Armed self-defense & 'The Stopwatch of Death'

Photo: Oleg Volk, www.olegvolk.net

“If I only had a gun,” ABC’s recent segment of “20/20,” treated viewers to a biased and deeply flawed “study” promoting the opinion that armed citizens are incapable of stopping active killers in mass homicides. On Monday, “Myths of Armed Self-Defense” exposed “20/20’s” fallacy of the omnipotent killer, noting that personality characteristics of such killers actually make them more, not less, vulnerable to armed defense. Today, we discuss the advice “20/20” gave viewers unfortunate enough to find themselves in active killer scenarios.

This is what “20/20’s” “experts” advise you to do if confronted by an active killer:

• Try to run: Maybe he won’t shoot you, advises JJ Bittenbinder, ABC’s professed expert: “Only 12½ times out of a hundred” would you be killed. (I would include the link for this “security expert’s” website … if Google hadn’t flagged it for “malicious software.”)
• Play dead: “Remember that receptionist who played dead after being shot crawling under a desk and dialing 9-1-1- for help,” admonishes host Diane Sawyer. This, of course, required being shot first.
• Dial 9-1-1: This is liberalism’s best hope for self-defense; have someone else do it for you, albeit 10 or so minutes later, when people are already dead.

Clearly, absent other options one should try any or all of the above. But as a first line of defense, I for one am not entirely satisfied taking a 1 in 8 chance that an active shooter won’t hit me when he fires; and playing dead while he circles back around, looks down and says “You don’t look so bad: Here, have another” is not a strategy.

THE ‘STOPWATCH OF DEATH’

Read it again:

“Time is our worst adversary in dealing with active killers. We’re racing what I call ‘the Stopwatch of Death.’ Victims are often added to the toll every several seconds.”

This is spoken by a 30-year law enforcement veteran and 17-year SWAT veteran who advises police departments not to wait for SWAT in active shooter scenarios, but instead for single law enforcement officers to go in and confront the gunman. Why?

“Where times have been reliably documented, the average post-Columbine ‘rapid mass murder episode’ lasts just 8 minutes, according to Borsch’s calculations.”

And how long does SWAT take to arrive?

“Since the Columbine massacre 9 years ago, few if any trainers any longer advocate delaying for a formal SWAT call-out, which can take 30 minutes or more in some areas.”

So let’s make this perfectly clear: Law enforcement experts tell us seconds count; they tell us that active killers:

• “…choose unarmed, defenseless innocents for a reason: They have no wish to encounter someone who can hurt them. They are personally risk- and pain-avoidant… If pressed, they are more likely to kill themselves”;
• “…typically fold quickly upon armed confrontation” and last but not least;
• “…the typical active killer would be a no-contest against anyone reasonably capable of defending themselves.”

And ABC’s best advice for you is to get shot, hide under a desk, play dead, and hope for the best?

ARMED CITIZENS ALREADY STOP CRIMINALS

In truth, armed defense by citizens is commonplace: The classic tome on defensive gun use, “Armed Resistance to Crime:

"The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun,” by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, affirms approximately 2.1 to 2.5 million civilian defensive gun uses in the U.S. each year.

As for the effectiveness of concealed handgun permit-holders in shooting perpetrators, recent police survival research conducted by the Force Science Research Center found even inexperienced shooters had high hit probabilities at the 5-7 yard ranges typical of gun fights. The study concluded:

“--even ‘naïve shooters,’ untrained and unpracticed with handguns, are amazingly accurate in making head shots at close range, and tend to shoot for the head instinctively;

“--the speed with which an officer can be put behind the reactionary curve, even by assailants who have no expertise with firearms, is startling.”

ARMED CITIZENS HAVE ALREADY STOPPED MASS MURDERS

• In Pearl, Mississippi, assistant principal Joel Myrick stopped triple murderer Luke Woodham using a handgun retrieved from his car;
• In Edinboro, Pennsylvania, the 14-year-old who killed a teacher at an off-campus dance was captured by shotgun-wielding James Strand;
• At Virginia’s own Appalachian School of Law, student Tracy Bridges used his pistol to detain murderer Peter Odighizuwa; and
• In Colorado Springs, Colorado, concealed handgun permit-holder Jeanne Assam, who volunteered to provide security for her church (she was later wrongly described by the media as a “security guard”) shot Matthew Murray when he invaded the New Life Church firing a weapon.

THE VALUE OF DETERRENCE

And none of this even considers that the high probability of encountering armed victims deters active shooters. Notes author and scholar John R. Lott in a Wall Street Journal article entitled, “The Real Lesson of the School Shootings”:

“In a controlled study covering 19 years, the number of multiple-victim public shootings in states which adopted concealed handgun laws declined by 84%. Deaths from these shootings plummeted on average by 90%, injuries by 82%. Higher arrest rates and increased use of the death penalty slightly reduced the incidence of these events, but the effects were never statistically significant.”

THE CHOICE IS OURS

I have seen plenty of logical-sounding criticisms of arming citizens against active killers: ABC says you wouldn’t be effective; readers worry that two concealed handgun permit-holders might incorrectly identify the active shooter and engage each other; and of course, the most ridiculous of all: That prohibiting firearms on campuses, in malls and in churches might actually influence the decision-making of someone so sociopathic that he has decided to kill people.

But lest you still consider flaws in the idea of armed citizen defense against active killers, consider too the reality that the choice is … nothing.

Cops can’t protect your every activity; and when seconds count, help is only minutes away. So take Diane Sawyer’s advice, if you like, and play dead under a desk, hoping the madman who wants you dead will just go away.

I prefer the philosophy of Clint Smith, founder of Thunder Ranch and one of the world’s foremost authorities on armed self-defense:

"I may get killed with my own gun, but he's gonna have to beat me to death with it, 'cause it's going to be empty."