“Good guy with pepper spray stops bad guy with gun” It was so obvious that people just couldn’t stop themselves from saying it. The gunman at Seattle Pacific University was subdued by a good Samaritan with pepper spray, Jon Meis, assisted by several people who were completely unarmed. Immediate competition began for the best ironic twist on the gun-rights slogan, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”, as uttered by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, among others. That’s certainly a fun thing to do after a mass shooting, but unfortunately, what happened in Seattle doesn’t refute LaPierre in the slightest. By all means, celebrate Jon Meis, who really is a hero and helped save lives. And continue your arguments for gun control, using the gunman here as an example. But this play on words is cheap nonsense. No one is foolish enough to believe that Jon Meis, and the people in Otto Miller Hall, were best served facing off against a gunman with pepper spray. And in any case, a good guy with pepper spray didn’t stop a bad guy with a gun in Seattle. Jon Meis was successful only because the bad guy didn’t have a gun. He had stopped to reload. For a moment, then, Jon Meis and his pepper spray actually had the advantage in arms. Credit him for his courage, his resolution, and his wits. He saw the moment and seized it. But had the gunman been armed at that moment, Meis, too, would likely have been shot. What he did was wait for the gunman to finish shooting three people, and then go after him. That was smart, and it was the only thing he could do. But the story would be very different if the gunman, as is usually the case, came in with several weapons loaded with tens of rounds. Are handguns that difficult to use? There is the persistent suggestion that a non-cop with a handgun is just going to kill more of the bystanders, always with the insinuation that all shooting is as difficult as a sniper’s headshot at 500 meters. Perhaps a handgun is essentially random, in the hands of a stereotypical movie teenager who is afraid of guns and has never held one in her life, but found one on the floor, and is now going to flail it around wildly for a couple of seconds before shrieking “Nnnnnnnh!” and throwing it away. But no one is talking about leaving guns lying around so they can be picked up by people who are that clueless. The counterscenario involves civilians who are deliberately armed, and have thus a basic familiarity and comfort with the weapon. These civilians are in the middle of the scenario, not perched on top of a building somewhere. They are thus shooting from relatively-close range. Handguns are easy to aim; the barrel points towards the target, the aim can be intuitively adjusted quickly, and the pistol grip gives the wrist a high freedom of movement. Unlike pepper spray, for instance, which must go into the face, the handgun can be fired into the much larger torso. The scenarios in which the presence of one or more “good guys with guns” makes the outcome worse do not apply here. We are not talking about a bad guy walking into a public place, murdering a single target, and going home. There you could argue that the armed citizen might misjudge the situation more often than not, and kill someone innocent, someone not intending to commit murder, or kill a bystander accidentally while attempting to stop a murder, and thus perhaps increase the death count. Of course, even in that scenario, we are generally relying on a “good guy with a gun” — a cop — to safely end the situation with a minimum loss of life. Instead, we are talking today about an active mass shooting. The longer it goes on, the more people who die. It needs to be ended as soon as possible. A civilian with a gun can hardly make the situation worse. The worst that can happen is that the civilian misses the gunman and hits a bystander. But all bystanders are potential victims of the gunman. If the civilian does not shoot, the gunman will kill more bystanders. For as long as the civilian waits to shoot the gunman, the gunman will keep killing bystanders. How are a few stray bullets in the direction of the gunman actually going to make this worse? And this idea that armed civilians will do more harm than good is more egregiously nonsensical when employed, as it was, in the context of Sandy Hook, where numerous unarmed teachers were killed attempting to stop the gunman. Give just one of them a gun and the situation is dramatically different. So what if she is not a marksman? She is more likely to stop him with a gun than with her charging body. She is extremely unlikely to hurt any children, since they are much shorter than the gunman, and she is aiming over a short distance. And in any case she is shooting at the gunman while he is deliberately targeting the children, so it is clearly in the interests of the children that she be shooting, even if her aim isn’t that good. Gun control activists are so committed to their argument that they will deny common sense whenever common sense is against them. They are trapped by their ideology and will give no ground, even as it crumbles logically beneath them. It’s perfectly reasonable to dispute the gun rights that allowed the SPU gunman to be armed in the first place. But the snarky twisting of a legitimate gun-rights argument in the face of today’s sorrow and heroism is not a contribution to the public debate. And moreover, no one actually believes it. No one, crouched under a desk in a classroom as some lunatic walks in and starts firing, ever thinks, “Thank God I don’t have a gun of my own. This can of Mace is so much better.” — O.T. Ford
