A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis, serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. © James Conner.

19 June 2015

We are least safe when everyone is packin’ heat

The emerging profile of Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old who reportedly has confessed to murdering black worshippers in a Charleston, SC, church, is depressing and not surprising: poorly educated, not very bright, and consumed with hatred, including self-hatred. He reportedly wanted to ignite a race war, then die in a blaze of notoriety, which if true suggests he was suicidal.

Whether more stringent controls on firearms would have denied him the handgun he used is not a question with an easy answer. Nor is whether not having a firearm he still would have found a way to kill. Neither question is that relevant to the debate over firearms policy. Statistically, mass murders by lone gunmen with strange personalities are rare events that seem more common than they are because they’re so horrific. They may generate the political push needed to pass firearms legislation, but they’re not the events on which firearms policy should be largely based.

What we can do without, but are not being spared, are assertions that the churchgoers Roof allegedly killed might have lived had they been carrying sidearms and thus able to shoot back. Most making this argument sincerely believe that if armed, they might be able to protect themselves by returning fire. Carrying a handgun makes them feel safer, so they conclude that everyone is safer if everyone is carrying.

That’s a conclusion both specious and dangerous.

We are safest not when everyone is packing a sidearm, but when no one is packing. A truly civilized society in one in which an unarmed husband and wife can walk their stroller and baby through their neighborhood without fear of being harmed. That’s the actual state of affairs in most places in the United States. We would do well to recognize that, and not heed calls for pistols on everyone’s hip.