No question, but in the context of mass shootings, it's certainly not a common event. My point was about the things that would have to change if we want to see good guys with guns stopping mass shootings with any sort of regularity. It's precisely because mass shootings are so relatively rare that it will require a LOT more people carrying guns who are confident and competent enough to use them to stop mass shootings before we are going to get any significant numbers that we can point to.
Good read so far. Gives a lot of things to think about. Thanks to everyone that's responded here.
I will do my best to add quality to the conversation.
The highlighted part is a big part of the reason that we may not ever see a significant change in the outcomes of these incidents.
Quite simply, the math defeats us.
Mass/spree shootings are a lot like meteorite strikes. From the innocent bystander POV, they're completely random, like a bolt lightning on a clear blue-sky day. As was iterated earlier, the shooter picks the time and the place of his act.
And we live in a world where
even if every other person in the US owned a gun, and
even if more than half of those people carried the thing most of the time, and
even if those people were trained at Frontsight or Gunsite, or wherever, and
even if they all graduated their schools with an A+, or Distinguished Graduate, or Super Clean Pistol Ninja, at the time of the incident, even well-trained, well-armed people aren't going to react in a uniform manner.
"In order to learn how to fight, one must fight for real. No amount of sparring or perfection in kata will ensure that the martial artist will be able to fight effectively on the day that he is faced with real combat. He must train the body and the mind through actual combat. It is the only way." Bruce Lee (not an exact quote, but fairly close, IIRC)
Many years ago when I was still a full-time commercial flight instructor, I was working with yet another group of young commercial pilots on their emergency training for fixed-wing multi-engine aircraft. Well, they all passed their training on schedule, and they all passed with essentially flying colors.
Months later I was sitting right seat observing-only (OBO) in a twin-engine plane with one of these former students on a training mission. About half-way through our outbound leg we had an engine failure, just after we received our descent clearance.
The training dictates that you First,
aviate (keep flying the plane, dipstick!), then verify that you do in fact have an engine out as well as which engine. These items are expressed out loud. Then execute the Emergency Procedures for Single Engine Failure in Cruise Flight as specified in the handy-dandy QRH (don't worry, not going to bore you with every tic on that list). But something this pilot had done dozens of times in practice and had always received a satisfactory rating.
But this time it was a real engine failure in a real plane, not a simulator, at around 2300 (so more than an hour of essentially very boring flying, and starting to get a little sleepy as well), with clouds starting at 16,000, so pitch black, probably about an hour from ELP (long way yet to fly in dark unfamiliar skies, to unfamiliar airport), with mountains approaching somewhere out the windows.
Add: we were at an altitude where the one operating engine couldn't produce enough lift to maintain level flight, so we were in an uncommanded descent. VSI showed approx. 500 feet/min. descending. Towards those mountains we couldn't see. About 8,000 feet, IIRC. Gave us about 10 or 13 minutes before rocky top.
Add: there was a rainstorm. Real IMC within five minutes. Some down-drafts in our way. Fly inside a closet with the door shut. Plane go bouncy bouncy. Won't hold altitude. Large hard invisible rocks outside in front. My Chief Pilot's vernacular: a No Bueno Moment possibly culminating in a life-changing event.
By the way, when you have your first real engine failure in the dark hundreds of miles from the airport, really strange things begin to happen. Your heart-rate triples. You start sweating. Your hands feel like they're shaking. You seem to be looking through a pair of toilet paper cardboard tubes. Your mouth gets ridiculously dry. You can't remember where in your flight bag you stuffed your low level charts. The ones with the elevations of the MOUNTAINS on them.
None of these things aid a pilot in flying a crippled airplane. In fact, it's fairly uncomfortable, if I had to say so.
Fortunately, the second time it happens, your body doesn't do half of that stuff.
Bottom line:
He didn't perform anything like he had in practice. It was . . . not up to standard. I ended up having to take control of the aircraft.
My point being,
even if you can get all the training that money can buy, that still doesn't mean that you're going to perform up to the level of your training when it's the real thing. In my experience as a flight instructor, it's more of a spectrum:
Take a hundred students. Train them all exactly to the same standard. Have them test to the same performance. Then drop them in an actual crisis situation, and . . .
Some will fail miserably,
Some will succeed admirably,
Most will perform adequately. Probably. Most of those might make a mistake, but probably not one that will end up killing them and their crew/passengers. Something minor.
No one will perform perfectly.
And just like you don't know when and where the next mass shooter will strike, you don't know which students will perform well, which will do satisfactory, and which will fall flat on their faces.
Then add in the ones that never had a chance for whatever reason.
Then add in the ones that run away from the scene instead of towards it. We don't care why; it was a choice and they made it.
And so on.
So the reality is that due to the very nature of mass shootings and those that perpetrate them, the rarity of these events, combined with the lack of "good guys" that just happen to be in the area at that exact moment, that we may never see a significant change in the data towards the "good guys with a gun."
The math, simply speaking, is not in our favor.
But we also know that sometimes events work out in a way where we do have a chance to change the outcome, simply because we are in fact armed.
Training, at whatever level, quality, consistency, etc., just evens the odds a little, or maybe even tilts the odds slightly back in our favor, in spite of the fact that we were taken largely by surprise, in a place and time not of our choosing.
And when you must play the cards dealt to you, and they're not very good cards, everyone wants every other advantage they can get before having to show.
One of the great "hidden" tools we have at our disposal is the internet. These free forums. Youtube, and so forth. The ability to ask questions and get answers in almost real-time. To discuss video. To analyze and break down incidents tactically, technically, philosophically, etc. can make a difference to some of us.
Maybe to most of those of us that end up one day having to draw a weapon in actual combat. Or maybe not "most," but maybe to several of us.
Most importantly, maybe something I learn here or on a video, or in a class will save a life, like mine for starters.
Which, by the way, is pretty much exactly how we do it in aviation. We take real incidents from the recent past and break them down and try to come up with solid plans of action in case such things happen to us in the future.
