On Saturday, an armed St. Louis resident on a bathroom break at a St. Charles QuikTrip shot and killed a knife-wielding robber, possibly saving the life of a store clerk. On Sunday, at an Indianapolis-area shopping mall, another armed civilian shot and killed a gunman who had just killed three others and could have killed more.
While both are cases of demonstrable courage and heroism, and might appear to vindicate the National Rifle Association’s much-touted “good guy with a gun” theory of addressing America’s violence epidemic, the triumphant chorus from some quarters should look at the facts. A New York Times analysis last month of how most active-shooter crises end drives home what a lightning strike these scenarios are. And the outrageous new details about the hundreds of good guys with guns (and badges) who failed for more than an hour to stop the grade school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, is instructive.
The Times looked at all 433 active-shooter incidents in America between 2000 and 2021. Even that sobering statistic is deceptively rosy, because it hides how sharply the annual number of active-shooter cases has been climbing in recent years — from 13 in 2011, to 61 last year. It goes without saying that no other advanced country in the world has numbers anything like this.
The newspaper’s analysis found that the most common way in which those 433 active-shooter emergencies ended was with the attacker leaving the scene, which happened 113 times. That was followed by the attacker committing suicide (110 times), police shooting the attacker (98 times), bystanders subduing the attacker (42 times) and police subduing the attacker (33 times).
And how many times did a random armed bystander end the crisis by shooting the attacker? Of the 433 incidents, that’s how it ended just 15 times — and three of those interveners were off-duty police officers. (Another seven incidents were ended by shootings from security guards, which isn’t the same thing as a random bystander doing it.)
None of this is to minimize the actions of the two citizens who intervened in St. Charles and in Indiana. That heroism was real, and it’s possible that, had either citizen not been armed, more lives could have been lost.
But it begs the question of how this country arrived at a moment in which Americans are so routinely armed that not only are mass shootings numbingly common, but when they start, one small part of what sometimes ends them (in about 3.5% of incidents) is that someone else on the scene happens to be armed as well.
This is the result of a country having more guns than people with few commonsense restrictions. To accept the good-guy-with-a-gun solution is to accept all the deaths that this rare scenario doesn’t prevent. Including those of the 19 children of Uvalde, whose “good guys” failed them — but whose country failed them first.
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