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On Dec 10, 5:05 pm, "SteveB" wrote:
I saw a clear full body picture of the Omaha shooter. Anyone who had a
concealed weapon and who could shoot decently could have lessened the
carnage. If you got a CCW, carry your weapon.

Steve

Dont you wonder, in your more lucid moments, late at night (if you
have them) thats there is something fundamentally wrong with a society
where the populace need to be armed to cope with the nuttier
members........

We don't need to be armed. Being armed is something one does for protection
against the most extreme and remote possibilities. Statistically it makes
little sense, unless one spends a lot of time in the most absurdly dangerous
pestholes, like Gunner seems to do. You might have seen the discussion here
a month or so ago about Dallas; people who continue to live or work in the
dangerous parts of our most dangerous cities have a choice, and they've
chosen to stay where the danger is.

Outside of those areas, you're unlikely ever to encounter gun violence in
the US. What you're hearing is mostly fantasies born of frustration and
wishful thinking. Even in the most heavily-armed states the density of
citizens who are carrying concealed firearms is so low that there's only a
slight chance that one of them could make a difference in a situation like
this. That's why you almost never hear of it.


I know its historical for you people, wild west, Hollywood, etc
etc..something in your constitution, but don't you wonder WHY shopping
centre massacres are a almost weekly occurrence....

That may be your impression, particularly because such shootings come in
clusters and the media jumps all over them like each one is the World Cup or
the Superbowl, but the fact is they're extremely rare.


How do you cope with this, the paranoia of buying a bottle of milk? -
there MUST be some alternative besides being armed to the teeth...

As for coping with it, again, the chances of being caught in one of those
situations is orders of magnitude less than that of being hit by a car and
killed on the highway. That doesn't make the shootings less dramatic but it
does permeate one's consciousness that you're looking at something that's
remarkable because it's so exceptional, and that the attention paid to it
has more to do with the media's (and the public's) hunger for melodrama.

If you want paranoia, there are parts of most large cities into which you
could venture for your bottle of milk and have much more reason to be
paranoid. Most of us just don't go there. Suburban shopping malls are not
where the real problems lie.

I don't make light of what you're saying, but I think you'll find that such
rare-but-dangerous situations are treated similarly around the world,
wherever they're encountered. Interviews with Israelis who have had narrow
escapes from suicide bombers provide a much more significant example of how
people react to higher incidences of such horrors. They shock and give one
something to think about, but the fact is that the chance of *you* being
caught in one is statistically remote. So life goes on, almost without a
hiccup.

--
Ed Huntress