TexasCHLforum.com

Since receiving my CHL not terribly long ago, it's been interesting to note how my thought processes regarding these sorts of incidents have changed. From a political/philosophical perspective, I've always been opposed to the usual knee-jerk demands for the government to DO SOMETHING, but I've recently begun thinking things over in more practical terms as well. Most of it amounts to armchair quarterbacking, and I usually eventually just write it off with a mental shrug after a while. For example, after the Aurora shooting, I ran the scenario through in my head many times, trying, as many people were, to decide how I would have reacted - would I have fought back? Simply taken cover? Made for an exit? All of the above? - and eventually decided that there were too many variables and unknowns to come to a firm decision.

Not today. Today, I can't help but thinking the same thing over again, a thought that I'm sure I share with most, if not all, of the responsible armed citizens in the country:

I could have stopped this.

This is an act of such sudden, unpredictable, indecipherable evil that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I would have done something had I been present. I don't enjoy the thought of maiming or killing another human being, even one as depraved as this monster, but it's something that I've accepted as being an unfortunate inevitability in some scenarios in order to, to paraphrase Mas Ayoob, control the damage done and keep a bad situation from becoming even worse. All of which is an academic argument, since neither me nor anyone else would even be allowed to set foot in an elementary school while armed.

I've always dismissed the media response to these events and the popular internet sentiments that it tends to create as short-sighted and ill-informed, but this is the first time that it's actually frightened me. Whether intentionally or not, there is a perception in popular culture that guns and "gun culture" are somehow completely opaque to "common people," and that mystique (and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that it creates) lets people completely dissociate their arguments from any semblance of logic. While reading a completely unrelated story, I stumbled across a blog post on Gawker (here, for the morbidly curious: http://gawker.com/5968542/) that contained this little gem about Michigan's recent decision to allow concealed carry in day cares: "Let's not."

Seriously? After all of the clamoring for a "meaningful debate" about gun laws, on a website that goes to great lengths to dispel and even ridicule the ideas that video games played any role in this tragedy, the best you can come up with is "Let's not"? No analysis, no reasoning, just an unthinking affirmation of the legal status quo that allowed this to happen in the first place. For the record, I happen to agree that any cultural posturing pointing the finger at modern entertainment (with the possible exception of the sensationalist news-as-entertainment trend that never fails to give these sick individuals their fifteen minutes of fame) misses the more fundamental issues of mental health and personal responsibility. But to try to find a deeper root cause for this senselessness than conveniently blaming them new-fangled vidyagames only to turn around and eagerly pin the blame on a different inanimate object that doesn't happen to be one of your own hobbies defies any rational explanation.

And there are plenty of people who are only too willing to jump on the bandwagon. I know this has been unbearably long-winded already, but there is a personal anecdote worth sharing:

A buddy of mine from college was in town visiting this weekend. This guy has been one of my closest friends for the past 7-8 years. We're both largely apolitical, but we do tend to agree on the few political points that come up in conversation - while neither of is exactly a card-carrying republican, we both tended to be on the more conservative-leaning and/or libertarian sides of political debates that cropped up when we were in school. His dad was career military, so he'd never had any sort of aversion to guns, but he'd never actually been shooting before; we'd talked several times about it, but only finally got around to a range trip yesterday.

It was the same story that you've all seen over and over again - he was initially just a little shy about actually (gasp!) touching a gun, but after a few magazines through the .22, he was having an absolute blast. Even mentioned the possibility of buying a gun himself, which he backed up by spending the rest of the day asking me questions about prices, calibers, availability, etc. Then the conversation turned to the Sandy Hook murders, and he asked my opinion on gun control - as delicately as I could, I observed that the strict NJ and CT gun laws and the gun-free school idea obviously hadn't helped much, so I was skeptical. He agreed, but added "well.... that makes sense, but I do agree that there's not much reason to own a high-power semi-automatic weapon. And the ban on high-capacity magazines does make sense."

I browbeat him with the statistically-proven uselessness of the AWB for a while, and the conversation moved on, but he still didn't seem convinced. This bothered me quite a bit. Later on, we went to a Christmas party being thrown by a coworker. The two of us were sitting and talking with a friend of mine from work, when my college buddy happens across the news story about the California incident and mentions it out loud.

My coworker let out a "Here we go again," and is quiet for a second. I like this guy a lot, but I know that he happens to lean a little more liberal than I do, so I brace myself for the inevitable argument; he's not a gun owner, and, like myself, is a young-ish tech/internet nerd, exactly the sort of person you'd think would jump on the gun-control bandwagon starting to spread around that community. But instead he says this: "Funny how this always happens in the states with the strictest gun-control laws. There's no way we'd put up with stuff like that in Texas - you're not going to shoot up a shopping mall if you know that half the people in there are armed. You try that kind of thing, and someone will just drop you. That's one thing at least that I love about living here."

Absolutely made my night.