04 April 2009

The NY Shootings: A Gun Beats 911 Every Time

All of us are reeling after a man identified as Jiverly Wong, a Vietnamese immigrant, walked into the American Civic Association center and opened fire on a roomful of immigrants taking a citizenship class before killing himself. Tragically, 13 people were killed a several more are hospitalized, some in critical condition.

Now we can expect the anti-gun crowd to use the dead bodies as a platform to push their agenda. They'll tell you that we need to ban guns to prevent incidents like this. What they won't tell you is that if guns were outlawed it would not stop psychos like Jiverly Wong because they aren't really interested in obeying laws (as illustrated by their shooting sprees). What they won't tell you is that if somebody in that building had been legally armed, we wouldn't have been watching a standoff on CNN, we would have been watching the scumbag's body bag.

The hero of this story is a receptionist who played dead, then crawled under a desk to call 911. God bless her courage and cool head to break the paralysis of fear and take action. But what if she'd been armed and trained. What if a couple of the good people in that building were carrying. Calling 911 is fine, but calling on 9mm is faster. Lives would have been saved. And psychos would have received a message that public places are not shooting galleries where you can achieve a high score for CNN & MSNBC.

3 comments :

  1. namaste said...

    i completely agree with you, khaki.

    such a terrible tragedy.

  2. DB said...

    fyi, that was most likely a government building where no guns are allowed under any circumstance so the result would have been the same. Same goes for many private business' that can forbid customers from carrying guns regardless of the law. That argument makes sense in theory, but so many shooting occur so often yet the shootings in self-defense are almost unheard of including places with mild gun laws. I am not saying stricter gun control is the answer, but that argument simply doesn't work.

  3. Khaki Elephant said...

    DB, I would disagree on two fronts. First, I support abolishing all so-called "gun free zones." There is really no such thing. A "gun free zone" simply means that only bad guys will have guns there.

    As far as self-defense use of guns being "unheard of" you should check out the NRA pubs. There are stories every month in a section dedicated to firearm use in self defense. And as they point out, you won't hear these stories in the main stream media because it doesn't fit their agenda.

    Where I see no evidence is in an argument that gun bans reduce crime. When Chicago introduced their handgun ban their crime rate rose relative to the national average. Even in Europe, where anti-gun groups love to point to lower murder rates (a cultural thing), there is a higher incidence of both assualt and occupied home invasions (bad guys there don't need to worry if their victims are armed).