Thank you!
JB,
Neither NY City/State (I grew up in NYC and went to school through college in NY State) nor Chicago/Illinois have lax gun laws. I think laws restricting law abiding citizens from owning and carrying guns - besides being unconstitutional - are unproductive and merely. However, significant penalties for criminal use, rigorously enforced, might serve to deter common criminals. I am just not sure if anything can be done for the lone guy who just goes nuts. I mean if one has decided to go kill a former boss by shooting him in the face in midtown Manhattan in daylight - the whole issue of laws and penalties is pretty much out the window as an implicit decision to accept any penalty has already been made.
A fact, which will never be mentioned, by our ever vigilant news media. In stead they will focus on how the shooter, was able to obtain a weapon at all. Lax gun laws some where.
Then nothing changes - nothing is made worse. But there was at least a chance of a less overall deadly outcome. Think of MAJ Hassan. I was at Ft Hood that day walking down the road as the police and EMTs started zooming by me but it wasn't until I got back to the VOQs that I found out what had happened. He was able to shoot many people in a large group of trained military personnel waiting to deploy into combat mostly because of surprise - initially - and their lack of weapons/ammo. Any one of those troops was trained to shoot and stop that terrorist but had been disarmed as a normal part of their pre-deployment prep. You are right, probably can't stop the first or maybe the second but boy you can make numbers 3+ a lot less likely.
Its all part of the plan.
This wasn't a mass shooting spree. The shooter initially targeted one victim and walked away. It didn't matter if he had 8 rounds or 80. It wasn't until the Keystones showed up that bystanders got hurt.
No matter how many people thump their chests CCW didn't make much difference in Colorado a few weeks ago. And open carry didn't work out too well as a deterrent in Arizona awhile back. If you think CCW laws are going to stop some crazy son-of-a-***** from murdering a bunch of people on a platform, in an office, at a school, at a movie, in a restaurant or wherever you need to rethink your deterrents, or detours for that matter. Half the people who pull this lunacy are committing suicide by cop, the other half couldn't care less what the gun laws are where they do what they do anyway, and both halves are insane, which makes gun laws as helpless for the NRA as they are are meaningless for Michael Moore. About the best you can expect CCW to do as a deterrent is in one-on-one type encounters or home invasions. Crazies are going to do their crazy crap wherever they are irregardless of the laws concerning personal firearms.
The point is, how did the gun restrictions protect the victims in this case? How did they empower the victims to deter or stop the felonious shooter? How did they keep the felonious shooter from obtaining and/or carrying the gun he used?
The answer to these questions is universal, they didn't. It doesn't matter one single bit whether someone carrying legally could have or would have stopped him. We know with 100% certainty that they didn't and couldn't have done so, because elitists like Bloomjerk and the NYPD say they can't.
You don't know that. You nor I would know the effect on the shooters if they would have know there was a possibility of resistence. It may not have meant anything to them, but we don't know that. You say we can what if all day long, but you are trying to say for a fact that it would not have mattered and you don't know that either. What the guns laws do is prevent the law abiding citizen from having the opportunity to protect themself from someone who isn't law abiding. I am not saying a CCW would have stopped any of the mass shootings, but it at least would give me the opportunity to defend myself instead of being sacrificed.
