“Where was the good guy with a gun when an Uber driver shot and killed six people in Kalamazoo on Saturday night? Where was the good guy with a gun when a mentally unstable man shot a Bay City cop Friday before turning the gun on himself? And where are the good guys with guns when the estimated 30-some people are slain by firearms every day in America? No where to be found. And why? Because there are more bad guys with guns doing wrong than there are civilian good guys with guns trying to stop them.” – Bryn Mickle, Time to ban gun sales until we find a way to keep them out of wrong hands [via mlive.com]
I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and say, there are only around 30 people shot per day because good guys with guns stopped there from being any more. Hard to prove, I know. But DGUs happen. every day. you just don’t hear about them.
If you use the lowest estimates for DGUs, (CDC estimates 500,000 a year) that works out to 1,370 per day on average, so good guys with guns save, on average, 1,340 lives per day. I guess this fellow is ok with all those people being allowed to die.
That doesn’t even account for the attacks that are not thwarted because they’re never initiated. That is, the deterrent effect of firearms is an unseen benefit which these antis willfully ignore.
Fortunately, we have some serious researchers who’ve determined the deterrent effect of concealed carry, for example.
This guy wants to know what good are good guys with guns? Well, you’ll know its presence by its absence.
Using his logic we need more people carrying.
+1… I also agree with him. Where were the armed citizens indeed? Apparently, there aren’t nearly enough good guys with guns!!!!
Honestly, I can’t find ANY logic in Mickle”s article. So, logic aside, there needs to be more good guys out there that will carry.
Actually, the lowest estimate, by Harvard public health professor what his face who works for Bloomie (blanking on his name at the moment), is 50-80k, but the resulting number is still four times higher than the number of people shot.
I think the author misses the entire point of of armed self defense. One of the reasons I own firearms is to protect my family and myself. I don’t go roaming the streets looking for bad guys. That’s not my job or duty. However, if I cross paths with a bad guy, I am not a defenseless victim-in-waiting. While I don’t live in Michigan and the Kalamazoo shooter was no threat to me, other threats still exist. My family was protected that very same Saturday night, albeit several hundred miles away from Kalamazoo. That still counts as a win in my book.
“..Because there are more bad guys with guns doing wrong than there are civilian good guys with guns trying to stop them.”
So then please tell us Mr. Mickle why you want to take all the guns away thereby making even fewer good guys with guns?
So kind of the gentleman, to provide his own refutation.
When I read the line you quoted, my first though was that we should increase the number of good guys with guns. Maybe teach NRA basic pistol to high school freshmen, then offer electives for sophomores, juniors, and seniors to learn more advanced techniques.
Sounds like an argument for more law abiding citizens to carry.
^This^
I can’t tell him where the good guys with guns were in those situations but I know damn well where they will be if he wants to go full tyrant.
MOLON LABE
That’s because good guys are playing by the rules and the rules are designed to make it easier on the bad guy.
I consider myself a good guy. No carry for me cause of my zip code. But the bad guys around here don’t seem to have a poblem carrying.
No doubt. In addition to that, in most areas CCW carriers are as much as 5-6% of the population, which means that out of those 6 Uber victims, odds were that none carried. Don’t worry though, Mr. Mickle, we’re working as hard as possible to bring those numbers up, with or without your help.
I wonder how many people with CCWs are actually carrying, at any given time. I’m sure that a lot less than five percent of the population that’s out and about is actually carrying right this instant.
But a law against guns will make ALL of the bad guys stop using guns to break the law…right?
Definitely. You have a problem with bad guys shooting people, right? Easy solution – ban guns! Poof, all guns just dissappear and no one gets shot.
Just like illegal drugs.
Kindergatener would come up with something like this.
Wonder if these people ever hear what they say and just go, hmmm, that doesnt make sense. Probably not.
22 of those 30 involve people committing suicide – neither good guys nor bad guys, but people who need help, and who would still commit suicide, with or without access to a firearm.
Of the rest (some 8 people per day – around 11,000 per year), the vast majority are bad guys being killed by other bad guys. Taking firearms away from the good guys will have no impact on them.
