"Upscale" wrote in message
...

"J. Clarke" wrote in message
Can you give us an example of _one_ incident in which as a result "10
other people pulled out handguns and started shooting at each other"?

...snip If you were just walking along and you heard some bullets zip
by,
wouldn't your first impulse be to pull out your gun too?

Not if you wish to survive the situation.

If your first
inclination would be to run and hide, then why would you be carrying a gun
in the first place?

Deeply flawed premise... Pulling out one's weapon is the second thing to do.
Ducking behind cover is first. If possible, running a VERY short distance
to cover is a good way to get to that cover. Running far is a good way to
get shot in the back by a bad guy or a cop.

Face it, if someone is carrying a gun, they they're
prepared to pull it as necessary. When you don't carry a gun, then you're
prepared to take different steps.

Poppycock.
Prepared or not, if you are not armed, your choices are more limited. Duck,
hide, evade, and sneak are the ONLY options left. For people who are not
young, agile, or otherwise similar to soldier material, running to evade is
not a viable option.
Whether armed or not, the first defense is to avoid places where psychos and
junkies frequently go hunting victims.
When that does not work, the armed individual (defender) must use guile,
skill, calm judgment, and great care to survive. The initial aggressor (bad
guy) has most of the advantages.

A situation of that kind went the right way one night in Alabama a few years
ago. An armed older ("senior") fellow and his family were at a restaurant
eating. Bad guys entered and held the patrons at gunpoint to rob them.
Hoping to not increase the danger to his family, the armed older fellow was
going to go peacefully along with being robbed. Then the bad guys began
herding people into the freezer room of the restaurant. Knowing that other
recent robberies had occurred where the victims were murdered in the freezer
rooms in restaurants, the armed older ("senior") fellow drew his weapon and
shot the robbers, killing 2 of them. A couple of "good guy" people were
wounded (bullets can pass completely through bad guys and hit other people),
but no "good guys" died. The dead and wounded bad guys were later
identified as the murderers in the previous restaurant robbery/killings. A
horible nightmare was minimized by a peace loving, armed man.
It happens all the time in situations where no shots have to be fired, but
those seldom get reported.

Bless that armed older fellow who had his gun on him and used it.
Desperation, guts, a gun, and no place to "run and hide"... in Life and
Death situations, the real world is infinitely variable, but seldom like
abstract mental constructs (dreams based on limited or erroneous
information), TV, or movies.

Axel