Advocating for guns isn’t that hard. Just argue that people should get the benefit of the doubt when they want to buy a weapon. The Constitution says as much, and the ‘well-regulated’ part gives plenty of basis for setting sensible limits on who should not have a firearm (e.g., paranoid schizophrenics) and on what kinds of weapon we want to avoid selling to private citizens (e.g., a truck-mounted .50-caliber machine gun). That lets most people buy what they need and it’s a hard argument to credibly dismiss.
Still, people like their ideas pure and their arguments absolute, and the gun fetish crowd feels less need to keep their demands reasonable now that the rational debate is over and they won. Thus we get silly arguments about how great the world would be if everybody carried a firearm all the time. As evidence, just imagine if everyone at some violent incident had been packing! A dozen good guys would have shot the bad guy before he could do whatever terrible thing he ended up doing! And indeed, it would be great if a dozen people who don’t know each other all pulled out a gun and knew instantly who the bad guy was so that they could shoot him. They would know this because good guys wear uniforms and bad guys wear a different uniform and in a chaos of smoke and gunshots you can tell right away who is which kind.
I know that this will sound crazy, but imagine for a second that the good guys and bad guys don’t wear uniforms. Imagine that they’re just regular people, and nobody knows each other, and they’re not psychic, and it really isn’t clear what’s going on. One citizen vigilante might accidentally shoot the wrong person. Since vigilante #1 forgot to wear his bronze deputy star that day, another citizen vigilante (also not wearing his bronze deputy star) might reasonably think that the first guy is an accomplice and try to shoot him. Vigilante #1 would make the perfectly reasonable decision to shoot back. He might shout ‘hey! I’m not a terrorist!’, because a terrorist would never think to say that. A minute later good guys in uniform do arrive on the scene. Who do they shoot?
Sounds silly, except that it really isn’t. Thank god Joe Zamudio took a critical moment to reflect before he made an awful day in Tucson that much worse.
If Everyone Had A Gun, Stupid Mistakes Would Be Tragic MistakesPost + Comments (94)