As I said in my earlier post, weapons are my business. I'm comfy with them. Being Canadian I take no position on the US gun control issue. However I will say, based on my experience in CQB, the argument that if everybody carried guns mass killings wouldn't happen is one that can only be advanced by someone utterly clueless about the realities of combat.
Say you're in the library, reading up on your favourite plane. Of course you've got your legal concealed carry sidearm on you. POP POP POP. You look up. Some guy is there with an automatic, capping rounds at someone you can't see. You draw with one well-practiced movement, take aim and... is this guy the killer? Or is he an armed citizen like you, shooting at the killer? Better not choose wrong.
And then POP POP POP, some else is shooting at you, because you've got a gun out and she ain't waiting to figure out who's who. So now you better shoot back. Only you CAN'T shoot back because lethal stress has shut down your fine motor skills so hard you can't find the trigger, even if you weren't too tunnel-visioned to get a sight picture. And that's probably a good thing, because if you could fire you WOULD fire, and you wouldn't be thinking to scan the background to see the school group trying to hide under desks behind the one shooting at you.
And some of you are thinking right now "Not me, I'm good. I'd be able to aim, to fire, to hit the target and not the kids." but the fact is you didn't even think of these things as you read this scenario until I brought them up. You're deluding yourself if you think you're going to be that switched on with live rounds coming at your face when you can't even do it when reading some text on your screen. To quote LCol Dave Grossman, who literally wrote the book on human performance under lethal stress. "You will not rise to the occasion, you will sink to the level of your training." Let us be clear on what "training" means. I don't care how many years you've managed to kill the deer and not your buddy - if your training didn't involve incoming simunition and a thousand target-discrimination rounds a day, it was inadequate. If you weren't in the kill-house in the last 14 days, you're stale. That's the level that SWAT teams and SF train to, and even they kill the wrong people sometimes. Still think you're so switched on you can get accurate rounds downrange in this situation? Then you already know why you just killed an innocent. What, surprised? The girl you just shot wasn't the killer, she's the one who thought YOU were the killer. You didn't forget that, did you McLane? She's the armed teacher protecting her students behind her, didn't you pull that out of your combat asessment? Do you even know what a combat assessment is?
So that's you in a no-warning firefight. Now thank about fifty other concealed-carry heroes in the library with you. Now think about this going down in a dark movie theatre, like in Colorado last July.
Yeah.