Dec 9, 2018 6 min read

One of the foundational arguments the NRA uses against gun control is that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns. The corollary is that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have a good guy with a gun. After the recent shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, President Trump suggested that the tragedy would have been averted if only the synagogue had “an armed guard inside the temple, they would’ve been able to stop him.” Aside from the issue of Trump’s insensitivity in criticizing the victims of a traumatic event, recent events have demonstrated the fallacy of this argument.

At a nightclub outside Chicago, someone inside the night club opened fire, hitting multiple people. A black man, Jemel Roberson, was the club’s armed security guard, and he heroically apprehended the alleged shooter outside the club. Because of the gunfire, local police rushed to the scene. Seeing a man dressed in black, holding a gun, the officer ordered him to drop the gun. Although multiple witnesses told the officer Roberson was a security guard (and he was wearing a hat that identified him as security) when Roberson did not respond to the officer’s command, he was shot and killed.

More recently, there was a shooting at a mall in Alabama. Police responded to the shooting, shot and killed a man wielding a gun, and initially claimed to have killed the shooter. Emantic Bradford, the man who was killed (who was also black), was licensed to carry a gun (he was the son of a police officer and had completed basic training in the army). When the shooting occurred, Bradford took out his weapon, and helped people to safety, fulfilling the “good guy with a gun” scenario. But two police officers working security at the mall heard the gunfire, rushed to the scene and shot a man they saw with a gun. The autopsy revealed that he was shot in the back.

There are two issues that are conflated with both of these cases. The first is race; the Black Lives Matter movement was started in response to multiple cases of police officers killing unarmed black men, which suggested that black lives were insignificant in the eyes of the police. In most of the cases that were protested, the victims were suspected of a crime, but unarmed. In these most recent cases, the victims were assumed to be criminals because they were carrying a gun, and their race undoubtedly contributed to the suspicions of the police officers.

There are two other recent cases that are also relevant to this argument. The first was the mass shooting at Parkland High School. There was an armed guard at the school, but he elected to wait for back up instead of going into the building to confront the shooter on his own. While some judged him harshly for his failure to act, and given he was a deputy sheriff, presumably with some training, this case might have been one where we could reasonably expect the existing security measures would have reduced the casualty total.

The other case is the recent shooting at the dance club in Thousand Oaks, Calif., which also had an armed security guard. In this case, the shooter targeted the security guard first, which is a pretty obvious way for a shooter to approach such a situation. An armed person intent on committing murder has a tremendous advantage over a security guard, since most guards will never face someone trying to kill them. Additionally, it won’t be good for safety (much less business), if security guards assume they are likely to face someone trying to kill them, and start pulling their weapons on suspicious looking customers. And if the guard waits until he sees a weapon to draw his, it’s already too late.

I don’t blame the individuals involved in these cases, either the police who mistook people holding guns for criminals, or the security guards who were either afraid or caught off-guard. These are exceptionally difficult circumstances, where snap judgments can mean the difference between life and death. But they do demonstrate the fallacy of pretending that more guns will make us safer. More guns will mean more chaos; police arriving at the scene will have difficulty determining who (if any) of the people wielding guns are the bad guys, and are likely to make errors. Likewise, security guards cannot act like sentries at a besieged military position, since doing so would likely endanger innocent patrons. We live in a civilization, not an active war zone. The only thing that will reduce (though not eliminate) gun violence is reducing the number of guns in these altercations. Guns make tense situations worse, not better. When guns are present, police, rationally fearing that within seconds, they might be shot, are prone to making hasty assessments, which increases the likelihood that someone is going to die.

Japan (population 127 million) has around 10 gun deaths a year; the United Kingdom (population 56 million) has 50 to 60. In 2016, the United States (population 350 million) had 37,200, which is near the number of Americans killed during the entire war in Vietnam. While there will be cases where an armed civilian has helped the situation, there is always a tradeoff: the more guns there are and the easier they are to access (which is required for a quick response to a threat), the more likely a gun will be misused, either in the heat of the moment (suicides or arguments) or by people ill-equipped to handle a gun (children). Unless we consider ourselves to be uniquely violent people, we should be able to do better. Assuming that owning and carrying a personal firearm is the best way to ensure personal safety is a dangerous assumption, since an increased number of guns increases the number of people killed by their use. Reducing the number of guns will reduce gun deaths, and failing to do so simply means we consider those deaths an acceptable cost of having so many guns.

Kent James is an East Washington resident and has a doctorate in history and policy management from Carnegie Mellon University.