Demonstrably false. There are about 10,000 murders per year committed with firearms (again, 2/3 of which are bad guys killing each other). The most conservative of estimates indicate that there are at least 20,000 defensive gun uses per year. The more realistic estimates are at least an order of magnitude higher than that.
Great analysis Chip.
By the way I thought something like 80% to 90% of murders with firearms fell under the category of criminals murdering other criminals/ex-convicts. I wish I could find the source for that.
At the very least, there are sources that claim criminal gangs are responsible for something like 75% of all crime (both violent crimes and property crimes) and in some regions those criminal gangs are responsible for as much as 90% of all crimes.
Sources:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-08-31-criminal-target_N.htm
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-01-29-ms13_N.htm
“(some 8 people per day – around 11,000 per year)”
Check your math.
His “30 per day” seems to account for suicides.
Oh, that’s right. The suicide-inflated number is 80+ per day.
So, the calculus really doesn’t change, though. Around 20 of those 30 (a conservative estimate) are bad guys killing other bad guys. That leaves only 10 per day (at most – since that also includes accidental deaths and justifiable homicide) that constitute bad guys killing good guys.
(And as others have pointed out, domestic violence makes up a good bit of that remainder; much like suicide, taking guns away from good guys won’t have an impact on domestic violence-related deaths – and may even cause them to go up, since would-be victims would be disarmed.)
He beat me to it… 11000, 365 and 8 caused the “tilt” light to go bright red for me, too.
Nevertheless, your larger point remains true. The overwhelming majority of those deaths are NOT murders of innocents in the way this clown implies (the original poster I mean).
If it helps someone to do so, they might analogize “thug shooting thug” as a duel. Except the thug agrees to the possibility of being shot, and deserving to be shot, when he becomes a thug, not when he accepts the challenge mere minutes or hours before the duel.
You know what we should do? Make murder against the law! That would fix the problem right? /sarc
For fun, you can always troll the gun control advocates for being misogynist scumbags who want their women disarmed, barefoot, and pregnant. It makes their little leftie brains explode.
Let’s get it right, Leftists want their women to abort their pregnancies. Also unarmed and bare nippled.
Won’t work, leftist brains come equipped with a “Logic Interrupt Circuit Trip”. Any time a logical point is made against their leftist ideology their system auto resets and engages some leftist dogma subroutine response, e.g. “Patriarchy, white privilege, racism!”
The ole I have an opinion and going for inches per column so I’ll say something stupid, ruffle some feathers and dam that 2A thing cause gotta do something now, even though the pres and congress aren’t boo hoo’n enough for the likes of me and the anti gun folks wanting to take away lawful self defense and all the other stuff to make this the longest run on sentenance I can muster for now cause I can blather on like the nutter in that article.
This person, (I can’t say this man) is so delusional and out of touch with reality, it boggles the mind.
“Epidemic of death” , mmm, no, the murder rate is the lowest it’s been in fifty years.
“There is 300 million guns in this country, so we need to stop selling guns now to stop this epidemic of death”. So with a gun for every man, woman and child, how is stopping the selling of new guns going to stop this non-existent “epidemic of death”?
“We put a man on the moon, we can surely find a way to keep guns out of the hands of bad guys”. Like the war on drugs have stopped people using drugs, and Prohibition stopped people drinking alcohol.
It goes on, the whole diatribe is full of the same denial and delusion ,but these are just some of the low lights.
The really bizarre aspect is that I am sure he considers himself to be one of the “intellectual elite” and that he really believes he has the “solution” to this non-existent “epidemic of death”.
Is this a call to arms or a gun control cry?
I see it as a call to arms. But that’s just our logical brains thinking…
I don’t know how to think like Mr. Mickle
“I don’t know how to think like Mr. Mickle”
Paper sack, tube of super glue or can of spray paint. Dispense product into bag; huff until the obviously stupid seems logical. Repeat until permanent.
I see armed police daily . Way more than 30
Where were the armed police? Perhaps we should just do away with them because they didn’t prevent the murders, too!
/ sarcasm
I want to see this guy face off in debate vs. Larry Correa.
Two large bald men with the same beard enter…
Larry is an outstanding 2nd amendment advocate. Smart, calm, articulate, and the fact that he is an accountant and is a successful fiction writer totally catches the lefties off guard. Plus, he is a very large man. And very bald.
http://monsterhunternation.com/about/
Also, if you don’t read his books, you are probably with Al Quieda.
or a progressive. Same difference.
