> Is it not true? What did they do in response to an active shooter? They called the police and SWAT -- people with guns

Qualified people with guns (ideally).

Maybe more importantly, uniformed people with guns. In an active shooter situation, people in plain clothes are all suspects and suspects holding guns get shot.

Myself and coworkers joke about our "armory" of weapons ready to combat a shooter. However, we're not stupid enough to actually do that. We know the police that would show up within seconds would see us as targets as well.

seconds? Nope. 5+ minutes (which is usually too late).

The office I work in has the city's emergency management building right at the foot of it.

Sounds like we agree that having a police officer on duty at schools that are "gun free" is a good idea.

The fact that it's common knowledge that you're armed means you'll likely never have to deal with that kind of situation.

And also, shoot everyone because guns just aren't accurate weapons unless you're in the calm situation of a range.

See all the innocent bystanders shot by police who miss the alleged offender.

https://www.popehat.com/2013/12/05/nypd-baby-you-know-we-lov...

America's obsession with credentials at its finest... these people are allowed to have guns because we say so, but no one else! (except those pesky criminals and shooters who don't abide by laws)

America has a pretty big obsession with thinking that they would be the hero in this situation if only they were there and had a gun.

The average gun owner (hell, the average police officer probably) is in no way prepared for an active shooting situation. It's a fantasy to think you'd be the one to stop it.

Bear in mind that after the recent Florida school shooting, the President of the United States declared that if he were there, he would have, despite being unarmed, physically overpowered the shooter and saved the day. If that is not worrying enough, half of the country believed him when he said that.

[citation needed]

This is a man who got out of his limo to confront a mugger in Manhattan. (old news articles cover it) I think that this is evidence enough to suggest that yes, he actually would do it.

Good for Trump that he said that. He has an imposing physique, and he might just have impressed the disturbed kid enough to put down his gun. (Ten years ago there was a school shooting in Germany where a teacher did stop a student that way.)

But we must respect the decision of the policeman in Florida who found himself outgunned not to confront the shooter, first responders are trained not to be heroes and to keep their life first priority.

> Good for Trump that he said that. He has an imposing physique

Okay, while attempting to be as neutral and objective as possible, Trump is an obese geriatric. He's decently tall, 6' or so. But that's about it.

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse2.mm.bin...

Average gun owner != average CCW holder who would be carrying at that moment

CCW holder just means you took a class (in most states).

Oh, man. Having known a bunch of CCW holders who also carry their guns with them at all times, I would be far more scared of those guys in this situation, full stop.

They talk tough, but I have zero confidence in their ability to add the good kind of violence to a violent situation. Sooooooo overconfident, smh.

Heh heh, struck a nerve with some CCW holders ;)

It has nothing to do with being the hero. People who are a good law abiding citizens should not be denied the right to own firearms because some people misbehave.

This is just a result of America’s individualist society. If we were collectivists we would ban guns for the good of society. But we’re not, and we never will be. We’re rugged individualists, for better or worse, and some people actively vote for things that make their lives worse just to uphold that value. It’s what America was built on. I don’t see a problem with it. It’s just a different way of life.

The same Americans were perfectly ok with draconian sentences for marijuana and other drugs. The same America is imprisoning most people among all countries oftentimes for surprisingly long time. You can get arrested for jaywalking or loitering, both of them being unimaginable to me. You have to keep your hands on wheel when cop stops you, lest cop can shoot you. Meanwhile, I can keep my hands where I want when cops stop me in a car.

I am not sure individualism and freedom are good enough explanations.

Very few Western countries actually ban guns. Sweden, for example, has 2M registered guns (21 for each 100 persons). Germany has 5.5M. In the Czech Republic you can get a PAR MK3 (local version of the AR15).

To the best of my knowledge in Germany it's mostly long guns for hunting, not handguns. To carry a handgun you'd need a permit and demonstrate your need to be armed.

But can you own an AR-15?

According to [0], it looks like you could even own the full auto military version (the M16).

0)https://www.sweden.org.za/gun-laws-in-sweden.html

The current laws in Sweden - the short version is that you need a justified reason (hunting or "shooting club"), you need to pass tests and not have a recent criminal record. Fully automatic weapons are much harder to get permits for than standard ones.

https://polisen.se/lagar-och-regler/vapen-regler-och-tillsta...

