Michael right,

Most of these so called 300 million guns are locked away in kid proof safes - chances for a good guy who is packing a concealed gun and would want to get involved , so that would be a 1 -to- 300 million chance that would happen.

Slightly higher in states that do allow concealed weapons to begin with . The good guy guns are generally left at home for home protection and thats where the laws favor them the best.

Imagine if you will ?
Good guy gets involved in a shoot out with a bad guy to save lives - but a innocent bystander gets shot and killed by the good guy <-- he still could face murder charges even with the good Samaritan laws. Remember these thing happens in a few seconds at most - a good guy has gotta pull and fire in 2 seconds flat - I really don't think a good guy can do that ? ?

I don't think that's true Llewelyn. IF a good guy stopped someone bad - it'd be BIG news... and don't you think the NRA would be hyping the HLL out of every one of them ? I haven't seen or heard of any ! I think they're almost non existent !!

It's a big pill to swallow !

The stories are out there, but they're hyped each way by members of each side of the argument. When a good guy does stop a bad guy, then the "arm everyone" crowd blows his achievement out of proportion, extolling how many potential victims were saved, while the "ban all guns" crowd totally underplays it - but then these two extremes tend to play in their own sandpits, that you have to hunt for.

National news tends to play down both sets of hype, so it tends to fall to local news "a local good samaritan prevented a bad guy from harming xxxx", it's easy to save that the samaritan probably saved the target, but difficult to quantify if the bad guy was doing general mayhem or just after the current target.


Arizona mall shooting - Dec 2012
So was the good guy a factor in the stoppage of the shooting? Did the bad guy just decide to end it because his primary weapon wasn't working? The end result was very few people were shot, so I don't believe it was that big of headline thing for the nationals.

Or there's this one from a couple days ago. Now it's not a mass murderer, but the guy definitely made a difference for the victim in this case. But once again it's just a local story, that's pushed on the gun supporter forums.

#1 is legit, though how rare is this? I'll admit I never heard this on the news. BUT if there's so many - why isn't the National news covering it?

#2 - while the firearm stopped and held the guy; the "good guy" didn't have to have it to stop a beating.

And I have no problem with regular firearms - it's the assault rifles and 30 shot magazines that make me cringe. Either guy could have done what they did with a 6-shooter ! They didn't need a Bushmaster. But regardless, I think we've done this experiment in about 1880 and it didn't work out well. Story #1 also shows the dilemma a "good guy" has - he didn't shoot because of bystanders. IF police had come up and seen him - how do they know he's the "good guy"? Does he wear a bright t-shirt with a big G on it ?

The whole argument is just not logical.

That's part of the intangible. There are local stories where the presence of a firearm makes the bad guy rethink his plans, no shots fired, no crime committed. The only quantifiable is the mass shooter who goes through with his plans unmolested. Everything else is speculation one way or the other, and both sides hype the stories in favor of their viewpoint - and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle most of the time.

And who's to say a 6-shooter is sufficient? Real life is not like the movies, where the incidental bad guy goes down with a single shot and hit (ok the main bad guy usually just keeps on coming ). Folks miss, even marksmen who spend hours per day on the range, and people can survive multiple gunshot wounds, especially if they're hyped up on andrenalin (or pcp). And while it might be reasonable to question who needs 30 shot magazines, the same could be asked of a Ferrari owner, who needs a car that can hit 180mph? Does firearm ownership always have to come down to need?

That's a poor analogy. No one kills 20-30 people in 3 minutes with a Ferrari.

Proof that rationalization fails in the face of common sense and fact.

Oh I don't know, driving recklessly on a highway and causing a multiple vehicle pileup can cause that number of fatalities. And I doubt that most purchasers of assault rifles are doing so with the intention of killing 20-30 people in 3 minutes.

Though personally I cannot justify having either an assault rifle or a Ferrari, some folks just want these things for fun/sport (that's sport, not hunting).

Even if driving recklessly that would be called an accident. No one wakes up and thinks "i'll just kill a bunch of people today... and instead of using a firearm...I'm going to use my nice expensive sport car".

I don't think most people are "purchasers of assault rifles are doing so with the intention of killing 20-30 people in 3 minutes.".. but so what?

I love how people keep coming up with analogies comparing a gun to other types of weapons. There are few, maybe none, weapons available to the public that have the capacity to kill like an automatic or even semi-auto. That's why they are so freakin' popular... because they are good at killing. It's pretty much why they are manufactured.

You're struggling — unsuccessfully — to find the connective tissue. Ferraris are designed and engineered to thrill and please those who can pay the price of admission, and to impress those who can't.

Assault weapons and high cap magazines are designed and engineered to kill or injure as many targets (read "people") as possible in the least amount of time and with the least amount of effort. Connecting such weapons to "fun" or "sport" is yet another hollow rationalization.

Adam Lanza's mother was a prepare and a survivalist. She bought a bushmaster not for fun or sport, but for what she felt was a valid purpose: self-defense in a post-apocalyptic world. Largely a fantasy. And a dangerous one at that. Had she not been able to purchase such deadly ordinance, it would not have been accessible to her mentally disturbed son. If he had had to rely on a less efficient weapon, the death toll at Sandy Hook would have probably been half what it was. Same for Aurora. Same for Columbine, et al.

Ordinary citizens do not need military or law enforcement-grade weapons — and that has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment. That is not a "well-regulated militia". And a sports car is not a weapon by design.