fun fun fun til daddy takes the gun away

Remember that time when someone went on a shooting rampage and a whole bunch of unarmed nonbelligerents were injured and killed before the shooter turned the gun on himself or was gunned down by the professionals?

Remember when all those people who equate increased private gun ownership with increased safety and freedom from crime for all suggested that this sort of thing would not happen if only everybody were carrying?

Presumably, the logic runs thus: In that classroom or workplace or movie theater where all of those present are carrying a firearm and maintaining perfect situational awareness while studying or working or taking in the blockbuster with their kids, immediately upon the lone gunman's first shot everybody else (except, perhaps, the victim of that first shot) will throw down on that whacko and, in righteous unison, execute him in a torrent of retributive lead from all directions.

That scenario sure does sound safer for everybody. What could go wrong?

Before considering my own less-than-perfect situational awareness at any given moment, my lack of training with firearms, my personal biases and grudges, clumsiness, poor aim, and erratically fluctuating levels of bloodlust - probably more or less in accord with those same features of the statistical norm among the U.S. school- and church-attending, workplace-haunting and movie-going persons - I wonder how the trained professionals, within whose baliwick such incidents explicitly fall, might fare in such surprising, scary and unpredictable situations.

Mmmm- . . . maybe not so well, depending on your metrics for success: Reports indicate that, confronting one armed man on a crowded street, two police officers shot their target ten times and shot three unarmed bystanders, while injuring six more unarmed bystanders with bullet fragments.

Presumably those police knew that the armed man was the aggressor, that the bystanders were not aggressors, and, accordingly, did not intend to shoot those additional three people; they were accidentally struck by bullets intended for the only target. The fragments probably are reasonably-foreseeable, but surely not intentional (and, to the degree they are reasonably-foreseeable, so too must be the NYPD response of overwhelmingly generous distribution of bullets, to one contemplating shooting a former colleague outside the workplace round about rush hour).

Now suppose that everybody was armed and, after that first shot has cracked open panic, each felt the ennobling duty - nay: the moral imperative - to use that firearm to protect others by shooting the person who is shooting before the person who is shooting can shoot more people. And then the gristly chain-reaction ensues. I imagine waves of gunfire rippling and refracting among the armed individuals comprising an ignorant, terrified and righteously violent crowd in much the same way I visualize a fission reaction, except that the pile would probably burn out long before achieving critical mass, and with more actual blood and screaming and crying.

A fellow I know from Colorado said he'd recently been among a random grouping of people who, it turned out, all had concealed-carry permits (and arcane knowledge of a complex network of interstate reciprocity). Among these was a Denver-area man, with children, who reported that he had gone right out (after learning of a recent gun-related incident in his community) and bought a high-powered flashlight which he will carry (presumably along with the concealed firearm) with him to the movie theater from now on.

At first this struck me as a really clever and nonviolent way to contribute, and, after a while I started to wonder how, in such a situation, I might be tempted to behave, both as gunman in search of targets, and  as light-wielding person with less than perfect situational awareness. Also as armed innocent, startled and looking for a target. And I don't see the light doing much more to improve the situation than merely giving one person something to do with his hands other than shoot.

Me? I'm gonna try to wear drab, dark tones, hone my situational awareness and always keep a likely place  to duck and cover in sight. Let's roll.