Just remember: when there’s a mass-shooting going on, and seconds count, you can depend on the authorities to respond in minutes:
D.C. police quickly deployed an “active shooter team” within seven minutes of reports of shots fired, Ms. Lanier said.
The Navy Yard – a “gun free zone” but for any security on the site – was as defenseless as Fort Hood.
A carry permit holder would have reduced that time from “seven minutes” to “as long as it took to get his or her firearm out of its holster”.
The important thing to understand is that if everyone always had a firearm every time they are in public, tragedies like this wouldn’t happen.
I see EmeryTheUSAHater’s account is still hijacked by a sane person.
When the active shooter is reported to have an “AR15 Shotgun”
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/17/video-piers-morgan-and-the-scourge-of-the-ar-15-shotgun-or-something/
you can understand the delay. It would helpful if our Democrat Dominated Media Culture had some sense of firearms as I must of heard the term “Glock” ten times yesterday to describe the guns the murderer used.
Is there a difference between deployed (ie: leaving the station) and on scene? Seven minutes to the scene in DC traffic seems fairly quick, depending on their origin of course (and if they used helicopters). Doesn’t take away from your point but thought I’d offer them kudo’s for the response time.
I sense sarcasm – and stupidity
Sarcasm, but this might have been one case in which armed people did show up–the two police who were injured by (?) thankfully not killed–and lost in the confrontation, re-arming the perp.
Of course, maybe it would have thrown him off if it’d been someone NOT in uniform shooting back….but ifs and buts, if they were candy and nuts, boy what a party we’d have. I’m all for armed citizens, but it’s not a panacea, of course.
Maybe not a panacea, but a heck of a deterrent.
A gun carrying society is a polite society.
If we instituted a nation-wide “always carry” policy, there would be a brief flurry of incredible violence as the assholes were weeded out, then a much longer period of tranquility as calm people calmly went about their business. Sadly, I suspect the ratio of calm people to assholes is not sufficiently diverse to pass constitutional muster.
The American myth is of the rugged individualist who tames the frontier, both nature and the ne’er-do-wells who threaten his homestead. While clearly not a description of most Americans even 130 years ago at the height of westward expansion, the myth lives on and is central to what gives Americans a self-confident, can-do culture. A man (and often a woman) buys a gun as a physical embodiment of his assertion that he controls his world, he can resolve his own problems, and he is master of his domain. This despite the fact that he lives in a moderately socialist economy where the growth of government and its intrusion into his everyday life is growing inexorably.