Rep. Gohmert: Did No One Else in Aurora Theater Have a Gun?
I suspect that if Gohmert was any more of an imbecile, that he'd have his feet in a pot and he'd be watered twice a week.
For the moment, let's set aside Gohmert's babblings about how such things wouldn't happen if people were able to pray more in public. Let's instead look at the situation you'd be faced with if you were at that theater with your concealed pistol.
It's dark. The theater is packed. Some clown comes in from the front, through an emergency exit, lobs a smoke or gas grenade and begins shooting. Pandemonium ensues.
You wouldn't have known that he was wearing body armor. But you'd be trying to shoot a guy dressed head-to-toe in black gear in a very dark room. The clown had a rifle. You'd have a handgun, probably a compact 9mm or a five-shot .38 with open sights. With your heart pounding, adrenaline coursing through your system and your eyes watering from the smoke/gas grenade, you'd have to make the steadiest shot in your life. While he is shooting other people, the noise of his shots are ringing through the theater and people are screaming, dying and pushing to get the hell out of Dodge. And when he didn't go down to a couple of shots to center-of-mass, you'd have to very carefully shoot him in the face while he is trying to kill you with a far better weapon.
And all that assumes that you're maybe fifteen feet away from Asswipe, which is about as far as you probably can be and have a hope in hell of making the shot.
Having said all that, what you'd probably end up doing is hopefully distracting Asswipe long enough so some other people could escape. But for that, you'd pay with your life and probably cost the lives of people around you.
Bottom line: It would be like trying to stop a fully-involved house fire with a garden hose.
Gohmert is an idiot.
18 comments:
Linking to this because intelligent (actually, Gohmert would have to be watered three times a week because not drought-resistant).
Gohmert is out of touch.
The problem here is we had a nutbag that just wanted to see chaos and destruction.
Applying morality and logic to that does not apply.
Having a firearm might be helpful for the person he aimed at, but like all
speculation, it is about what happened vs wishful thinking. However, it's
my understanding the venue was a gun free zone making those people that
obey law and do carry disarm. Certainly that was not a helpful thing.
Oddly those that would ban guns do not appreciate how much worse other
means could be. Those there were lucky it was not a can of gas and a
match as we have notable examples of how nasty that turns out.
Eck!
Add in a hand- or foot-powered pump to that and the carnage would have been unfathomable.
Not to mention if two in the audience happened to be armed, the possibility of confusion as to who the dangerous shooter could be that a well-intentioned defender might end up with a serious case of the deads.
If memory serves me right, there were armed (legally) civilians present at the Giffords shooting in Arizona.
Nobody returned Loughner's fire or put him down - except to tackle him while trying to reload (not to mention it was daylight and he wasn't armored).
Meant to comment on Comrade Misfit's post on occupational hazard of armed robbery but life intervened. It would piss me off more to get shot dead by armed civilian protecting an internet cafe in FLA than to get robbed. To my understanding, CO does have concealed carry law.
Plus as to Giffords shooting, armed shopper at grocery store came out and came close to shooting rescuers and/or getting shot by police.
http://empireofdirt77.blogspot.com/2012/07/us-averages-20-massacres-per-year.html
I can't help but think than even with armor, a full clip of .45s, center mass would have at least knocked him off his feet. I also agree it would have taken Superman himself to put all 7 in the x ring under those conditions.
But once you knock him down, then what. I don't exactly carry handcuffs and a gun.
w3ski
Let's say several off-duty police officers had been in the theater. Smoke bombs go off, shots fired. What are the odds that the police officers would shoot the bad guy rather than each other.
Now, let imagine a bunch of civilians whose sole training consists of paper targets at a well-lit range.
For bonus points, imagine those same armed civilians' reactions to someone setting off a few strings of firecrackers in the dark while screaming "Gun! Terrorist!..." Do they carefully assess the threats like a well-trained combat shooter, or just start blazing away?
w3ski, you could hope to get one, maybe two decent shots off at him, IF AT ALL. A full clip is fantasy.
I'm an ex cop, ex MP, and odds are, no one could have taken this guy down with a firearm.
But I'm SICK of these events, and sick of the NRA sponsored murder of our citizens.
By all accounts, this guy was intelligent, creative, and dedicated in his planning and actions. Why why did he go with guns to kill these people?
Because it was the easiest thing to obtain and use.
And thats the problem.
Early-adult onset of schizophrenia is certainly something to consider here. Perp was in his early 20's, had recently been failing in coursework in which he formerly excelled. Loss of concentration, auditory hallucinations, withdrawal from social sphere -- all of these are suggestive.
Nobody just up and massacres people. My heart and soul goes out to the victims and families of this horror. But I have to feel extreme compassion for Holmes' parents -- particularly if it turns out that their son's mind was being eaten away by mental disease. I would also offer a prayer for the perp if, indeed, it was mental illness and not some sick but "sane" vendetta that prompted his actions.
"Gohmert is out of touch" is a bit mild in describing this unhinged person. He has consistently battled with Michelle Bachmann, Paul Broun, Virginia Foxx, Steve King, and Alan West for the Congressman most in need of psychiatric care.
Actually, unless you were right next to him, in a theater full of chaos as people try to escape, you'd most likely accidentally shoot more audience members than a target halfway across the room.
As to the "gun control" question, he could easily have used gasoline powered devices instead of guns.
Good Lord with added oxygen he could have taken out a neighborhood much less a theater. Lets have Gasoline Permits and Controls !
w3ski
A handgun has one purpose - saving yourself. Only professionals can save a room.
If I had a gun in that theater, I'd be low on the floor thinking "if he comes after me I might be able to do something".
That's not completely theoretical. A hundred people died in the Station nightclub fire nine years ago. I'll bet that there were far more people in that theater than were in the Station nightclub. An arsonist killed six times as many people as Asswipe did in the Happy Land fire 22 years ago.
Asswipe was methodical in planning his shooting. There would be no reason to believe that he would not have been as methodical in planning an arson attack.
Even without darkness and smoke, situations like that aren't likely to end well...
I suspect several people in the theater were armed despite the supposed ban, there's a lot of concealed carry zealot types who think that if there's no metal detector to stop them they're going to carry anyhow -- that whole "better be judged by twelve than carried by eight" thing. But even if there had been a half dozen off-duty cops with concealed weapons in that theater, as Cthulhu notes it simply wasn't a situation where there was a good shot at the guy until the majority of the civilians were either down or had escaped.
Guns aren't magic. If you can't acquire the target due to chaos and smoke, you can't kill the target. If your first two shots don't kill the target and you have no effective cover, you're dead because he has identified you as a threat and brought his own weapon to bear -- and remember that your training as a cop is to shoot for center of mass, where he had body armor. A K-tel .380 automatic, a typical concealed weapon, is unlikely to knock down someone wearing body armor -- think about it, the recoil of such a little pop-gun as you're holding it in your hand is barely enough to feel, and that's more energy than is hitting him at the end of the bullet's travel (though the time frame is different since that energy is imparted to him all at once rather than over the course of the bullet's travel thru the barrel). There are situations where a gun in the hands of a civilian would change the outcome. This, however, isn't one of them. Not unless you're a moron who thinks guns are magic, anyhow.
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