You hear the usual arguments:
- “No civilian needs a gun”
- “The police are armed and can take care of it”
- “Untrained civilians will do more harm than good”
These arguments are valid in the following situations:
- You can trust the government and law enforcement generally to do the right thing
- Police response is swift and decisive (typically associated with being in an urban or dense suburban area where you have plenty of nearby officers)
- Criminals attack and flee so quickly that by the time people can draw their guns and take up positions, the crime is over
- The criminal doesn’t pose an ongoing threat to society that can’t be compensated (e.g. you don’t pursue a bank robber in a high speed chase)
Trusting the government to do the right thing is incorrect, but not the focus here.
Many crimes in many areas of the 48 states do conform to the last two limitations. However, mass shootings, crime rampages, and pervasive gang violence (including drive bys) do not. Using information mostly from Wikipedia and the Texas Monthly 2018 article on Sutherland Springs, I will describe how it is that the most horrific ordinary civilian crimes require a different response.
Sutherland Springs is a small-ish town outside of San Antonio, Texas. It has no particular reputation for being a hotbed of crime. On November 5, 2017, apparently citing reasons with little particular malice towards the people of Sutherland Springs, Devin Kelley decided to kill the worshipers at the First Baptist Church. He spent 11 minutes discharging roughly 700 rounds. He left the building when Stephen Willeford screamed outside the building; Willeford and Kelley exchanged gunfire, with Willeford landing body armor contacts on Kelley’s chest, and wounding him in the chest and leg as Kelley went to his escape vehicle. After Willeford and Johnnie Langendorff pursued in Johnnie Langendorff’s vehicle – a chase that police never were able to join – Kelley left the road and apparently killed himself with a shot to the head.
There were several factors of this incident that clearly indicated civilian action would have been the better policing posture (costs to pay for police officers aside):
- The shooter acted uninterrupted for several minutes, pausing for reload. Any civilian with any type of weapon could have saved many lives.
- With dozens dead and injured, even if a civilian had shot innocent people, likely the net outcome would have been in favor of violent intervention.
- The shooter emerged from the church after Willeford’s yell. If this was the stimulus that stopped the shooter’s rampage, Willeford’s training as a firearms instructor and arrival with a rifle wasn’t necessary. All any civilian would have needed to do was to yell, generally create disruption, and act like they were going to take action. The following exchange of fire certainly was relevant to stopping the shooter, but nonlethal actions paused the massacre and bought time.
- Willeford’s accurate fire didn’t even bring down the shooter, but the damage he did do with his initial shots was good enough to make the shooter flee.
- The police didn’t come close to responding in time. 11 minutes isn’t a great police response time even for an urban area, and from my limited searching and reading of reports, I couldn’t see that they even got called during the time that Kelley was in the church.
In summary:
- In an ongoing crime situation, likely the situation will be improved even by nonlethal, nontrained citizen response.
- Neither police gunfire nor civilian gunfire may be effective to the target, but the intervention still can improve the situation.
Learning from Sutherland Springs and other incidents, the improvements you certainly should consider are:
- Packing heat makes sense for the minority of the population that believes in/who relatively like guns.
- Response to these situations would be improved by adding active intervention elements such as screaming and confrontation.