A firearm question for you LeftiesFollow

I read an account of it over the weekend that states he ducked behind a pillar after hearing three shots, which made me wonder what he was doing the other fifty plus shots.

Crying, probably.

That incongruity is bugging me an irrational amount.

So, some of the smaller police departments in my area are telling their officers to ration ammo during training and are having difficulty updating their equipment. Private citizens have been purchasing arms in such bulk that manufacturers aren't able to keep up, and retailers have been prioritizing sales to private citizens since they can charge slightly more.

At that point the shooter had made the decision to end the shooting and kill himself. Many mass shooters enter this phase at some point (because many of them kill themselves rather than being captured, which was clearly the case here). We can't say for sure when he switched from "kill others" to "kill myself" mode, but it seems silly to assume it had nothing at all to do with an armed civilian pointing a gun at him given the breadth of data we have on shootings. I think that some people are ignoring the fairly clear common patterns that many of these kinds of shootings have. The shooters tend to continue shooting until they either run out of ammunition or they feel threatened by something that might interrupt their shooting. There often appears to be a desire to end the shooting on their terms rather than someone else's. The specifics of what they do once they've "ended" their spree vary, but there's always a clear trigger to it. Usually, it's the arrival of law enforcement, but the statistics also show that when an armed civilian intervenes it has the same effect. It triggers the end of the shooting. Mentally, he's done with the random shooting of victims and moves on to whatever end scenario he has planned.

While some might be mystified as to why he didn't shoot the guy in the hallway, I'm not at all. It makes complete sense and fits the pattern these kinds of shootings follow. What's interesting is just how consistent this pattern is. As I pointed out a couple times earlier in this thread, in cases of "random" shootings like this (where the shooter is just shooting people in an area rather than having a specific target and the shooting itself is the purpose, not a means to something else), the victim fatality rate after the shooter is confronted with armed opposition is zero as far as I can tell. In looking over all these cases of shootings, I haven't found one in which the shooter continues to shoot at random people in the area once he's aware of armed opposition to what he's doing. That's not to say that there might be a case or two where this happened, but it would seem to be the exception rather than the norm. The norm is that once someone with a gun arrives to oppose the shooter, the random killing of victims in the area stops.


So while we can speculate that maybe he made that decision for some other reason, and speculate on the impact of Meli and his gun, in the final analysis, this shooting followed that same pattern. Can we say for 100% sure that Meli's intervention prevented the shooter from killing anyone else? Not at all. Can we say it's probable that it did? Absolutely. More importantly, this case gives further weight to the data on shootings and the impact of armed civilians (and concealed carry). Because while we can't make any assumptions about the specifics of any one case, at some point the overwhelming data should allow us to make some broad conclusions about the effect of armed civilians and concealed carry on the statistical outcomes of shootings. And since we're not setting policy based on what would happen in this one case, but over any and all cases, those statistics should be given some weight. Ignoring them simply because they don't fit the narrative and assumptions you want or like is really silly.

Edited, Jan 29th 2013 3:27pm by gbaji

In this context? He has his gun out and pointed at the shooter. He is then "going down to pull" but decides against it because he sees someone behind the shooter and he's worried he might hit that person if he fires. In this context, only a complete imbecile would conclude he meant anything other than putting his finger down on the trigger and pulling it. But you go ahead and continue arguing that point. You're only making yourself look more foolish.



They're not "my accounts", they are news reports on the incident. Written by a number of reporters. So "someone" in this case has more information than you do. I suppose we can just ignore all of them and instead continue with the pure speculation that matches your own narrative about guns and violence.

Also, they are reports based on more than just the interview with Meli. From the same damn article:



From lolwiki:




And if you bothered to actually watch the video of the interview instead of just quoting from the article (which only has some of the information, you'd realize that the full statement of what he says is this:



Clear enough now?



That's some serious backpedaling there. So now it's not that "going down to pull" was in reference to pulling the trigger, but that he might have just made up the whole thing anyway? Um... Whatever.

Sure, I hadn't watched the video. No problem admitting that it's clear that he says he pulled his gun and aimed.

"Now"? No, I said that from the very start. In that his account shouldn't be taken as gospel, not that he made it up out of whole cloth.

But, yeah, totally backpedaling back to.. ummm... statements I had made a month ago?

Edited, Jan 29th 2013 6:53pm by Jophiel

Or we can not speculate. I know that hurts your argument since it hinges entirely upon speculation but, hey, just a thought.

It's absolutely true that we can absolutely speculate that he absolutely only stopped absolutely because he absolutely saw Meli with his absolute gun... maybe.

But we can absolutely speculate that every time a shooter is stopped we absolutely maybe stopped a mass shooting so it should count.

Should we also absolutely speculate that every time a shooter isn't stopped it's because someone close by had a concealed carry permit and was just too chicken **** to do anything with it?


I think I'm doing it wrong.

*sigh*

It's just obvious.

Well, sure but did they have any recently graduated English-Lit majors with three hours of firearm training? Because that's what's going to save you when this sort of thing happens.