I agree with your observations about the US (as an inhabitant myself), a lot of people forget or deny these points.

I do disagree with your conclusions that it must stay this way, because I feel that on the gun issue, the resulting policies are leading to more guns in unqualified hands and more violence. I think there is space for rugged individualism and sane gun ownership requirements.

I think we're at a middle ground that is worse than either idealistic extreme (zero guns everywhere VS everyone trained and carrying).

Having gun-free zones exist alongside available firearms has repeatedly resulted in mass shooters picking the least armed location. The eventual Pulse shooter scoped out the Disney parks but was discouraged by the guards. The presence of a few qualified people carrying is a deterrent that we shouldn't rule out, and it's not worth staffing police on every block like a police state.

Perhaps a better combination might be legislation for sane gun ownership requirements combined with legislation limiting the proliferation of gun-free zones. That way vetted gun owners wouldn't be unarmed in the places in their community that they care about when they come up against a killer with no regard for rules.

This comment breaks the site guidelines noticeably worse than others in the thread. Please don't post ideological rants here and please edit out the name-calling.

You've done this a ton and we've given you a ton of warnings. Eventually this leads to getting banned, so would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended from now on?

There is zero name calling in this post. Only contra positions to glittering generalities that try to paint dementedness as handsomeness.

I've received three warnings in the years I've posted hundreds of times. That is not in any rational way a ton. You are the only person who has ever picked on any of my posts. None of the posts you've ever complained about have had more than -2 karma at the time of the complaint and this one was at 0.

Your position amounts to bullying: you are in a position of power, you cite vague guidelines and each time I've asked exactly which guideline and in what manner it's a violation you refused to answer. This is a might makes right tactic. I refuse to accept it as fair, or just, or right. And itself is inconsistent with those same guidelines.

There will only be more challenges to such an absurd coddling of discourse that necessarily arise from highly charged events. There will be more such events. They will be even more ideological. That's why they occur and why people want to talk about them.

When people post nonsense, I have always seen enough downvotes by the community to render such opinions moot by their invisibility. I see no purpose or logic in your claim.

I have never opened a throw away account. This is my only account. All your threat does is tell me that was the actual mistake.

"Nonsensical Ayn Rand crap" and "irrational fearful white bunny rabbit gun nut" count as name calling in the sense that the site guidelines use the term. As for previous warnings, here are some:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13513215

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14224942

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14668018

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479044

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15763025

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15847807

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16232868

That's a rather shocking level of abuse of this site and ignoring of moderation requests. If you don't correct this and abide by the site rules from now on, we're going to ban you. I'm sorry if that feels like bullying; it's routine moderation, and we've already cut you a ton of slack, as the linked comments make clear.

You are just a sheep parroting NRA and not a rugged individual.

Citizens shooting back in a crisis only makes things worse, how do you know who is the real shooter now?

Have you ever been in a shooting situation? If you are not trained for it it is terrifying and it is unlikely you will make a positive difference.

You're wrong. The guy who shot up church in Texas last year was stopped by an armed civilian with a rifle.

Personal attacks are not ok here, regardless of how wrong someone else is. Please don't comment like this again.

Your comment would be fine without the first paragraph.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I could have worded it differently, but I think it is important to point out that the rugged individual label does not apply to most Americans who live in cities and follow the herd.

Also this was in a response to a building where I have many friends was attacked by an active shooter.

I own an AR15 and a shotgun. Law enforcement is the right call for rapid response versus someone like myself with limited range time.

I don't care about your credentials; if you have actual training, that's what matters. Your average civilian has almost no training, therefore law enforcement is the preferred response. Can you prove training without credentials? Certainly, but we're not all going to the range together to see who we are and aren't going to trust to respond to active shooters.

It's not just the training in a broad sense - if you're armed with your concealed carry, and you witness a shooting, are you duty-sworn to act?

Put it another way, in that it actually happened: If you're duty sworn to act, and don't, are you partly responsible for further deaths? See: The on-campus resource officer for a recent highschool shooting who did hide.

I for one support a clear division between who is responsible for general civilian safety. I draw the line at buckling my seatbelt and not drinking cleaning product - beyond that, I don't think I should be in charge of making sure I don't get shot, or smashed into by a drunk driver, or ensuring the train I get on doesn't derail. I want my government to take care of that and I'm happy to pay for it.

