for implementing future gun policy.
A Twitter denizen called George Hahn who describes himself as an actor and a writer and has almost 250,000 followers said as much in a viral tweet, with which he included a video of himself rage crying over his inablity to guarantee more innocent deaths by forcibly disarming those who would volunteer to defend their fellow citizens from evil.
Said (this other) George:
After literally tens of thousands of Americans dead from gun violence. Right Wing nuts are super excited they finally have a story to sell, exploding in a collective Good-Guy-With-A-Gun-gasm. Yay. Neat. Wow.
Read that again… “finally” he says. George seems to really believe that this is the first time such a thing has ever happened.
And that’s why people like George are able to leap so quickly and easily to this bizarre conclusion because, unike us, they cannot remeber any of the myriad stories of heroism that the rest of us can recite from memory. Given the way they silo themselves within Progressive media bubbles, it’s entirely possible that they cannot remember them because they never heard about them in the first place.
Because when it comes to guns… I’m going to say it again for the cheap seats…
They do not know anything.
Thing is, we know exactly where these actve shooter situations occur… they occur in crowded places where Americans congregate to relax and have fun… or where they are most likely to be distracted by their lives and families and are therefore unprepared to deal with someone intent on killing them… or where most of the people they’ll face are likely to be children incapable of mounting a defense… malls, movie theaters, schools.
Active Shooters are looking for infamy. They want to kill as many people as possible, to break the previous record if they can, without facing any kind of effective resistance. They want to feel powerful, after a lifetime of failure.
That’s why they go where there are unikely to be police officers present and where armed civilians are least likely to mount a defense. Notably, shooters do not often target concert venues… why is that? Because there are only a few controlled points of entry, which often feature metal detectors, and those points of entry tend to be monitored by security guards.
What can we learn from this detail?
That risk assessment seems to be the last cognitive skill that fails when crazy people lose their mnds. They think about these situations and plan for them obsessively, with incredible attention to detail. When their highly-calibrated risk assessment tells them that schools and malls and theaters are the best places to do what they want for as long as they want, without facing armed resistance, they are correct (for now). It’s this equation, this mental calculation, that we need to change if we expect to stop future killers from targeting these crowded locations.
And the best way to change that caluculation is to ensure that the odds of an Active Shooter running into an armed civilian trained to stop him are as high as possible. If every time an Active Shooter opened up on civilians in a mall, they were instantly suppressed by return fire, the risk calculation would necessarily change, and over time you would see fewer of these incidents.
The Anti-Gun Left will never accept this though, because again… they do not know anything.
To The Left, every gun is like the bomb at the end of a James Bond movie… a completely uncontrollable, purely destructive thing with three seconds left on the timer. They do not understand, nor would they believe you if you told them, that a gun can be safely controlled and used effectively by people who know what they are doing. To the anti-gun Left there is, truly, no such thing as a “Good Guy with a gun” because in their minds, guns are evil, and cannot be used for good. Ever. The only solution, therefore, is to eliminate them from the planet entirely.
Which of course is impossible, but don’t bother trying to explain why that is because…
…say it with me.
They do not know anything.
One final point: Humans, even crazy ones, respond to incentives. We know that most mass shooters are looking for notoriety, that they’ve watched the media respond enthusiastically to the greivances of every shooter that’s come before them. And that they know that if they can manage to kill a bunch of innocent people that everyone in America will know their names and everyone will hear their story.
It’s unrealistic to argue that we should stop the press from publicizing their names… that’s never going to happen. But what we can do is try to balance the incentive calculation on the other side.
We can make Elisjsha Dicken a very public hero. Put him on the cover of every major newspaper and magazine… give him a full hour on every major primetime interview special… make sure that he never has to pay for a drink again as long as he lives… give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For every crazy out there thinking “I want to be just like Dylan Klebold”, let’s make sure there are ten young men and women saying “I want to be just like Elisjsha Dicken.”
Even flatworms have enough brain capacity to turn away from pain. If enough of these crazies are gunned down the minute they produce their weapons in public, their wannabe followers will eventually get the message.
We are done with your shit… find a different way to take your rage out on the world. We don’t care how you die, just don’t do it here.
Until that day comes, I guess we’ll just have to wake up each and every day, find our Emily Blunt, and start at the beginning.
Well said, sir.