Most "bad guys" with a gun were "good guys"
with a gun — until they weren’t.
Picture a world in which most of the people you encounter — on
the street or at work, in stores or classrooms, at the movies or in church —
are openly carrying guns.
That’s the world Second Amendment absolutists are promoting when
they repeat their mantra, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a
good guy with a gun,” and blame mass murder victims for not going about armed.
They’re wrong. More gun carrying is actually a formula for more
murder.
To understand why, we need to look at two things — the nature of
most American murders, and the nature of most American murderers.
Five mass
shootings garnered the bulk of the news coverage about gun
violence last year. But the 40 people slain in these well-known massacres
account for a very small proportion of the 11,000 Americans who die in gun homicides each year.
“Every time I think about
those kids it gets me mad,” he said of the 2012 massacre of elementary school
children in Connecticut. But, he added, “it happens on the streets of Chicago every day.”
Indeed it does. And throughout the land. The bulk of America’s
gun homicides happen in a slow, daily, bloody grind.
Few involve mass murders by deranged strangers or terrorists.
According to FBI data, 90 percent of murders in America involve a single
victim. Four out of five victims are acquainted with their killers, and over a
third of murders are committed by intimate partners or family members.
“Most homicides are momentary lapses,” a Kansas law
enforcement official explains. “They happen in fits of anger or fights over
drugs.”
Talk about “good guys” and “bad guys” is fine for cowboy movies.
But in the real world, most killers were (more or less) good guys until they
lost it and became murderers. Carrying a gun probably won’t protect you against
the ordinary murderer you know.
Of course, some murderers aren’t ordinary. A handful of killers
want to slay large numbers of strangers. But because random mass shootings are
relatively rare, the shooters will always have the advantage of surprise —
whether you’re armed or not.
Replay the Sandy Hook Elementary School murders with
kindergarten teachers packing handguns. When the murderer enters the classroom
in that event, what does he do first? He shoots the teacher.
Or are teachers supposed to draw their guns whenever the
classroom door opens?
Sure, you can make up a scenario in which an armed bystander
might limit a mass killing. It’s far more likely, though, that a civilian “good
guy with a gun” would overreact and turn a misunderstanding into a bloodbath.
Or that more people will kill each other in fits of anger.
This may explain why so few people have been ready to try the
absolutist solution. Outside law enforcement, barely 3 percent of Americans carry guns outside the house on a
daily basis.
A recent study looked at that 3 percent. More than
half of them acknowledged losing their temper and getting into fights, smashing
things, or having other angry outbursts.
Armed, angry, and impulsive: People who feel the need to have
their guns with them all the time aren’t a bulwark against violence — they’re
more likely a source of it.
Such people are less like Gary Cooper in High Noon and
more like the man in Chapel Hill, North Carolina who brought his rifle
along when he went to complain to his neighbors about parking issues — and
ended up murdering them.
The “good guys with guns” jingle advertises a phony fix to the
real problem of gun violence in America.
Mitchell
Zimmerman is an intellectual property lawyer who devotes much of his practice
to pro bono work.
Distributed by OtherWords.org.