> Put it another way, in that it actually happened: If you're duty sworn to act, and don't, are you partly responsible for further deaths?

Legally, no. See Warren v DC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

> the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists

The country was founded on the notion that all you have is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So I rather defend myself.

If you want to “happily pay for” your own protection, you should hire your own bodyguard. I don’t want my taxes to go to your protection just because you want the government to solve all your problems.

The community is better at self defense than the individual.

If your family member was murdered while you were out, do you have the expertise to find out who did it and meter justice?

Do you have the resources to guarantee mutually assured destruction with another community?

"The community is better at self defense than the individual." - Not sure what this means. My own experience comes from someone abusing someone at a bus. Nobody intervenes. Just a bunch of sheep until I have to say "Stop it". So while the community may be better defending, they don't, and it is up to the individual to secure his / her own protection.

If my family was murdered while I was out, then by definition I cannot defend them. The law system will take care of it presumably, but that is not "defense", it is post-fact "justice."

Unclear what your mutually destruction comment was.

In your first example - why aren't there more assaults on buses? Why wasn't there a gang member on the bus demanding a secondary fare or "protection fee"? Because your taxes pay for a local police department and a federal policing force. I'm not talking about "bystander effect" here, I'm talking about government resources designed to protect the population at whole. Isolated incidents will still happen. The Law, and Government, is about doing as much good as possible.

Your family is de-facto defended from murder because it is harder to commit murder and get away with it when the FBI exists, generating criminal investigation resources and distributing them among local police detectives. Your taxes pay for this and are protecting you right now. The very existence of a justice system is preventing crime. Not all crime, obviously, but a great deal. The remainder is more a socioeconomic failure of this country than a justice system failure (or, a justice system failure in that the war on drugs is policy failure enforced by the justice system).

Mutually assured destruction is more a macro-comment. Why aren't hordes of Russian barbarians coming over the hill? Because the US exerts its sovereignty within its borders. Why doesn't an organized community (government) challenge that? Because both communities would be vaporized.

Since we're on the subject, your taxes are a much cheaper way to get clean water, medicine that you are guaranteed actually contains the active ingredients you're looking for, food that won't poison you, and ensure that the city upriver doesn't dump toxic waste into the river. If you wanted to "take care of those problems yourself," you'd be running around like a headless chicken. Communitize, instead.

I'm actually replying to sibling comment regarding being duty-sworn to protect but don't see reply button there for some reason... Police are NOT duty-sworn to protect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

> Law enforcement is the right call for rapid response versus someone like myself with limited range time.

This may not be true if you're right there and SWAT is 5 minutes away.

Agree, but edge case. Maybe you're armed, maybe you have the training, and maybe you're not going to panic. Can't base sound policy at scale on the stars aligning.

> Agree, but edge case.

This is by no means an "edge-case" if you live in a rural area. "Sound policy" within a heavily urbanized area may be unworkable elsewhere.

> Can't base sound policy at scale on the stars aligning

"Failing to scale" here would be to allow urban population centers to dictate policy that would be untenable in other areas of the country.

What range training features people who are bent on killing _actively shooting back_ at you?

_You_ don't want to harm anyone else, you only want to protect yourself (and possibly others). They have no such compunction.

Being able to put a few downrange with a Glock is not an active shooter situation, and honestly, as a first responder, most people in such situations find themselves vomiting, urinating in terror (and reasonably so).

I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.

However, overall, it would be terrible policy because such a proliferation of arms in public would result in all kinds of extra mass shootings, suicides, homicides, accidents, etc. that would cause more deaths than any reduction in the lethality of a given mass shooting.

I grew up with gun culture. I was taught you don't pull a gun unless you are genuinely ready to kill someone. If you aren't prepared, both logistically and psychologically, to actually kill someone, this goes very bad places.

The idea that we just need to arm everyone pretty much guarantees that most people won't actually meet that standard. It goes all kinds of bad places.

The other thing is you don't find your way to a more peaceful civil climate by escalating the violence. That's so very much "Going to war to protect the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."

We need to be fostering a more civil climate where Americans are better cared for. That's the real solution here. We need to be fixing healthcare and housing and the extremes of poverty in this country that are appalling for a first world country.

And I think that most of the discussions of gun violence overlook that larger reality and see it is as not relevant. But there are reasons people go postal here, and it isn't because a side effect of gun ownership is insanity.

