Well they not only have a gun. They have something far more important: body armor. Even a completely untrained SWAT member is going to be more successfull than a random citizen with a gun.
Also, an armed citizen if far more likely to suffer consequences if they shoot the wrong person by mistake. And the training they get is going to be much more "Don't shoot unless you're really sure" rather than "shoot first to protect yourself".
Getting a CCW involves training to use the gun properly to shoot assailants. People with CCWs are more likely to win a standoff than random criminals with stolen guns and no training.
If the assailant also had a CCW, he would know how stupid it is to approach someone else with a gun.
This is one of the most naive takes that I hear often.
An assailant with a gun is prepared to do you harm. There is a 100% chance that they are going to have their gun with them and be ready. They are no more going to wait for you to prepare to defend yourself than the person with a knife is going to swing it widely in a way your corner self defense class is going to prepare you to defend yourself.
That’s like people saying they want guns to protect themselves from the federal government when a small town SWAT team could take them out without breaking a sweat. Let alone the federal government with the worlds largest military.
physical strength, dexterity, skill, and combat training still make a hell of a difference in a gunfight. A gun only makes a physically weak person strong against someone without a gun.
You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?
It would not be certainty a fair fight. Even so, a murderer is forced to engage civilians who are shooting at them rather than civilians who are simply defenseless. The only thing a person with handgun can do is buy time for a SWAT team to arrive and the slower the SWAT are, the more likely for death. (See the North Hollywood shootout as an example of this)
Nonetheless, I consider the defenders having guns to be an equalizer. In the Virginia Tech massacre incident, the murderer have only two handguns, but he was able to kill 32 individuals.
And it's not exactly like they need weapons either, a determined person trained in unarmed combat will easily kill/maim someone just using their hands.
A pattern you see is that simply _having_ a gun is a massive massive deterrent. When the victim finds an opportunity to counter ambush, they can very frequently prevail. If they practice even a little they will be more skilled than most criminals, who don't even know how to hold a gun many times.
I think the basic motivation for carrying a concealed weapon in situations like these is what if the guy never plans to stop killing? What if he just carries on hunting people for so long as his ammo lasts? That gives you a possibility of making a difference by putting him down early.
Likewise, why bother wearing body armor, they'll just shoot you in the face! Except... sometimes whether by their aim sucking or not having time to aim properly, and etc., it does matter. Chaotic situations like these have many possible challenges to present you, some of which a concealed weapon can help you with.
I think a lot of people have hate for guns and hence irrationally choose to ignore all the utility of them, in this case by suggesting a situation where it is ridiculous to stop bullets with more bullets, essentially a strawman argument, ignoring all the situations where you can use bullets to prevent someone from firing more.
Your scenario starts with a gun pointed at the person. How much training do you believe is required such that an otherwise ordinary person "win" a gunfight when their gun is holstered and the opponent already has them in their aim?
I'd be interested in better understanding the threat model here - the scenario where it's actually useful.
Call it a failure of imagination, but to me it seems exceedingly unwise for a law abiding civilian to be entering a situation where body armor would be helpful (and I say this as a firearm owner).
My point is that if someobe gets training on how to breach and secure buildings, either in SWAT, or in their previous career in the military, then they will have training which teaches them to aim for center-mass of anyone they perceive as a threat.
Swapping out the type of ammunition isnt going to erase that training and so they would fall back to it in a stressful situation.
If they have a handgun chances are I'm dead before I can draw my own and train one on them anyway. I'm not Clint Eastwood and this isn't a hollywood western. Whoever has the drop wins and by definition that's the intruder since I'm not going to spend every second of my life with a gun in my hand.
Self defense with a firearm can be part of a plan to avoid being the victim of violence, but it works a lot better in a society where crime is rare, serious crimes are likely to be punished, and the probability of profiting from major crimes is low. When skilled and motivated criminals attack unsuspecting victims, they tend to be successful even if the victims are armed.
Case in point, in 1986, Michael Lee Platt and William Russel Matix went on a crime spree in the Miami area. They started by murdering a man at a shooting range to steal his firearm and car. They then tried and failed to rob an armored car, murdering an armed guard in the process. Next, they robbed a bank. After a couple months off, they robbed another armored car, during which they stole a guard's rifle and murdered him with it. A couple months after that, they robbed and attempted to kill another man at a shooting range, using his stolen car in a bank robbery a week later.
All of the victims these criminals shot were armed, which did not dissuade them from initiating attacks. The armored truck guards were presumably trained, but not sufficiently to defend against attackers whose opening move was gunfire.
Sure, but people making this argument tend to imply that a gun is the only effective way to deter or disable specifically an attacker with a gun. No one says police should carry guns to deter knife wielders and a Kevlar vest would seem to provide more protection against someone with a gun who's at the end of their rope/too strung out to care.
This line of reasoning would make more sense if life was a TV show and every armed interaction was a Mexican standoff, but in reality most criminals with guns are already far from being rational actors.
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