Let’s look at this another way. In a CPR class, I was taught that about 95% of heart attack victims that require CPR outside of a hospital will die despite performing CPR. So, does that mean performing CPR is a waste of time. Here is another one. House fires are extremely rare. Does that mean I should disconnect all my smoke detectors and remove my fire extinguishers from the house. Also, our best stats show that there may be as many as a million defensive gun uses per year, and most do not require the CCW holder to fire their gun to stop the threat. This Democrat Party operative conveniently forgot to mention that.
21 of the 30 were suicides. 5 of the remaining 9 were gang related. 1 of the remaining 4 were DGUs (civilian and police). Want to talk about the 3 that make up all remaining crime, including random shootings?
“But if saves just on life, it’s worth it!”
Of course, if it saves just one life of a woman by carrying a firearm, from being raped and murdered, that is NOT worth it.
After all, it is just a myth that a civilian can use a firearm effectively to defend their life.
If only one had the courage to say no to nonsense
You mean the force doesnt work? Someone tell the finns. They think it does and they advise their women to use.
My wife, friend and I went out on my shooting lane yesterday. She shot her 380 for the third time. Her first firearm. At 7 yards she put 8 out of 9 rounds in a 2 1/5″ circle….bullseye.
She is one of the good …..people with a gun. To bad she wasn’t there at the time. I am damn proud of her and her ability. She will use it IF necessary to protect herself and others.
Most women I have seen shoot for the first time after minimal verbal instruction do very well accuracy wize. My wife was no different. Just keep in mind that there is more to self defense with a handgun than putting holes in paper, standing flat footed and slow firing.
Mindset is a major factor as well. My wife had never shot a gun in her life. Then at the prime young age of 47, we bought her a Beretta Nano 9mm. The shop has a range so she fired it that day. 7 yard full size silhouette, she put all 7 shots in the x ring. She looked back at me over her shoulder and said “I could kill somebody”. I said “yes that was very accurate”. She said “No, I mean, if I had to shoot someone to save my life or our kids, I would do it”. Mindset.
“She said “No, I mean, if I had to shoot someone to save my life or our kids, I would do it””
The kids, herself… But not you?
You might wanna up your life insurance, Micheal… 🙂
Naw, when she’s with me, she mostly condition white. All the killin is my job. What’s the point of keeping a man around if he won’t do all your fighting?
But when she’s alone, she feels like she can handle trouble.
Like I said before, the antis will accept 1000 rapes if it saves just one criminal’s life.
Actually, I think the number is closer to 6 of the remaining 9 were gang violence. Thus, that leaves 3 remaining and some of them are justified homicides as you pointed out. So, it might be closer to 2 of 30 involve basically random victims.
And we haven’t even addressed how many of those 2 “random victims” are actually not random but rather domestic violence victims … which I would argue are meaningless to ascribe to firearm availability since the domestic aggressor can EASILY kill their domestic partner with a hammer, knife, club, ax, or poison while the victim is sleeping.
“21 of the 30 were suicides”
30 x 365 == 10950
Isn’t that the non-suicide number?
He might be an anti-gun, anti-self-defense idiot, but at least he didn’t lump suicides in with his “gun deaths” figure. The least we can do is perform a little 3rd-grade arithmetic in our heads before automatically calling him out on that particular number.
Yes, correct. Scale all of those numbers up by a factor of about 3.
And here I thought no one was coming for our guns…
270,000 teen pregnancies are carried to term each year in the US. Is it also time to stop sex education because it doesn’t work?
By those numbers, sex ed has been working just great.
Obviously then the Leftists will be all for “common sense” abortion control laws, right?
He sounds like he was that kid who would get mad and threaten to take his toys home and leave the playground when the game didn’t go his way, as well. You’re supposed to leave behind childish thinking when reaching adulthood. It’s a shame he didn’t.
The comments on that article are great. You know the quality of the argument when commenters can’t tell if the article is satire or not.
Hilarious.
“There are more bad guys with guns than good guys with guns”
Ok, so we need more good guys with guns. Sounds reasonable to me!
“Let’s ban the only way good guys get guns!”
