Not all people should carry as not all people are responsible or trained or care. Instead I would prefer the eliminations of the "no weapons" areas.
Don't look for that to happen any time soon. If anything, it will get worse, and this incident will make more of them. Too damn many people think emotionally rather than rationally. Or they just plain don't think. It should be as obvious as the fact that the sun rises in the east the "gun free zones" don't work as intended. A five year old ought to be able to figure out that if a man is willing to walk into a room and commit murder many times over, he's hardly going to be stopped by the sight of that "no guns allowed" sign, and that, if anything, this will only make him smile as he realizes all the poor rubes inside who do obey the rules are unarmed and helpless. This should be easy to figure out, but there are some people who just can't seem to make the connection.
Reading some of the articles written in the aftermath of this atrocity makes me shake my head in despair at how incapable of rational thought some people are. Roger Ebert, the film critic, wrote in an op ed in the NY Times:
The United States is one of few developed nations that accepts the notion of firearms in public hands. In theory, the citizenry needs to defend itself. Not a single person at the Aurora, Colo., theater shot back, but the theory will still be defended.
He doesn't even
attempt to find out if anyone had the means to shoot back. And since the theater was a supposed "gun free zone," odds are they didn't. But apparently, to Ebert, the fact that citizens didn't return fire with guns they didn't have is supposed to disprove the idea that an armed citizen at least
might have been able to stop the madman before he killed so many people.
Another op ed from the same paper had this little gem of wisdom to offer (referring to a quote by Texas Republican Louie Gohmert):
Mr. Gohmert added: “It does make me wonder, you know, with all those people in the theater, was there nobody that was carrying? That could have stopped this guy more quickly?”
That sort of call to vigilante justice is sadly too familiar, and it may be the single most dangerous idea in the debate over gun ownership.
Look carefully here. This is a newspaper man speaking. A so-called journalist. Words are supposed to be his very stock in trade. One would think, then, that he would at least know what they actually mean. But he doesn't. He can't seem to tell the difference between vigilantism (the undertaking of law enforcement without legal authority), and plain old self-defense (reacting to a threat occurring at that moment). Anyone shooting back at Holmes would have been acting in simple self-defense, not taking the law into his own hands. Words exist to designate ideas and allow us to communicate them to others. I wonder how the author of that piece can even think clearly, and organize his thoughts rationally, when he seems to be muddling his definitions.
