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No, More Guns in the NYC Subway Wouldn’t Have Helped
We need to have a serious discussion about the nation’s mental health crisis
Life is not like Call of Duty.
One would think that saying this was unnecessary, but one would be wrong.
Because once again, after a mass public shooting, fools are insisting that if those on the scene had been armed, large-scale casualties could have been avoided.
Because to these voices, life is precisely like a video game.
It is a place where the bad guy comes around the corner, and you blast him before he can kill your fellow students, co-workers, or, in the latest case, fellow straphangers on the New York City Subway.
At least that’s the way Marjorie Taylor Greene sees it.
The Congresswoman from Georgia is convinced that if it weren’t for New York’s strict gun control laws, someone on that train could have taken out the shooter, who, as I write, was just captured.
Though no one has died, thankfully, from the shooting, 23 were injured. The fact that Greene believes more guns in a crowded commuter tube or on the subway platform would have reduced that number rather than expanded it suggests her high school and the University of Georgia failed miserably to impart to her even a basic understanding of physics and math.
It’s not only Greene, of course, who thinks this way.
Firearm fetishists always make this argument. They insist that good guys with guns can stop bad guys with them.
It’s an argument that conveniently overlooks some things.
First, in the case of this most recent shooting, there were armed cops in the subway. And they, unlike average citizens, are actually trained to “stop bad guys.”
Yet, they still failed to stop this shooter, who also released gas canisters to distract people and allow for his initial escape.
Indeed, it’s probably a good thing that police didn’t open fire on the attacker since research has found that when cops discharge their weapons, they miss their targets about 80 percent of the time.
