I wish we could win this argument with logic, but I'm certain the fanatics will immediately latch onto the narrative that guns are being used by good guys already, but we obviously need more guns and less restrictions on them them to get those numbers up.
With Republicans, any fact against them is either ignored or bastardized to say the opposite of what it actually says.
Yeah, there's rarely any logical sense being made because to them gun is a right, not privileges, and once privileges turn into right it take a dictator to take that away.
But then again, jailing people in shitty prison where most right are taken away is a okay 🤷
A genuine, actual answer is that when you're being attacked, it is incredibly rare for a police officer to be standing there, ready to intervene. In life-or-death situations the police really only exist to take a report from whoever is left standing, and potentially make an arrest. There's plenty of people out there who don't have the strength to defend themselves in hand-to-hand combat, and even if they did, next to nobody has the skills necessary to reliably defend against a knife attack using their bare hands. That's just plain how knife attacks work.
You can counter this with statistics that show that access to guns increases injuries and deaths, because they absolutely do, but pro-gun folks put the individual before the group on this issue. The individual, in their mind, should have the right to quick deadly force in order to facilitate defense of their own life, and other's failure to handle that responsibility is not their problem and/or the price of that right.
There are always tradeoffs, in any policy you set for society. If you go the other direction there will be people who are victimized who would otherwise have been able to defend themselves. Which scenario is worse? How many victims of one type are worth victims of the other?
How does this turn into a knife argument? That’s just a distraction. We do already restrict certain types of knives, plus you can’t walk down a city street with a machete.
More importantly I can shut a door between myself and an attacker. Try that if they have a gun
They're saying that if someone tries to attack you with a knife (or even no weapon), pro-gun proponents argue you should have a right to a firearm to defend yourself against that attacker, citing that most people straight up do not have the physical ability to ward off the attacker (who is on average an adult man).
I would argue having a firearm is unlikely to help. At close range, knife has the advantage and you probably won’t even get the gun out. At longer range, running/avoiding is a better choice if you can.
There's a few YouTube channels that I think do a good job of being level-headed when it comes to analysing self-defense and giving decent advice around it. Hard2Hurt, Armchair Violence (a more general channel that recently did a video on unarmed knife defense), and Active Self Protection are three that come to mind right off the bat. All three say the same thing:
• avoid sketchy locations if you can
• pay attention to the people around you, especially in what are called "transition areas" like when you walk out of a store
• deescalate conflict as much as possible (without giving in to demands)
• leave as soon as you're able
• only fight when your hand is forced
As far as I'm aware, they all also advocate for carrying pepper spray and participating in folkstyle wrestling to use as your defensive base for things that don't require lethal force. The problem is, you don't have the only say on whether a situation will become a threat to your health and safety or not. Sometimes you're just unlucky and a guy flips out on you for something petty and now you've got a guy pushing and shoving yelling about how he's gonna fuck you up and you can see a pocket knife clipped in his pocket.
Most firearm uses are at very close range. If you practice your draw—and you absolutely fucking should—you should be able to draw and fire multiple rounds with a person busy punching or stabbing you. (Through what usually happens is the victim manages to get a window of separation and uses that to draw their weapon.) After a few shots your attacker will have had enough time to react to what you're doing, but most people react to being shot in the gut by falling over. It's mostly a psychological thing, but surprisingly effective. Once they do that, turn and run. All you're trying to do is get them to stop hurting you so you can get away safely.
The last time citizens with guns stood up against the government was the Civil War, and they were standing up for their right to enslave other Americans.
Oh yeah, I'm sure any of these cases were someone stopping to hold an active shooter at gunpoint and that somehow working out for them. Or maybe they used their gun as a melee weapon. Or maybe the attackers were subdued by being talked down over their common love of guns. Or maybe the active shooter ran out of ammo and came up to the good guy with a gun to get some more, at which point the good guy revealed they were actually tricking them into lowering their guard and put them into a headlock. Or maybe some other far-fetched bullshit that'll let me equivocate over the fact that "good guys with guns" don't do shit in the grand scheme of things.
I think you're pissed at the objective fact that 12/433 is fucking nothing and your "good guy with a gun" argument is a pathetic farce, so you're trying muddy the waters by shifting the argument to a ridiculous, unfounded, unfalsifiable notion that any of the 42 subduers might've had literally anything to do with "good guys" having firearms.
I think you're pissed at the objective fact that 12/433 is fucking nothing and your "good guy with a gun" argument
There is nothing in what I said that would imply what side of "good guy with a gun" argument I am on and there is nothing in the data that says anything about whether the 42 people had a gun.
My point is this is terrible and confusing representation of the data, as is often the case in any "data is beautiful" community.
But keep kicking around mad that the version that supports your narrative is not the only possible one :D
Yeah, so terrible and confusing that they didn't mention guns in branches that don't have anything to do with guns outside of a gun fetishist's fanfiction.
So, I can imagine someone with a gun menacing the attacker at gunpoint and forcing them to surrender. No shots fired.
But the data doesn't include this for bystanders. Maybe that's because it doesn't happen in real life, or maybe they muddied the watters. We can't know because we can't see the data they used to make this graphic.
For practical purposes imagine yourself in a public area with the gunman actively shooting people with an AR-15, to the left of you a guys head is turned to mush, down the way someone takes a hit to a limb leaving their arm dangling in an unnatural way. All around you are dead and dying you ignore the pistol in your pocket and run at him screaming "I'm going to take you down brudder".
The people who subdued people without shooting them probably didn't have a gun.
Not all shooters are blindly suicidal. They can be menaced with a gun and told to surrender. Yeah, in some situations it won't work, but in some situations it will.
42 incidents. Not even one of them used a gun to force a surrender? Hard to believe.
It's incredibly easy to believe. Many people own guns most of them don't go around armed literally all the time. Fewer yet are going to get in a gun fight to the death with a shooter who is actively killing people all around them. Of those willing to do so basically anyone with even half a brain is going to take the shot. By the time you have yelled "drop the" they have enough time to bring the gun to bear on you. It makes more sense to execute you than comply.
True, they didn't specify whether in that 42 cases the citizen does have a gun but did not fire, just aiming and intimidate. However the data did split between shot fired shot at the attacker(no mention hit or miss) vs subdued, not killed vs subdued, and also there's a mention of the attacker surrender, so i assume "subdued" mean the attacker did not surrender but forced to give up whatever they're doing.
The chance that someone decided to go hand to hand with a gunman in the middle of blowing away the population whilst leaving their gun holstered is basically zero.