Isn’t this worsening the problem you initially identified?
There is more bad cholesterol in tasty food than good cholesterol. So let’s ban healthy food that contains good cholesterol until we figure out how to reduce bad cholesterol!
Why does everyone confuse homicides and murder?
Well…. the author of this article thinks firearm owners go out -looking- for bad guys to stop. His grasp on reality seems a bit tenuous to me so conflating murder and homicide isn’t really that big of a leap.
All these logical arguments and data are excellent.
But we also have to understand and communicate that underlying all of this is the simple and fundamental fact; “shall not be infringed”. This is the first problem facing the anti-gun activist and should be highlighted and indicated as stridently as possible. First, shall not be infringed, and on top of all that we have logic, history and observable data on the side on individual liberty.
You want to disarm us and prevent the law abiding gun owner from protecting self and others? You cannot, and here is proof that you are on the wrong side of protection of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
WHERE WAS THE COP?
WHERE WAS THE PROMISED PROTECTION PROCEEDS FROM THE OVERREACH OF THE INFRINGING GOVERNMENT [a/k/a: all our a-hole neighbors with bigger and better ideas that not only helped to get the Uber-killer’s victims killed but march us steadily toward civil war due to their fing tyranny]?
WHERE IS THE MF WHO ASKED THIS (D)BAG OR ANYONE ELSE FOR THE “ANSWER” TO ANY PROBLEM, MUCH LESS, WHY SOME LIKELY (D)EMOCRAT DOUCHE DECIDED TO KILL A BUCH OF PEOPLE WHO WERE CONVINCED BY OTHER (D)EMOCRAT LIBERAL COMMUNIST DOUCHES THAT IT COULDN’T HAPPEN AS LONG AS THEY ENACTED SOME GUN CONTROL?
HOW MANY TIMES DOES YOUR GOVERNMENT HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT THEY CANNOT PROTECT YOU BEFORE YOU BELIEVE THEM?
whew, I almost “feel” better
Let’s just ban idiots, that would solve this guys problem.
Well, I don’t know about solving HIS problem.
It would, however, solve our problems with him.
And here’s the dumbest sentence I have read today:
“Time to ban gun sales until we find a way to keep them out of wrong hands”
Let’s make a law to do a thing until we can figure out how to do that thing!
Or perhaps: Let’s stop you from doing a thing since we can’t stop the wrong people from doing that thing.
FLAME OMITTED. :p
This^^^^
“Time to ban gun sales because banning gun sales to B Gs isn’t keeping guns away from B G’s.”
B T W, the good guy with a gun wasn’t there; probably waiting for the paperwork to clear.
What about the uber driver in Chicago that stopped mass shooting last year? It is easy to say a life was ended and harder than to prove a life was saved.
What we should be doing is stopping federal agents and other LEOs from losing their guns.
“Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010).”
— “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence”, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013
The logic fail alone is pretty impressive, but putting it in print…well, hat-tip, sir. LOL.
After reading the quote above, unless I was given context, I would have assumed that he was advocating more people carry.
So because guns in private hands are of limited use and not the society-wide, anti-crime panacea he alone unrealistically demands that they be, then we must not only forfeit them and suffer the consequences, but also resort to an unrealistic “ban all guns in order to disarm all criminals” approach? Oh that makes a lot of sense.
I guess since the flu vaccine does not cure cancer, treat Ebola, nor kill the germs that may cause bad breath, it and all hypodermic needles, too, must be banished from society and we’ll just let the young, elderly and infirm just fend off influenza in the wild?
Just as Luddites pick an expedient point of technological progress and vehemently reject any further advance, these antis adopt a satisfying stage of personal emotional development and then dig their heels in, adamantly refusing to grow up and see the world through mature eyes.
Yes, these cowards mock the mantra: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
That statement being mostly true in its context, the cowards can’t dispute it. So they purposefully skew the meaning and interpret it to mean: Enough good guys with guns will stop bad guys with guns every time. Which of course is ludicrous. The cowards feel so brilliant for disputing a statement no pro gun person ever stated or believed.
