“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” That’s been the guiding philosophy of the National Rifle Association since the 1970s. And it’s false.
A bad guy with a gun has a deadly weapon, safety off, with intent to use it. You could have 800 policemen present, as was the case at the celebration for the Kansas City Chiefs on Feb. 14, and you still can’t stop the bad guy. That’s because the bad guy is on the offensive. Everyone else is playing the role of target.
One way to counter such a move effectively is if everyone else is on the offensive, too, everyone else has guns at the ready, safety off, ready to shoot. That is warfare.
But we don’t want to be in a state of war when we’re going to a Superbowl victory event, the movie theater or elementary school. We want to live normal lives. But we can’t live normal lives and be targets for bad guys at the same time. And “good guys with guns” is only a fictitious ruse to somehow make us believe that more guns will bring us more safety. It won’t.
It hasn’t worked. Kansas City just proved it. We need lots of commonsense gun safety measures. And we need them now.
Greg Hauth
Everett
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