Advocates of House Bill 544, the so-called “campus carry” bill once again looming in the Georgia Legislature, are a downright romantic sort. They like to see themselves as potential knights in shining armor, ready to intervene against potential evil-doers wherever they may lurk — including college classrooms, dormitories and even football games — but they are frustrated that state law doesn’t allow them to carry concealed weapons in those locations.
And yes, those Hollywood-type scenarios do have a certain plausibility. It is certainly plausible, for example, that a concealed weapon in the right hands in that college classroom in Oregon could have been used to reduce the carnage. Plausible, but not likely.
When a gunman enters a classroom unexpectedly, wearing body armor and with guns drawn, prepared to kill and prepared to die, the likelihood of an amateur reaching into a bookbag for a handgun and responding effectively is pretty low.
And here’s the other part of that equation. For that handgun to exist in that bookbag at the moment it is needed to fend off a mass shooting, it will have to be there, constantly, in tens of thousands of other bookbags across the country. It will have to be there, easily accessible, in all those countless moments when it isn’t needed to fend off a mass murderer.
It will be there to be stolen or lost. It will be there when a curious child goes poking around. It will be there when a lover’s quarrel turns angry, or when the bookbag is accidentally dropped to the ground. It will be there when someone’s thoughts turn suicidal, or when a neighbor won’t turn the music down.
It will always be there, and both common sense and data tell you that in an open public setting, it is much more likely to be used as an instrument of tragedy than of safety.
According to FBI statistics, you are almost four times more likely to be murdered by someone you know — a friend, relative or co-worker — than by a stranger whom you might fend off with a firearm. And for every murder committed with a firearm during the commission of another crime, such as a robbery, assault or burglary, two murders are committed as a crime of passion, the result of an argument, brawl or lover’s quarrel.
Overall, trying to establish how many times guns are used in self-protection is very difficult. Concrete data is impossible to come by, with one important exception. We know how many people are murdered each year, and we know the circumstances. In 2014, FBI data tell us, there were 8,124 cases of murder with a firearm, balanced against just 229 cases of justifiable homicide by a civilian with a firearm.
In short, the average firearm, including that handgun tucked away in the bookbag, is 35 times more likely to be used in a murder than in killing a criminal. Add in firearm-related suicides, and the ratio of dead victims to dead bad guys jumps to 83 to 1. And just to be clear, because clarity is all too rare in this discussion: An argument for common sense in deciding where firearms are appropriate, and where they are not, should not be twisted into an argument for banning guns or confiscating guns. Those are two very different subjects.
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