> I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.

I don't think you've thought this through. You hear one, then two gun shots coming from two different people in a plaza with a bunch of people. Who's the real attacker?

Say you actually witnessed it, what about the 50 other people around you who now see you brandishing and firing a gun? Are you now the threat?

If everyone is shooting back at everyone else, the death toll will be WAY higher than just ducking and hiding with only one shooter. The real threat is clear in this scenario. The police know who to take down.

> I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.

It's probably much easier, if you count the deaths you cause and not just those from bullets you fire. When there is one person shooting, there are myriad reports from eyewitnesses with different numbers and descriptions of the shooters. When you've got multiple people shooting you are going to have multiple people perceiving who started the shooting differently.

How do you possibly plan for each of those people to know decisively who the "shooter" is? You're all shooters to each other, until proven otherwise.

Can you imagine the deaths of innocent people by crossfire?

Couldn’t be worse than the police

Stop.

Nobody has ever successfully used a shooting situation with victims as an opportunity to convince other people to own and carry firearms when going to school, work, or church.

All it does is piss people off, make gun enthusiasts look bad, and start up flamewars online.

If you want to convince other people of the merits of gun ownership, the time and place to do that is offline, with friends, at your favorite range or other safe shooting area.

If only America were actually obsessed with credentials on this one...

But before playing into your hand further: It doesn't seem odd that most people are not mentally/physically capable of dealing properly with an active shooter/combat situation and therefor don't feel that they would/should be the person to deal with it. Gonna make the bold assumption that most people's job descriptions don't involve annual firearm training, and they would therefor feel more comfortable with police dealing with these sort of situations. Which is the point other sane humans are trying to make before you deride the conversation for douchery.

>>shooters who don’t abide by guns laws.

Get your facts straight. Hint: the large majority do abide by gun laws in their purchase.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-s...

Actually no, most shooters do not own their guns legally. Only 18% of guns used in crimes were legally owned. Although your claim may be the case for mass shooters, a tiny minority of all perpetrators of gun homicide. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new-e...

Well, they may abide by gun laws in how they get the guns, but they sure aren't in how they use them...

(Though I suppose that's not "gun laws" that they're breaking, but rather laws against murder.)

Uhm, have you seen our cops?

Yeah, I don't see how support for BLM and gun control mesh. If cops are corrupt and biased, then why would you want to wait on one in an emergency?

It's hard to see minor details like that from high up in an ivory tower.

Lower income urban voters tend to be split on gun control depending on the type. There's little support there for anything that would make it more costly or time consuming for someone without a record of violent crime to buy a firearm.

You'd still need to hide if you happened to have a gun in the event that you don't, I don't know, want to get shot.

A gun is a weapon, not armor.

Also, having a gun out might make you a target for the police. They don't know that you're a good guy.

We had a shooter situation at my apartment complex not long ago and the police were on scene before I had time to unlock my pistol.

Consider, though, those living outside major population centers, where the police response time can be on the order of 10 to 30 (or more) minutes and there's an active shooter situation. There's very little that can be done to mitigate damage done by the shooter or prevent him from escaping in that span of time.

Professional people who are formally trained to use guns in situations involving other people who have guns.

It's both funny and sad that you think that being a SWAT member boils down to "here is a gun".

Well they not only have a gun. They have something far more important: body armor. Even a completely untrained SWAT member is going to be more successfull than a random citizen with a gun.

Even a SWAT member without body armor is way more effective than a random dude with a gun.

And if the assailant didn't have a gun, you also would not need to hide from an active shooter.

You'd need to hide no matter the weapon.

People who are specifically trained in the use of guns as a group in responding to active shooter situations.

Not just "people with guns".

I’m not SWAT. If I had a gun and there was an armed maniac going around shooting people, I would still hide.

> Is it not true? What did they do in response to an active shooter? They called the police and SWAT -- people with guns.

People with guns that will take down anyone else brandishing a gun in that area. Still think it's a good idea to have a gun in this situation?

The big edge the SWAT guys have is armor and shields, and sometimes armored vehicles, along with enough tactical training to use them. This lets them survive getting close enough to do something. Regular cops have guns too, but that's not enough. The Parkland shooting had an armed sheriff's deputy in the school, but he wasn't armored up to take on someone with an assault rifle.