If there is anything your more vocal ammosexuals hate, it’s anyone who calls for gun control laws in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. It’s too soon, they will cry. How dare you make this political before the bodies are cold, they will whine. Way to stand on the bodies of dead children to advance your agenda, gun-grabbers, they will derp.
The same respect for not using the dead to advance a political agenda does not apply in the other direction, of course. Which is why a bunch of shameless assholes who run a site called The Truth About Guns wasted no time in setting up an experiment to simulate what might have happened if even one of the people blown away in Charlie Hebdo’s office in France last week had been armed. It’s not exploitation, though! It is an experiment for science, which your modern-day conservative doesn’t usually believe in. But for this, they will make an exception to all sorts of closely held beliefs.
The experiment was fairly simple in its design: Put a bunch of people in a suite of offices and arm one of them with a concealed pistol. Then have two other guys armed with AR-15s converted to fire mock tactical rounds enter the offices and start shooting. For those of you reading this, you can mimic this experiment this weekend by rounding up a bunch of your buddies and going to the nearest paintball range. Sounds to us like it wouldn’t be much different.
Can you see some problems with this scenario? We can think of a whole bunch right off the top of our head.
But aside from the fact that all of the people playing potential victims are locals from Texas where they are steeped in gun culture (as opposed to a bunch of cartoonists and satirists going about a normal business day in France, which decidedly does not have the extensive collection of gun fondlers we have in America), the fact that everyone knew the experiment was happening (as opposed to the people at Charlie Hebdo, who later reported that when the first gunshots rang out they thought someone was setting off firecrackers), the fact that you didn’t have time to build an exact replica of the Charlie Hebdo offices so you had to make do with whatever set-up you had at hand, the fact you admit that getting hit with paintballs in no way tells you anything about whether someone hit by a bullet in the same spot would be totally incapacitated or able to keep firing back, this was a totally legitimate idea that was in no way about exploiting a tragedy and grabbing some media attention to push your political agenda, of course.
The final problem was time. Robert insisted that we perform this test within 24 hours of having the idea in order to capture media attention, and that unfortunately meant that the methodology was rushed, the volunteer pool was small, and we did not have sufficient time on the day of the event to even run all of the volunteers who did manage to make it to the location.
Oh. Well, but you learned something important, right?
I know the gun control activists will want to point to this as definitive proof that armed defenders are useless, but that’s simply not the case. Not only is there insufficient data to draw any conclusions whatsoever…
But you just gave us a list of all the conclusions you drew! Those conclusions were mostly that at best, one armed defender in the Charlie Hebdo office might have slowed down the attack but would certainly not have been able to stop it, most likely would not have hit either attacker with even one bullet, and would have gotten himself killed in the process.
So this was just the usual masturbatory exercise to build a body of evidence to convince more people that offices and schools and public spaces would be better off if more people would be trained and armed to respond to random terrorist attacks and ward off all the gun grabbers who would rather work towards building a society where everyone is not an armed, paranoid lunatic. Good to know.
[ KXAN / The Truth About Guns ]
Sorry, The Truth About Guns, but with a muzzle velocity or 975 meters per second, unless the offices at Charlie Hebdo have walls made of 3/4 inch steel, the guy with the handgun and the concrete block behind him are going to have a hole in them before he puts down his sketch pad.
They do know that one of the victims was an <em>armed bodyguard</em> from the French Protection Service, yes? Or did that little fact just wash over their head so they could pretend that all the victims were a bunch of 98-pound weaklings?