Again, we and the antis are talking from two distinct plains of thought. Every act of violence nationwide is shoved in our faces by the 24/7 media machine which, to the antis, makes the country look like it has a whole new set of “problems” to be fixed by enacting more laws that will do nothing. Americans used to share a kind of universal acceptance of certain realities about life, like the fact that dangers will always exist and the best thing you can do is know how to prepare for and react to them. It was also easier to keep one’s range of empathy focused solely on family and friends in those days. The aforementioned media ruined all that, and now everyone is paranoid over a pedophile, rapist, and murderer behind every tree. The end result of that culture of fear is the rise of the collectivist stooge like this guy, who dreams of impossible utopia because he’s so frightened by reality. And yet violent crime has been in a nose-dive since the 90’s. Go figure.
So when you say “ban guns”, what does that mean on the ground? What exactly are we going to do about people who have a gun?
Send in the police? What will they do about it, since you’ve taken their guns away? Oh, they’ll still have guns? How did you determine THEY’RE not bad guys? I thought we had no way of keeping guns out of the hands of bad guys?
Time to ban funny spelling names(as someone who has a kid named “Brian”). That makes as much sense as this “dudes” ideas…
Because there are more bad guys with guns doing wrong than there are civilian good guys with guns trying to stop them.
And why? Because d!ckheads like Mickle (mickheads like Dickle?) do everything possible to deny guns to good people. That’s why.
The same feed shows that Michigan is making it easier to get CC permits.
The same feed shows a different 6 people including an infant died because the dad put a gas generator in the basement of their town home. Someone does this at least once a year.
Shall we outlaw generators?
You know perhaps you should have to take a class. I’m not being sarcastic. Chain saws too. If you’ve seen what trouble people can get into with them! My first lesson from an old farmer: NO chains around your neck!
Ban all the guns.
If people were being irresponsible with 300 million guns there would be a lot more carnage.
Zika virus. First response: KILL all the mosquitos. Seems effective but a childish response. Life is way more nuanced.
Where was Deborah Hughes when Steve Utash was brutally assaulted on Detroit’s east side? Where was Ruben Kendrick when he was staring down the barrel of a gun during a bank robbery in Warren? Where was Didarul Sarder when Stephanie Kerr was stabbed multiple times by her daughter outside of the GM Tech Center.
Somebody call an ophthalmologist–it looks like Mr. Mickle may be a bit myopic.
Delusional.
I can make a gun in my garage. I can make a full auto SMG on the mill/lathe out of scrap billet and chain length fence tubes. Don’t make me mention the “Shovel” AK, or the DIY iron glock. Guns exist and they are here to stay. Not to be overly pessimistic, but even if all guns are banned – we share a border with Mexico. We are not a small island like hawaii or even the UK floating around trying our hardest to be (and to a very minimal truthful degree in the case of small island states/nations) isolated. The war on drugs is a colossal failure – the war on guns would be too.
If total wackos like Mr. Mickle above wanted to reduce deaths with guns (who cares about other methods right?) the last effective method to do so is trying to ban guns. Seriously. You want some gun deaths? Ban guns and see what happens.
Instead of promoting gun control , the dude should exercise portion control; or maybe advocate the banning of AYYE buffets. “If it saves just one life……..”
Heck, Bryn, there weren’t enough cops around to stop those attacks. And you want to blame armed Americans for not doing so? Double standard much? Perhaps we should all live in a police state…oh wait….
““Where was the good guy with a gun when an Uber driver shot and killed six people in Kalamazoo on Saturday night?”
I don’t know, but I do know where six good people WITHOUT guns were.
Instead of posting those stupid pocket dump photos, the number one priority of TTAG should be to create a wiki of all known DGUs that includes hard copies of supporting materials, i.e., no dead hyperlinks. Every time one of these yahoos claims there are no DGUs, we need only cite to the wiki.
1. Isn’t a bit disingenuous of Mr. Mickle to lament the lack of good guys with guns to stop the bad guys after decades of demonizing guns and gun owners to the point that many are afraid to obtain and carry?
2. Embedded in his quote is the notion that 1 fail = total failure of the idea. Perhaps he should apply that logic to his own point of view.
The most common type of successful DGU is “defensive display” in which the bad guy learns that he had better run and he does. No shots fired and, even if called in, unlikely to result in a police report.
Full potato.
Sounds to me like he is making the case to arm more good guys. I’m all for that.
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