The Formal Rules of Gun Safety: WHY an armed audiece should NOT have fired at James Holmes

The premise that more armed people would have prevented or shortened the mass shooting in Colorado has received a lot of support on the right among the gun-lover crowd.  It is a stupid premise, and it only serves to underline that their gun attitudes are founded on an emotional hero fantasy, rather than an objective attitude about guns.
There is no way that either armed civilians or armed law enforcement could have safely taken out the shooter in Aurora, Colorado.  To have attempted to do so would violated the rules of gun safety; those rules apply MORE not less in a situation like the mass shooting in a movie theater in order to reduce casualties.  There is nothing about that situation that would make setting aside those rules a desirable or intelligent exception.

I'm going to use the wikipedia entry here.
The scenario in Aurora Colorado - a dark theater, loud sound from the movie, a person wearing all matte black coming in from an outside door, not apparently back lit by direct outside lighting, throws canisters of a substance that acts as tear gas or pepper spray.
You have a lot of people moving around.  You have an inability to breathe easily, choking, eyes are watering, lights are flickering in mostly darkness from the movie.  There is tremendous confusion and movement, both the crowd and the shooter.  The seating makes movement difficult. 

Here is the gun safety rule that apply to responding in that situation, an excerpt from Wikipedia's Gun Safety entry ( added emphasis is mine - DG).
Gun Safety Rules
Be sure of your target and of what is beyond it
This rule is intended to eliminate or minimize damage to non-targets when a firearm is intentionally discharged. Unintended damage may occur if a non-target is misidentified as a target, if the target is missed, or if the bullet hits something or someone other than the intended target.
Handlers are taught that they must positively identify and verify their target. Additionally, they learn that even when firing at a valid target, unintended targets may still be hit, for three reasons:

• The bullet may miss the intended target and hit a non-target around or beyond the target.
• A non-target may pass in front of the target and be hit with a bullet aimed at the target.
• The bullet may pass through the intended target and hit a non-target beyond it, so called "overpenetration".

Therefore, this rule requires a handler to "always be sure of your target; not just the target itself, but above, below, to the left, to the right, in front of, and behind the target".
This may create situations that present dilemmas for a handler. Such situations are for instance a police officer in a riot, a civilian facing a possible intruder at night, or a soldier in a situation where civilians are near the enemy. Indecision or misjudgment of the handler's abilities in such a situation may cause undesired outcomes, such as injury to the handler due to hesitation, or the handler violating rules of engagement and causing unintended damage.
Training is used to minimize the risk of such outcomes. Target practice increases the precision with which the handler can discharge the firearm and thus increase the chances that the intended target is hit. Education about terminal ballistics gives the handler knowledge about the characteristics of a bullet after a target is hit. This knowledge coupled with insight into the handler's own capabilities makes it easier for the handler to make appropriate decisions about whether to discharge or not, even if given little time and/or put under severe stress.

Ammunition can be chosen to reduce the risk of overpenetration; see Terminal ballistics, Stopping power, and Hollow point bullet.

In the real world scenario, not the "I would be the hero" fantasy of the gun nuts and 2nd Amendment fanatics, you could not possibly safely shoot in the situation in Aurora, Colorado. No civilian or law enforcement office could know who was around and behind the shooter, or even have a clear view of the shooter, much less know if the shooter was alone or acting with others. 

This was a situation where people could not breathe, and where their eyes were watering from near the shooter across most of the theater, and the gas created a visual barrier; the problems of being able to see the shooter clearly are compounded the further from the shooter a person was located.  ADD to that situation that someone would or could be shooting at the person returning fire which inexperienced people tend to disregard or downplay, and you do not have a good return-fire situation, even for a swat team or a highly trained and talented sniper.
Now add to this that there is NO WAY WHATSOEVER for an armed movie patron to know if there is one bad guy attacking or multiple people involved.  Whoever takes a shot at the shooter, rightly or wrongly in terms of safety, now becomes to other armed movie patrons a potential second attacker, or third or tenth bad guy. 
There are documented cases of off duty law enforcement, in situations without these impediments of gas and darkness and crowds of people and noise, shooting each other because of this kind of difficulty in identifying who is a good shooter and who is the bad shooter(s).
A case in point where friendly fire has been just as deadly as unfriendly fire, and where the people involved had far more training and experience than an ordinary gun-carrying civilian:
How a Retired Officer, Trying to Stop a Robber, Shot an Agent Doing the Same
or the case of Omar Edwards, also in New York.

