The Good Guy With A Gun Isn’t Going To Save Anyone

He’s nothing but a myth

After every major shooting, Republicans and Second Amendment extremists argue that having more guns is the solution to gun violence. Schools, stores, and offices can supposedly be secure spaces so long as a “good guy” with a gun is present to take out the bad guy. According to them, mass shootings only occur because not enough armed citizens are present to gun down an attempted shooter.

The good guy with a gun sounds like a brave man; a quickdraw ready to pull his revolver from its holster within a moment’s notice. I imagine that he wears a cowboy hat and keeps a lit cigar in his mouth at all times — with each of his steps followed by an orchestral sting. The perfect embodiment of the wild west.

Unfortunately, and unlike what the NRA and GOP would have you believe, this mythical hero isn't going to save anyone. With hundreds of mass shootings each year, our protagonist still refuses to show his face.

But that’s because he doesn’t exist.

Two of the last significant shootings occurred where guns were present

There have already been too many shootings to keep track of over the previous month, but two of the most noteworthy have to be the attack on a private Christian school in Tennessee and the siege of a bank in Louisville.

Both attacks occurred at locations where police were stationed nearby or had armed staff on the premises. In neither instance did armed personnel confront the shooter until it was too late.

According to a 911 call sent from the Covenant School in Tennesee, several employees on site were armed and likely had concealed carry permits. Nevertheless, 6 people at the school were killed before police arrived to neutralize the shooter. Some staff members did confront the shooter (including the principal who was killed) but the school’s armed security was nowhere to be seen.

Similarly, the Old National Bank in downtown Louisville was a secure space by definition. Police were on the scene within minutes of the first shots, but even that was too late. 5 people died and a police officer was shot in the head. He remains in critical condition.

Following this shooting, a tweet from Republican Senator Ted Cruz aged like fine milk.

“When you go to the bank and you deposit money in the bank, there are armed police officers at the bank. Why? Because we want to protect the money we save. Why on earth do we protect a stupid deposit more than our children?”

Now, we know for a fact that banks are no safer than schools. In truth, there is nowhere safe in America — not when there are physically more guns than people. No number of armed guards will change this.

This is the sad reality: mass shootings are nothing like the movies. These aren’t slow, dramatic showdowns where our perpetrator menacingly stares down his would-be victims. Oftentimes, bodies hit the floor before anyone knows what happened. This is especially true when we throw assault rifles into the mix — a shooter can empty an entire magazine of military-grade ammunition into a room in seconds.

Even if our good guy with a gun was in the room to retaliate, that is not enough to save those killed in the opening salvo. That is of course if he responds at all. Perhaps he is one of the victims. After all, carrying a gun doesn’t give you a magic shield.

Then there’s always the inevitable matter of human nature. When people are confronted with life-threatening danger, they naturally experience a fight-or-flight reaction. Oftentimes, our instinct to flee greatly outweighs our will to fight, even when equipped with the tools to do so. Nobody truly expects how they will respond in this sort of scenario, not even those tasked with our protection.

Trained police officers are not even reliable in this regard; last year in the Uvalde shooting, first responders waited for more than half an hour inside the same building before they decided to act.

Likewise, despite imagining themselves as the heroes that will be there to save the day, even those with concealed carry handguns might find themselves hiding under a table once they end up in harm’s way.

Or worse, they end up shooting at anything that moves.

Paranoia is getting people killed

Over the last month, there’s been an alarming trend of gun violence stemming from exaggerated uses of self-defense.

On Tuesday, two Texas cheerleaders were seriously injured after being shot for accidentally entering the wrong car at a parking lot. In North Carolina, a 6-year-old and her dad were shot after entering a neighbor’s lawn to retrieve a ball that landed on their property. In Missouri, a 16-year-old was shot in the head for ringing someone’s doorbell. Most egregious of all, a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed in her car for turning into the wrong driveway, thinking she had arrived at her friend’s house.

It seems like there’s a growing number of gun owners out there that are trying to find any excuse imaginable to use their toys. Minor trespassing is all that it takes for some to decide that they have a right to take your life. It certainly underscores the idea that very few people have the judgment required to safely wield firearms. This is the natural consequence of giving people lethal weapons without requiring any training on safety or rules of engagement.

Gun violence is only driving people to commit even more gun violence. We should also consider that many of these gun owners are the prime audience of Fox News and other right-wing channels. There, you have people like Tucker Carlson warning of impending race wars, secession, and child “grooming.” With the constant stream of paranoia that people are being fed across the country, these hair triggers should come as no surprise.

If we do decide to arm everyone — including teachers and school staff — we could end up creating more preventable gun deaths than the mass shootings that we were trying to prevent.

As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Armed staff might turn to their weapon each time there is a brawl or altercation between students, leading to an avoidable loss of life that would be settled peacefully. Or perhaps those same students might steal this gun to settle their argument in a shootout. In any case, this is a disaster waiting to happen.

While there is no catch-all solution to addressing gun violence or school shootings, we need to put the myth of the good guy with a gun behind us. The United States is the most heavily-armed country in the world; if gun ownership was all it took to dissuade people from committing heinous acts of violence, we would already be living in a perfect utopia.

Rather, we should be focusing on regulation and enforcement that prevent shootings before they happen. No single policy is going to fix the entire situation, but putting better laws in place is a more sensible approach than giving every single Joe Shmoe a deadly weapon and expecting them to defend themselves in a Wild West-style shootout. At the very least, we need licensing, red flags laws, background checks, mandatory waiting periods, and a ban on fully-automatic weapons.

More guns are only going to cause more violence, and relying on the good guy is only going to get more people killed. We need to follow the rest of the world by passing our own common-sense restrictions on firearm ownership.

It’s time that we give our mythical hero a rest.

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