The strawmen cometh
By feedback@qando.net (McQ)
The QandO Blog
Cynthia Tucker, a columnist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and recent winner of a Pulitzer Prize, writes a post-prize article which makes you wonder about the credibility of the award. It is entitled “Pushing Guns for all Students Cartoonish Idea”.
A better title would have been “Pushing Guns For All Students Is A Strawman Argument, But One I Intend To Pursue.” If there is anyone out there claiming “all students should be armed”, they’re as “cartoonish” as Ms. Tucker’s claims.
On to those claims:
<<< Butit’s more than a little disconcerting to hear that so many adults also believe in superheroes. They must. Why else would they insist that the best way to prevent carnage of the sort that occurred last week at Virginia Tech is to put guns into every available hand? They’re indulging their childhood fantasies, remembering the movies in which the Caped Crusader or John Wayne instantly dispatched the bad guy. >>>
Why in the world would any serious person argue that guns should be put “into every available hand?” That makes no sense. It is fine if everyone chooses to do so, but that’s not the same as claiming the argument is that everyone must (or even should).
And, as far as I can tell, that’s not what is being argued by those Tucker cites. For instance, Tucker says:
<<< Yet, ultraconservative commentators have been in high dudgeon for days, suggesting that students with guns could have guaranteed a Hollywood ending in which an unflappable sharp-shooter would have felled Cho Seung-Hui with a quick head shot. Michelle Malkin was among those who denounced a Virginia law that excludes college campuses from areas where concealed weapons are permitted.
"What if just one student in one of those classrooms had been in lawful possession of a concealed weapon? ... It darned well isn’t too early for me to raise questions about how the unrepentant anti-gun lobbying of college officials may have put students at risk." >>>
Now, find in those two paragraphs where Malkin is suggesting that all students should (or must) carry guns? Of course she’s not. Instead she’s arguing that had those who chose to carry a concealed weapon (and had done so legally having met the state requirements to do so) had their guns available, the possibility exists that the carnage would have been less.
What Malkin and others are arguing, in fact, is that when you declare a place a ‘gun free zone’, you invite scofflaw predators to indulge in risk free crime. Knowing commercial airliners may have an armed air marshall onboard means that someone unknown to the predator on an aircraft has the ability to kill him. Criminals usually aren’t going to risk that possibility if there is easier prey.
But what about whack jobs such as Cho? Well, think about it. What did Cho do when police finally showed up armed to the teeth? Rather than confront them, he killed himself. So it isn’t particularly difficult then to argue that had Cho been confronted with an armed student, he might have withdrawn from that particular classroom and gone after easier prey. If his intent and objective was to kill as many as he could before the possibility of he being killed became real, why would he risk his objective to an armed student getting lucky? The fact that he as a nut job doesn’t mean he wasn’t rational enough to factor those odds into the equation and then settling on the line of behavior which maximized the utility of his effort toward gaining his objective.
Being pinned down in a gun fight and possibly being killed or incapacitated wouldn’t serve that end, would it?
That brings us to another strawman:
<<< "In real life, police officers —- trained to fire in the heat of battle —- hit their intended targets only about 40 percent of the time, according to University of South Carolina criminologist Geoffrey Alpert, an expert in police shootings.
You can train all day in simulated situations ... and you think you can hit a target. But it comes right down to it and someone is pointing a gun at you, and it just doesn’t happen," he said.
And we all know about war-time "friendly fire" tragedies, when well-trained soldiers accidentally kill their own. The death of former professional football player Pat Tillman, killed in Afghanistan by members of his own unit, highlighted the unfortunate reality of chaos in battle. >>>
Sometimes it isn’t about just hitting the target. It’s about raising the risk factor for the target and suppressing their ability to fire at will with aimed fire. Anyone who argues that fire that doesn’t hit the target is ineffective was never taught (or has never seen) the effectiveness of suppressive fire. Again, killing or wounding someone like Cho is ideal, but if you can pin Cho down, raise the risk of his movement and at the same time allow others to get out of there, hasn’t your fire been effective?
Yet another strawman is the probability of “friendly fire”. Obviously that is a risk. But my guess is it’s is a risk that at least 32 people that day would have gladly taken, given the outcome.
John Lott wrote a book about a two decade study he did on the phenomenon entitled, “More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws” (1998). In it he uses this example of a very similar situation which happened in 1991:
“Referring to the July 1984 massacre at a San Ysidro, CA
McDonalds restaurant, Israeli criminologist Abraham
Tennenbaum described what occurred at a crowded venue in
Jerusalem some weeks before the California McDonald’s
massacre:
“Three terrorists who attempted to machine-gun the throng
managed to kill only one victim before being shot down by
handgun-carrying Israelis. Presented to the press the next
day the surviving terrorist complained that his group had
not realized that the Israeli citizens were armed. The
terrorists had planned to machine-gun a succession of crowd
spots, thinking that they would be able to escape before
the police or army could arrive to deal with them.””
As is obvious in that case, the Israeli civilians knew quite well who the good and bad guys were. And they handled a situation which could easily have been as bad or worse than what happened at Va Tech.
Tucker concludes:
<<< If dozens of Virginia Tech students had been armed, "Lord knows what a disaster we would have had," Alpert said. "I think it’s inappropriate to have firearms in a classroom ...
"If they had had a Jack Bauer, maybe so. But the world isn’t composed of Jack Bauers," he noted.
So all those armchair heroes —- all those firearm fanatics who claim everything would be different if they’d been in one of those classrooms with a gun —- should don their red capes and take a leap. >>>
To the Ms. Tuckers of the world, who have a tendency to project their inadequacies and fears on other people, I again point to the Israelis, the Appalachian Law School and Pearl, Mississippi shootings and remind her that everyone of them was stopped by those who did don a red cape, picked up their personal firearm and leaped into the fray, thereby saving the lives of others without killing a single, solitary innocent bystander.
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