More people shooting at James Holmes in Aurora, Colorado not only would have caused MORE death and injury, they would have badly confused the situation for law enforcement to be able to correctly identify the attacker.  Further complicating a correct identification of the attacker in that mass shooting was that the way he was dressed would have made law enforcement MORE likely to believe he might be one of them, and then shoot instead at an armed civilian trying to help by mistake.

The risk would be that the heroic person trying to take out the attacker would in turn be shot - shot by law enforcement, shot by another armed citizen or multiple armed citizens.........and the greater the number of rounds fired, the exponential increase that those rounds will hit someone else who is an innocent bystander in that theater OR IN THE NEXT THEATER.
I would point out here that some of the Aurora Colorado victims WERE in the adjoining theater; those rounds hit them AFTER going through the theater walls.  Adding to the number of rounds fired would also have endangered THOSE PEOPLE in addition to the danger from the attacker.
The painful reality is that there was unlikely to be a good, safe, LEGITIMATE opportunity to shoot the shooter at any point in his attack, until he had voluntarily broken off firing and left the building, where he appears to have dropped his weapons, or placed them in his vehicle, and WAITED for police to arrest him without resistance.

Add to this scenario the facts that these carry crazy gun advocates won't mention.  The reality is that even the most well-trained law enforcement officers who engage in shootings often have many if not most of their shots miss their targets.  It is very different to be taking your time, in optimum lighting in a target shooting situation from the shooting in a real conflict.  One of the most significant items of information that was included in my own firearm training were how often even at relatively close range law enforcement and civlians alike fired a lot of rounds at a threatening individual, at criminals, and had most of the rounds fired MISS their target.

This is an excerpt from an excellent op ed piece from a retired Chicago cop about his 30 years on the streets that describes exactly that experience of most shots missing their target in a real shooting situation: (my emphasis added in bold-DG)

When I reached one man, running in the darkness between two houses, he had already been shot by another officer. When the officer had ordered the man to stop and identify himself, the man had pointed a pistol at him. The officer ducked behind his car door and fired half the bullets in his Glock 21 before finally hitting the offender once in the left buttock. We eventually found the shooter’s silver semiautomatic deep in a snowdrift.  

The suddenness and confusion of that moment points out the folly of the politician’s belief that an armed civilian could have easily taken out James Holmes. Imagine the scene: speakers blasting, larger-than-life heroes and villains on the screen, and suddenly real gunshots, a man in a gas mask firing one of three weapons — a shotgun, handgun and rifle, with extended magazines for extra ammo capacity — into the panicking crowd. Even a highly trained, armed police officer would have been caught off guard. Try adding a bunch of untrained, armed civilians into the mix — this type of intervention could have made things much worse.

A Glock 21 has a 13 round capacity magazine, which is larger than most standard handguns. 

That those who advocate for open or concealed carry think this would have been a good instance for intervention only highlights how UNSAFE these people are among us.  It is an understandable impulse, to want to stop someone doing something so horrible as this mass shooting, or any other crime.  But the solution to these situations is NOT more guns, no matter how appealing the fantasy of being a hero is, or the fantasy that gun carriers have that they will shoot the bad guy -- and ONLY the bad guy; odds are they will miss, but the odds are all too good they would hit something or someone else.
The ONLY real solution is to stop guns and explosives getting into the hands of people like James Holmes, or Jared Loughner, or the hands of the many other people who commit crimes of gun violence every day in this country with smaller victim totals resulting.  Those peole are just as dead, just as injured as anyone in the Aurora, Colorado shooting.
More guns are not the solution; they are part of the problem.  Our gun culture is predicated on fantasies that can only result in more deaths and injuries and threats; our gun culture is a failure.  Gun restrictive societies and cultures have been far more successful at reducing deaths, injuries, and incidents of intimidation or threats from firearms than our own gun culture has been.  The clearly effective solution is not more guns, but fewer guns in the hands of fewer people who are more carefully selected and regulated (both the guns and the people who have them).
The time has come to choose, gun reality or gun fantasy.  But that doesn't make for exciting movies or games; reality is less sexy than fantasy, so we probably won't succeed at making the right choice.

