It's Not About The Gun It's About The Good

I notice that a lot of progressives are having trouble internalizing a concept; what matters is the substance, not appearance. For example, if a person has double bit axe & a flannel shirt that does not make him a lumberjack; if a person has a 28 oz. waffle headed Eastwing & faded jeans that does not make him a framing carpenter; if a person possesses a ten gallon Stetson and a horse that does not make him a cowboy, and if a person possesses a doctor's stethoscope and a pastel shirt that does not make her an RN (right Miss Behar?)

Case in point:

"A good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun"

Simple enough, right? Not to progressives. Ya see, it has the word "gun" in it, which therefore becomes the fixation. Trips them right up, every time.

The thought (I use the term loosely) is that because Brave Sir Deputy failed to stop the mass murderer at the Parkland high school then voila! It is now proven that a good guy with a gun cannot stop a bad guy with a gun.

I present to you this dribble from one Elliot Hannon over at Slate:

"The problem is that there was a good guy with a gun at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that day" (emphasis in original)

This is very easy to clear up, and I shall in a moment.





"Was [Brave Sir Deputy's name redacted] not a 'good guy' in the end?" Hannon asks. And I'm glad he asked.

No. Any adult that stands idly by while children are being murdered is by definition not a good guy. Coward is the most generous description available.

Having a gun does not make a person a good guy or a bad guy or even a coward. It's the actions of a person that determines which category a person fits into.

So let's review:

True: "A good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun".
False "A coward with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun".

The author goes on to presume that because a coward with a gun didn't stop the bad guy, then there's little chance for ordinary folk, not anointed with .gov fairy dust, to stop a bad guy with a gun. By that reasoning (and the word is used in the loosest sense) since Benedict Arnold offered to surrender West Point, there was no point in having a Continental Army as who knows how many more traitors were in its' ranks.

At that same high school at least one, possibly more unarmed coaches ran into the building when they heard gunfire. They were good guys, but because of laws championed by progressives such as Hannon, they were unarmed. Coach Feis died protecting students, but he was unable to stop the murderer. If he had been armed he may have been able to stop the murderer and he may have lived.

This is important;  it is a man's duty to protect women and children from physical harm. If he is denied the tools to stop an evil actor that does not diminish his duty; it merely decreases his chances at success or survival.

So, good guys can be good guys with or without guns, though having guns makes it easier for them to stop the bad guys and increases their chances of living through it.

Cowards are cowards no matter what tools they possess or uniforms they wear.

N'est-ce pas?

Since hopefully that's cleared up, I shall speak of the aforelinked scribblings from Slate no more.

"But wait!", the progressives exclaim, "he wasn't a coward; he just had no chance going up against someone with an AR15!" (a paraphrase of what I've seen via twitchy, here and here.)

Again, that's incorrect (even if he somehow knew it was an AR15). After all, Coach Feis was unarmed yet he did his duty. But I'll provide a few more examples to illustrate why this defense of cowardice is mistaken:.

Mark Alan Wilson went up against a murderer. Mr. Wilson had a pistol. The murderer had an AK47, and Mr. Wilson knew it going into the situation. Mr. Wilson was killed in the ensuing firefight, but gave the local cops enough time to rally and drive off the murderer before chasing him down and killing him. No one was killed, except Mr. Wilson and the murderer himself, after Mr. Wilson engaged the murderer.

At Arapahoe high school a senior who planned an extensive mass murder, complete with molotov cocktails, killed himself as the SRO deputy closed in on him. The attack lasted about 80 seconds. One student was shot and died 8 days later. That of itself was a shame but the attack was not worse than it was because the good guy with a gun rushed towards the sound of gunfire and the murderer heard him coming. From this dated story can be found the following:

"After the shooting, the school resource officer activated what police call the active shooter protocol -- rushing toward the gunfire to stop the violence." (emphasis added)

Oh, the murderer went into Arapahoe high school with a shotgun, which is more powerful shot-for-shot than an AR15. (For more info on how warning signs were missed by various governmental systems in this instance, look here and here.)

The Congressional baseball Shooting of 2017. A would-be murderer injured 4 people with an SKS (which uses more powerful ammo than most AR15's) but was killed by 2 Capital police officers using handguns.

Lastly two ladies use handguns to fight off a robber that's wielding a shotgun. There's video at this link.

(For further examples of good folks with guns stopping bad people with guns The Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog is a good place to check)

At its core though is a cognitive impairment that makes it difficult to accept that non-government actors can or even should successfully wield force to stop people intent on evil. I went over this in a post called A Tangled Weber. They accept as fundamental that the state should enjoy a monopoly on force, therefore only the state may wield force justly. When the state fails to wield that force to protect innocent lives, then they have serious trouble believing that an individual could wield that force effectively where the state has failed.

So they call a coward a good guy, and make excuses for his inaction to keep at bay the notion that the state is inept at its core function. Meanwhile they cling to their notion that only the state can produce a highly trained good guy, and if that training fails the state then there's no hope an individual without that training can do anything but harm.

Progressives have been arguing for decades that only the government should have arms; that individuals would be either inept or ineffective or both. When confronted with evidence that government is not able to do its job effectively they almost have no choice but to claim that as proof that no individual could accomplish what the government failed at. Even though I listed examples above of individuals (as well as a few cops) doing what Brave Sir Deputy failed to do, I doubt any progressives would change their minds; they'd simply seek new ways to justify their core belief that only the government should use force.

I'm a stickler for some things. I didn't use Lapierre's exact quote "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" because it's inaccurate. Good guys without guns have stopped bad guys with guns, (for example here) so it's not the only way - just much preferred. When the good guy has a gun it increases said good guy's chances of surviving, though nothing in this world is certain.

I'll leave you with a quote from the late Col. Jeff Cooper from his book The Art of the Rifle which I think sums things up nicely:

“The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.”