(And Why Gun Free Zones Don't Work)
This past week has certainly been
one of tragedy. My heartfelt prayers and
thoughts certainly go out to the victims, the families and the people of my
home town of Aurora, CO. I was in high
school when the Aurora Mall, where the theater is, was brand new. And the
apartment of the alleged gunman is just down the street from where I went to
junior high school. The apartment
evacuees were relocated to my old high school.
But what really is disappointing to me (not surprising, but disappointing),
is that the gun control wonks are coming out of the woodwork to use the blood
of these innocent victims as a means for forwarding their agenda. So, since everyone else is “Monday morning
quarterbacking” this massacre, I thought I would jump on the bandwagon as
well.
That theater was a “gun free
zone.” More massacres have been
successfully carried out in gun free zones than at places where good people
were allowed to carry their gun. Virginia
Tech, the 2008 Chicago Mall shooting, and Fort Hood, just to name a few, are
stark examples of this point. On the
flip-side, just take a look at the New Life Church incident in Colorado Springs
a few years ago. The gunman was armed similarly
to the Aurora shooter. But an armed
woman was present and took him down before he could cause more than only a few
casualties. I carry all the time for
that very reason.
Without an armed person present, those people had
ZERO chance. With an armed person
present, their chances sure as heck would have been greater than zero!
On a Facebook discussion thread
there was a comment made that one armed person in that theater could not have
stopped the gunman. That's a perfectly valid point. While it may be true (that one armed person
may not have stopped the gunman), one armed person would have distracted the
gunman long enough to allow more people to escape, or for others to take
action. It doesn't take much to
distract a gunman who is as narrowly focused as this guy was. He was focused on
killing as many people as he could. What I am talking about here is the concept
that I wrote about in a previous article of getting off of
your "X" and putting the bad guy on his
"X." The other concept alluded to here is what we in armed
self-defense circles call “gaining the half-second advantage.” If you can distract the bad guy for even half
a second, you can at least do something to take swift action and change the
outcome - hopefully to a good outcome.
Yes, he had body armor. But, as the
media likes to spin things, they called it a "bullet proof vest." There is no such thing. Different levels of body armor can protect
against certain levels of ballistic performance, but no body armor is
completely bullet proof. And depending on what he had, it is quite possible
that he only had a low level of ballistic protection. This guy didn't seem to know a whole lot
about guns, to be honest. So it isn't a
far leap to say that he probably knew even less about ballistic protection. An armed person would have tried to at least
penetrate the body armor, and if that didn’t work try for a more vulnerable
area. At that distance (within that
theater - a movie theater is way less than 25 yards), a head shot with a
handgun is not out of the question. A proficient person with a handgun could
have stayed concealed just long enough to un-holster and get a well-aimed shot
off, then move to become a huge distraction to the shooter and attempt to take
him down. Either way, if the gunman had
someone shooting back at him, he wouldn’t have been trying to shoot the people
who were trying to escape.
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| This why I am an armed citizen |
The bottom line here is that the gun control crowd has got to finally realize that gun-free zones DON’T work, and allowing citizens to practice their right of self-protection DOES work. This has been proven time and again. Most sheepdogs I know are well trained to keep moving, and find shots that have a low perceived penalty for a miss. The shooter's main threat at that point would be the moving sheepdog with the gun that is shooting at him, so he wouldn't dare turn his attention to anyone else. Many more people would then be able to escape.
So what can you do to be more
prepared? Take some form of “Active
Shooter Response” training. Even if you
don’t carry a gun, this type of training will give you a good foundation of
things to think about to increase your chances of survival. I took some of my training through the FEMA Independent Study Institute, and I refresh the training annually. For those of you who do carry a concealed
handgun, I also encourage you to keep up on your live-fire training and keep
those skills sharp. See my previous article about the need for continuous training to learn more ways
to stay polished.
This was a horrible event. But let’s not continue to enable future
similar events with more criminal enabling “gun free zones” and this insane
insistence on taking away people’s rights to self-defense. If guns were banned, he would have found
another way to cause harm. As Charlton Heston
once said:
"Here's
my credo. There are no good guns, There are no bad guns. A gun in the hands of a bad man is a bad
thing. Any gun in the hands of a good
man is no threat to anyone, except bad people."
