So it appears that there was an armed citizen at the site of the Saturday shootings. He heard the shots, pulled out the gun, flipped off the safety, ran toward the commotion, and…almost shot the guy who had taken away the gun from the assailant.
Whoops.
Arizona is damn near the most gun-friendly state in the country, as you’d expect from the state that gave us Barry Goldwater and Joe Arpaio. You don’t need a permit for concealed carry and you can buy 30-round magazines for your Glock – two conditions not possible in California, for instance – so in theory, a place like Arizona is where the gunhugger theory about armed society and politeness would take its fullest effect. The flaw in this thinking is that it requires a person to make considered assumptions about the likelihood of armed response and the notion that anyone around him might be packing heat – and quite frankly, if everyone is capable of logic and reason, the need for everyone to be armed drops precipitously.
The problem is this: it’s not that we don’t regulate guns, it’s that we don’t regulate who has guns. In Switzerland, there are assault rifles all over the place, you’ll see a guy walking through the supermarket with a SIG 550 over his shoulder – but it’s because every man jack in the country has to do his military service and then keep the rifle at home thereafter, where two sealed boxes of ammunition wait against the day he’s called to defend the country. Meanwhile, for an administrative fee of 30 francs, an officer can retain his 9mm pistol after leaving active duty. But in both cases, you’re talking about a situation where the person has been trained, practices routinely, and is in every way qualified to use the weapon – and presumably knows when to.
Mr. Almost-Fucked-Up in Tucson has no military or law-enforcement background at all, by his own admission. He merely “grew up around guns.” Well, so did I. Hell, quite a few purchases have been financed through the gradual unloading of my late father’s personal arsenal. (Everything from tires to sportcoats, and I still have a little walking-around money unaccounted for.) In a lot of cases, the things hadn’t even been shot (the Colt Government .380 pistol, which I’m sure was bought in the mid-90s when his arthritis wouldn’t allow for a more powerful cartridge, was said last year by a dealer never to have been fired). The point is: yer boy grew up around firearms, and I learned things, like – all guns are always loaded, never put your finger on the trigger unless you’re pulling it, never point at anything you don’t want destroyed, and never shoot at anything if you don’t know exactly what’s behind it. And especially – if you have a gun, and you hear shots being fired, that gun is not a license to run toward the shots. They have people for that, and they’re called cops. If you’re packing, it’s for those times when somebody is pointing a weapon AT you, at which point your objective is to get away from them; the gun is there to impede them in their pursuit.
The problem in this country isn’t the guns. It isn’t even the people who have the guns. It’s the people who go armed all the time, who want to go armed all the time, because they want to need to go armed all the time.
Fifty years ago, before they went off the rails, the National Rifle Association was pretty much what the name implies: an organization devoted to marksmanship, shooting sports, conservation (!), and other things of interest to responsible gun owners. But when random civilian people are demanding 30-round clips, or the ability to walk through Starbucks with pistol on hip, or insisting on carrying rifles to political demonstrations, it’s pretty clear that the word responsible has taken a hike.