Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
I see that our usual suspects have posted comments about their comic book hero with a gun fantasies. "If only everyone was armed, the world would be a safer place." Funny thing about fantasies, they are detached from reality.
Karoli at crooksandliars.com posted a piece several days ago that posed the right question (emphasis added): Can we retire the "if everyone has guns, no one will need guns" theory now?:
Arizona is an open carry state. It's not unusual at all for citizens to be carrying their guns, even to the supermarket. So what happened? Why wasn't there a hero with a gun ready to shoot Loughner down before he trained his Glock on that nine-year old child, or that Federal judge, or the nice little elderly man waiting to chat with her?
It turns out there was. Only this particular hero was smart enough to stop and think for a second or two, which probably saved more lives than were otherwise lost.
But before we embrace Zamudio's brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let's hear the whole story. "I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!' "
But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.
If you compare Zamudio's story to Bill Badger's account … as told to Lawrence O'Donnell last night, a picture emerges. Had Zamudio not been careful, there might have been another fatality, or six. At about the 5:36 mark in the video, Badger says that after Loughner went down, the gun left his hand and someone else picked it up. Badger yelled for him to drop the gun, fearing that the police might shoot him, thinking he was the shooter.
Or a well-intentioned citizen like Zamudio.
This idea that good guys carrying guns will somehow make us safer from bad guys carrying guns is straight out of the NRA talking points, but it doesn't bear any relationship to reality.
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And then there's the dilemma that Zamudio ultimately faced when confronted with the prospect of using his own gun:
The Arizona Daily Star, based on its interview with Zamudio, adds two details to the story. First, upon seeing the man with the gun, Zamudio "grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall" before realizing he wasn't the shooter. And second, one reason why Zamudio didn't pull out his own weapon was that "he didn't want to be confused as a second gunman."
Here's the truth: Had Zamudio used his gun, there's every indication the tragedy would have been compounded, not averted. Isn't it time to lay this canard to rest?
William Saletan at Slate Magazine adds, Joe Zamudio and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting: How an armed hero nearly shot the wrong man:
This is a much more dangerous picture than has generally been reported. Zamudio had released his safety and was poised to fire when he saw what he thought was the killer still holding his weapon. Zamudio had a split second to decide whether to shoot. He was sufficiently convinced of the killer's identity to shove the man into a wall. But Zamudio didn't use his gun. That's how close he came to killing an innocent man. He was, as he acknowledges, "very lucky."
That's what happens when you run with a firearm to a scene of bloody havoc. In the chaos and pressure of the moment, you can shoot the wrong person. Or, by drawing your weapon, you can become the wrong person—a hero mistaken for a second gunman by another would-be hero with a gun. Bang, you're dead. Or worse, bang bang bang bang bang: a firefight among several armed, confused, and innocent people in a crowd. It happens even among trained soldiers. Among civilians, the risk is that much greater.
We're enormously lucky that Zamudio, without formal training, made the right split-second decisions. We can't count on that the next time some nut job starts shooting.
Here's more from Rachel Maddow's blog on why more guns in the hands of citizens doesn't ever equal less people being killed with guns with some stats on states and gun ownership.
UPDATE: What if suspect Jared Loughner had a smaller capacity ammunition clip when he went to Rep. Gabby Giffords' event? If he had standard capacity clips, the killing spree could have been stopped sooner and the body counts could have been lower. Lawrence O'Donnell took up this debate with Arizona Congressman Trent Franks on Tuesday night's show.
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