Dr. Murray Shane, on NPR's "All Things Considered" yesterday, said that he didn't think that psychiatrists need to carry guns. (Go to about 2:44 if you just want to hear the comment itself.)
Right. The perp killed a caseworker and then was about to kill the doctor. The doctor drew his own gun and they exchanged shots. The perp did federal time for bank robbery and then for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Assuming that he had a stolen weapon, he was looking at at least ten years in prison if he were caught carrying the gun.
Laws prohibiting felons from possessing guns didn't stop this guy. Neither did the "gun free zone" signs at the doors to the hospital. What stopped,or at least slowed, this asswipe down from committing mass murder was two shots in the stomach from a .32 automatic.
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9 comments:
When denial and wishes trump critical thinking we get inane stuff like that.
The whole gun-free-zones things is a proven failure as they have proven to be Victim-rich-zones.
Eck!
Single case anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much, if anything, in a 300+ million population country.
This reminds me about the discussion whether teachers should carry guns just in case. This could in theory (best case) save a few dozen lives per year, but I also remember someone's remark on how he would not have wanted a certain choleric teacher of his being armed, ever.
And there's the problem; unintended side effects. Armed psychologists may be able to defend themselves better a couple times per year if they're armed, but how many of them will kill people in frightening (yet otherwise non-lethal) moents? How many female receptionists will be raped by their boss with a gun in their face? How many psychologists will kill themselves by gun accident?
Are psychologists especially in danger? Hardly. Their patients are 99.9% of the time incontact with other people, after all.
Why do you think that psychiatrists are accident-prone,nervous rapists?
I'll go w the doc - he knows his patients and also has brains enough to act on his knowledge... and I'll go with anyone else similarly situated.
Darn, the .32 auto really seems Not to have done the job. I wonder where the felon got hit? I love my old Colt .32 Pocket pistol but it seems to not be a good choice for defence? Yet in that situation with my High Standard .22 stubby he would have probably lost at least an eyeball. Stopping power requires a book to understand or a .50 bmg it seems.
w3ski
"Why do you think that psychiatrists are accident-prone,nervous rapists? "
I don't, and don't need to.
We're speaking about a country of 300+ million people. That's a hundred thousand psychologists or so. You just know there are plenty of any kind in this large a group without assuming anythign special about the group as a whole.
And yet you assume that among those other 299,900,000 (and more) people, the number that it will be necessary to defend against is so small that it's wholly justifiable to strip others of their rights?
This is the first time that a shooter has ever been taken down by a handgun in the possession of a civilian while one of these incidents is underway.
The first time.
Will there be a second time? I don't know. I will say that one out of several hundred shooter incidents where a handgun in the possession of a civilian was instrumental in saving lives doesn't really add up to much statistically.
In fact, there has been no -- zero -- difference in crime rate rise/fall between states with lax gun laws and states with strict gun laws. Gun laws seem rather irrelevant to crime rates right now.
But that's a different topic altogether.
BadTux, your point doesn't take into account that almost all of these clowns do their shootings in places where guns are prohibited. If that doctor had not ignored the prohibition in this case, he'd have been dead body #2.
Besides that, how many CCW holders are setting out to stop a mass shooter? Certainly not with a baby KelTec or a J-frame Smith. CCW holders have the guns to defend themselves. In this case, self-defense overlapped stopping a mass-shooting before it got going.
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