"Mike the Gun Guy?" Really?

Ah, Huffpost and your wonderful, if lacking in insight and intelligence, commentators!  This one calls himself "Mike the Gun Guy". Not sure who elected him - probably people who liked his opinion.

For instance, this piece of drivel regarding the FBI report I wrote about last week:

"The fact that 21 of these shooting situations were terminated by unarmed civilians as opposed to a single incident that ended because a good guy had a gun might come as a big surprise to the NRA..."

You see, what partisans like this fail to recognize is that the vast majority of these events happen in places where guns are either illegal for "common" civilians to possess (e.g., schools, military bases) or where they are not allowed as a function of private property owners' prohibitions. You know the kind of places that people like "Mike" and Moms Demand Disarmament are intent on expanding around the nation.  Hence, they have to jump through hoops to make their case.  So he parses things, like suggesting many of the locales for these events were "not readily understood to be gun-free zones".  "Readily understood"?  So he really thinks that a private property owner or an employer has right to set policy and no effect on the carry of a firearm in their establishment or workplace?  Does he realize how many employees have been fired for carrying (and in some cases, using) concealed firearms in their place of business against company policy? So would he say, in this case, that Starbucks, Target, and others are not understood to be "gun-free" zones, that people who typically carry may choose not go go there and spend their money?  If not, then why all the action to try to force such places to adopt such counter-productive policies?

The reason these events go on as long as they do, the reason that so many are not halted by police, but by the shooter, is because people like "The Gun Guy" have worked hard to prohibit armed self-defense in these areas, whether it is by statute or assertion or a property owners' rights.  They do not want people to be able to defend themselves with a firearm there and then they use the lack of such defenses in past events as some kind of bizarre evidence.  Well each person who dies between the time an armed civilian response could have stopped the attack and then it ends is on you.

Here is the list of the four events with the highest "body counts".  Notice any similarity?

■ Cinemark Century 16 Theater in Aurora, Colorado:
70 (12 killed, 58 wounded), July 20, 2012.
■ Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia:
49 (32 killed, 17 wounded), April 16, 2007.
12
■ Ft. Hood Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Ft. Hood, Texas:
45 (13 killed, 32 wounded), November 5, 2009.
■ Sandy Hook Elementary School and a residence in Newtown, Connecticut:
29 (27 killed, 2 wounded), December 14, 2012.

- The Cinemark theater was posted "no firearms allowed".
- VT had a no firearms on campus policy.
- Concealed carry is prohibited on US military bases.
- Sandy Hook was a "no firearm" zone.

Not much need to go on; Both law and business policy disarm many people every day.  Active shooters usually look for defenseless victims.  The conclusion is clear.

There is no data in this report to support the idea that, if an armed civilian were present, these events could not have been stopped sooner.  You cannot prove such a thing.  The fact that they were stopped in some cases by unarmed civilians is a godsend and a testament to a combative mindset and will to live even when disarmed and at great disadvantage.  But it is not evidence that they might not have been halted even more expeditiously by an armed civilian "good guy".  The fact that they were stopped by unarmed civilian "good guys" does not address this at all.

The study "The Gun Guy" cited by Kleck is really not relevant to a study of active shooter events; Kleck and Tark (2005) looked at rape completions and  "Mike" really needs to read it again (and so do you if you are taking his summation as accurate), since he misrepresents its findings (and, of course, his audience at HuffPost is not likely to go read it).  For instance, the summary of findings in the Abstract notes that: "...we believe that rape victims’ self-protection actions significantly reduce the probability of rape completion and do not significantly increase the risk of serious injury."  The actions they are referring to are both forceful and non-forceful.

But beyond the usual motivated attention deficit and misrepresentation, there is also conceptual error; We are not talking about individual survival in this FBI report, as Kleck and Tark were in their study.  So even if there was some data to suggest that "running away" was a better tactic, we are talking about stopping the killing and dying of an active shooter event, not just running away to leave others to die.  I recognize that people like "Mike" and his readers are more focused on their own survival, saving their own worthless skin, than they are on stopping others dying.  I can imagine he would have been jumping from the windows at Columbine while his students fended for themselves.  I know that the idea of sacrifice, of heroism, is a foreign concept to them.  The only killing they are motivated to thwart is their own.

So, here's a quote from a LEO in relation to the events at Vaughn Food Processing in Moore OK last week:

“This was not going to stop if he didn’t stop it. It could have gotten a lot worse,” Lewis said. “The threat had already stopped once we arrived.”

Damn good thing he didn't opt for The Gun Guy's strategy of saving his own skin.  Damn good thing he was there and was armed.