A PSA in Support of Opposition to Repealing Minnesota's Gun Purchase Background Check

Before anyone gets their knickers in a knot, let me emphasize, I am NOT anti-Second Amendment rights, and I am not againt gun ownership by people who are legal and responsible.  Please, please note that this is entirely in support of keeping guns out of the hands of those individuals who are recklessly violent, engage in criminal activity, are drug users or are dangerously mentally ill.  If you do not fit into one or more of those categories, you are not adversely affected in your gun ownership rights by these activities.  Rather you are safer: safer from criminals and addicts, safer from terrorists, safer from dangerous mentally ill fellow citizens.  Not only are you and your families safer, but so are our law enforcement officers.  That is a worthy goal of safety and sanity that we should all be able to support in conjunction with exercising our 2nd Amendment rights.  In that context, I offer this as a Public Service Announcement.

For criminals, drug abusers and other dangerous people, buying a gun without a background check is far too easy.


Just two weeks after the Tucson shootings, the City of New York sent undercover investigators to a gun show in nearby Phoenix, Arizona where they filmed three gun purchases -- all with no questions asked.


Check out this undercover video and share it with your friends and families.


Federal law prohibits certain categories of dangerous people from owning guns, and licensed dealers can easily screen buyers with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). But the system is easily evaded, especially in so-called "private sales" made at hundreds of gun shows around the country every year.

The Gun Show Loophole is how investigators bought a Glock 9mm and three 33-round high-capacity magazines -- just like those used by Jared Loughner -- without undergoing a background check.


In fact, investigators were able to buy two more handguns, even after informing the sellers they “probably couldn’t pass a background check.” That’s not just outrageous, it’s an illegal sale.


It’s time for Congress to step up and fix these deadly flaws in our gun laws. The background check system must include all the names of prohibited purchasers, and the loopholes that let criminals evade background checks must be closed immediately.


Watch the undercover video from Arizona and spread the word about fixing gun checks:
http://www.GunShowUndercover.org


The fatal flaws in America’s background check system have been exposed at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and now in Tucson. Let's do what it takes to stop these tragic shootings.


Thanks for getting involved,


Mayors Against Illegal Guns

Republicans in Minnesota Attempt to Remove Gun Precautions That Work. In Their Haste to Appease Gun Fetishists

This op-ed article in the STrib makes an especially compelling argument for retaining effective state-level gun checks, while highlighting the failures of the federal NCIS gun check data base that we pointed out here.  Republicans claims that the two different background checks are redundant, and that the state check is unnecessary seem to be willfully oblivious to the fact that we aren't keeping up our participation in the federal data base.  I think the argument can be made that the Republicans and other conservatives on the right are making their gun decisions on an emotional basis, not on a factual one.

We have provided precisely ZERO names of dangerously mentally ill people to the NCIS data base, and neither have some of the surrounding states to Minnesota.  North Dakota supplied ZERO names to the data base under the category of mental illness;  South Dakota supplied only ONE.  Nebraska has provided precisely ONE.  Iowa provided TWENTY FOUR.  While Wisconsin has provided FIVE HUNDRED EIGHTEEN  names of dangerously mentally ill people who are not allowed to own guns to the federal data base.

