The Post Navy Yard Gun Control Debate is on Our Terms

[Brooklyn]

You're the good guy. You do whatever you have to do in order to ensure you don't take an innocent life (more precisely, to minimize the loss of innocent life. Sometimes that means taking the shot when you otherwise wouldn't, but that's not the case here). That means holding your fire until you're sure that your target is the bad guy and that your life or the life of another is in imminent danger.

Yeah, that means that if the bad guy is a very fast and very accurate shot, he's more likely to prevail even against multiple good guys. The good guys operate under rules. The bad guys don't. That means the bad guys have flexibility the good guys don't have. Advantage: bad guys.

This is the real world, not some fantasyland. Here, in the real world, it is easier for evil to prevail than for good to. But that does not relieve the good guys of their burden.

It is also true that most bad guys are not batman comics super villains..

 

[FrankZ]

It is also true that most bad guys are not batman comics super villains..

That's only because criminals these days are too lazy to take their game to the next level.

 

[kcbrown]

That's only because criminals these days are too lazy to take their game to the next level.

But that's because they don't have to take their game to the next level, either because their victims are forbidden by law from carrying the means to effective self-defense, or because their victims are sheep who aren't inclined to bother to do so even if they can. Criminals that want to actually cause bodily harm will go to places in which the former is true, i.e. "gun free zones".

 

[FrankZ]

But that's because they don't have to take their game to the next level, either because their victims are forbidden by law from carrying the means to effective self-defense, or because their victims are sheep who aren't inclined to bother to do so even if they can. Criminals that want to actually cause bodily harm will go to places in which the former is true, i.e. "gun free zones".

It takes a lot of work to become a super villain. They are the overachievers of the overachievers.

 

[cad68m_m]

LA Times article detailing Arron Alexis Navy Yard Shooter mental health issues.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-navy-shooter-20130919,0,4030934.story

Also see: http://www.fixnics.org for the number of mentally ill that each state has reported as of March 2013