A Skeptical Response to the "Good Guys with Guns" Argument

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, gun-rights advocates say that if only there had been an armed civilian present, the shooter could have been taken down. Gun advocates point to cases in which an armed bystander has taken out a shooter. But this is not the only way for society to deal with gun violence, and especially in mass shootings, this response is very risky to the armed civilian and everyone else. Many of these mass shootings involve high-powered weapons that fire bullets rapidly. When a shooter comes into a school, a mall, an office building, or wherever, and starts spraying bullets, what is a person going to do—pull out their own AR-15 and start spraying bullets back? Suppose there are ten people present with their own assault rifles, firing from all directions. Is this going to prevent more people from being killed, or is it mainly going to cause collateral damage?

Perhaps assault rifles are too cumbersome for your average "good guy" to want to carry around everywhere, so people carry concealed handguns instead. Imagine that a killer comes in and starts rapid-fire shooting. A bystander pulls out a handgun and aims at the shooter. How likely is it that the person is going to actually hit the shooter? Especially in the frantic state the bystander is likely to be in, this armed civilian is going to have to be a virtually perfect shot. Otherwise he is likely to miss the shooter while drawing the shooter’s attention (and a barrage of bullets) to himself, or, of course, to accidentally hit another person. In this situation, it seems more natural for a person to get down and hide than to stand and face a barrage of bullets, which would seem at least as likely to result in the bystander getting hit with the killer’s many bullets as for the person to hit the shooter with one or two of his own.

My point is not that it is impossible to reduce the body count in a mass shooting this way; in some cases, this has happened. But as a model for the proper response to gun violence, this approach seems extremely risky at best, and just as likely to result in more death as to take out the killer.

The gun advocates will say, "What would you rather people do, stand there defenseless while people are being killed?" I believe that their preferred alternative is likely to result in more deaths than hiding and waiting for the arrival of professionals trained for this kind of situation, but gun-rights advocates will never agree with that. But perhaps a majority of citizens will be open to an alternative policy that will make such attacks less likely to occur in the first place, and thus save people from having to confront a person who is armed with a weapon of war. The proper policy is to restrict access to assault weapons in order to make it more difficult for would-be shooters to acquire them in the first place.

Of course, gun advocates purport to believe that gun control laws are useless in preventing violence, because criminals don’t follow laws. If we take that blanket proposition seriously, we of course have no basis for restricting any weapon, including automatic weapons, rockets, grenades, and other military weapons. After all, if people were really determined, they could get hold of such weapons regardless of the law. But the fact that criminals don’t follow laws does not, as gun advocates assume, mean that killers are not hindered by laws. Well-enforced laws can indeed make a criminal’s plans harder to carry out.

Therefore, if we could make access to these weapons even a little bit harder, we could prevent some mass shooting deaths. A killer might have to resort to a less powerful weapon, and kill ten people instead of 20. Many mass shooters purchase their weapons legally; they are not career criminals with access to a steady supply of illegal weapons from which gun control laws would not keep them. Adam Lanza got many of his weapons from his mother’s collection. If such weapons had not been legal, there is a good chance that those weapons would not have been in that house, and Lanza might either not have done the shooting or would have had to find some other source for weapons; perhaps he would have ended up with less-powerful weapons, and killed five or ten people instead of 26.

Of course, it’s true that no law, however well-enforced, will prevent all gun deaths. But well-enforced laws can prevent some deaths. Which is why, despite the fact that criminals don’t follow laws, we still attempt to restrict criminals’ access to guns—because even if we can’t ensure that no criminal gets a gun, we can at least make it more difficult for them to do so, and that is well worth it.
It is sad and unnecessary that Americans have to face the dilemma of whether to hide and wait for the police or to take out guns and start firing. In most other advanced democracies, people do not confront this choice. Australia has not had a mass shooting since the country enacted strict gun legislation in 1996; in the same span of time before the legislation, there were 112 mass shootings.

Nor is the success of the nation's gun legislation limited to mass shootings. Margaret Hartmann writes: "…In 2012 a study by Australian National University's Andrew Leigh and Wilfrid Laurier University's Christine Neill concluded that in the decade after the law was introduced, the firearm homicide rate dropped by 59 percent and the firearm suicide rate fell by 65, with no corresponding increase in homicides and suicides committed without guns." (Source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/how-australia-and-britain-tackled-gun-violence.html ) The likelihood that this legislation contributed nothing to this decline in gun violence seems very small.

The U.K. also enacted restrictive gun laws after the Dunblane massacre, also in 1996. It is difficult to tell how much difference that law made in the frequency of mass killings, since the country had so few anyway, and the overall gun crime rate did not change much, again probably because it had so little gun crime to begin with. The country simply does not have nearly as many guns as we do, leading to the startling conclusion that, in the absence of guns, gun deaths are quite rare.


Of course, the absence of guns would be nearly impossible to achieve in the United States. We enacted an assault weapons ban in 1994, but the ban was allowed to expire in 2004; gun-rights absolutism grew in popularity and political power in the intervening years. Even if we managed to re-enact the ban on assault weapons, there would still be many such firearms in civilian hands, as confiscation of existing weapons (as took place in the U.K.) would be unthinkable here. It would probably still be more difficult for a would-be killer to obtain such a weapon, if one could not be easily acquired legally. Yet most gun violence would be unaffected by such a ban, as most gun deaths involve handguns. If a ban on assault weapons would be exceedingly difficult to pass, a ban on handguns would be virtually impossible.

So it is a depressing fact that Americans will continue to face armed killers much more often than people in other countries like ours. If I were ever in that situation, I would surely root for the brave person who took out a weapon and fired back at the assailant. But it’s a shame that we have to settle for this when, with sensible gun laws, we could prevent this from being necessary.