For all the regional rivalry jokes in our part of the country, we have a lot in common with the adjoining states.  It is not plausible, it is not credible for a heartbeat that somehow Wisconsin has more dangerously crazy people than Minnesota or the Dakotas or Iowa.  Rather, looking at the stats for the other states, it is clear that what we have is a failure to comply with providing the necessary names to the federal data base, and that if we rely on the Republicans trusting to abandon the Minnesota background check, WE WILL BE LESS SAFE.   What we need is to be fact based, reality based, for a change, not fetish-driven in our regulations of guns. I realize that this is completely contrary to how Republicans operate, but that doesn't change the dangers of what they propose to do. 

What we NEED is to have Minnesota properly supply the federal data base with the names of people who ought not to be buying guns according to enforcing the existing laws.  NOT new laws, not unreasonable laws, but according to existing laws.

According to the information provided by the STrib OpEd:

Last year, the Bloomington Police Department received 541 requests for permission to buy handguns.

Of that total, 37 were denied following local background checks required by Minnesota law. According to officials, those rejections were due to chemical dependency or mental illness issues.

Had Bloomington authorities relied solely on instant federal background checks, every one of those 37 permit-seekers would have been cleared on the spot to buy a gun.

That gives officers time to consult several local agencies for histories of drug abuse, domestic violence, mental illness or stalking.

More Guns Do Not Equal Fewer Murders - the Statistical Reality

First, before moving on to the topic at hand, let me welcome our newest blog roll addition, Mikeb302000, where guns and gun laws are a regular topic; the link was made active just today. Please give them a visit.  Now, back to our topic at hand.

I believe as a blogger that one of our purposes in writing is to ask the question, 'Is that true?', and then to try to correlate more than one source to answer the question.  One of the things we are here to do is to challenge assumptions. In the 1/14/'11 Friday Factcheck.org weekly update was this little gem fact checking a claim made by Senator Mike Lee of Utah:

Lee: And to the contrary, I think there is abundant research suggesting that in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate actually goes down

Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania countered this false claim by Senator Lee:

That’s not true. A causal relationship between prevalence of gun ownership and crime hasn’t been established by researchers.  

I was intrigued by this study, the article by Richard Florida with the assistance from Charlotta Mellander.  The Geography of Gun Deaths, which included great visuals in the form of maps showing various correlations.  To begin we have their map showing the number of deaths by firearm injury per 100,000 population in 2007.  I would like tomake the distinction that this is not a perfect correlation to Senator Lee's statement, as he refers specifically to cities, while these stats pertain to entire states (and D.C.) and there figures are not limited to murder, but rather reflect all gun deaths: murder and other homicides, suicides, self-defense or police shootings of criminals or by criminals, and accidental gun deaths of all kinds.

Buying Guns, or Voting - Which Should We Be Making More Difficult?

After the Virginia Tech massacre, the shooting in 2007, an investigation determined that the shooter had legally purchased a gun, and that he was not in any data base.  Even if he had not been able to legally purchase a gun from a licensed gun dealer where a background check was required, he would have been legally able to purchase a gun at a gun show without a background check.  There is NO prohibition that prevents or even discourages a person who is dangerously insane from purchasing a gun at a gun show.

In the United States, to be prohibited from exercising our rights requires a court decision.  A judge has to rule on removing our right to vote, or removing our right to own a gun.  The right has been very interested in restricting the rights of people to vote, actively acting to disenfranchise tens of thousands who are legally entitled to vote their single vote.  The right has been determined to make it as easy as possible for people to own guns, every possible kind of gun, unlimited guns.  They give lip service to preventing guns from falling into the hands of people who are legally prohibited from owning them, or who should be prohibited from owning guns, but they also do everything possible to make owning and carrying guns as unrestricted as possible. Guns can kill and wound people, innocent people.  In attempting to prevent people from voting the danger that Republicans are trying to prevent is merely the election of Democrats or other liberals - the LEGAL election of representative government candidates.

To put this in perspective, a recent article from article from Reuters reports that the United States has 90 guns per 100 people, more than any other nation in the world.  The next closest country in guns per capita is Yemen, at 61 per person.