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Originally Posted by Phang
because obviously, every college-age gun owner would be an expert marksman, with absolute preparedness to kill if deemed appropriate, and with prescience that allowed them to have their pistol drawn before the lunatic was already there and shooting at them, because they'd obviously be wearing it, with live ammo, while in class.
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1) You dont need to be an 'expert marksman' to hit someone at close range, and most people should have some basic firearms training anyway. Theres also the deterrant factor where a criminal would be less likely to do this sort of thing if they knew there was a decent chance their victims would be armed (this may perhaps not apply in this partcular case since the guy was suicidal himself, but its still a general rule).
2) Most people would be prepared to kill if their life or their friends lives were in direct danger.
3) If you actually read about what happened then yeah, they would have had time to draw in many cases. There was an incident where the gunman left a room then tried to force his way back into later while people tried to hold the door closed, for example.
I'm not really sure why youre arguing this; it seems pretty obvious to me that a situation where the victims of an intended gun rampage are armed is going to have significantly fewer casualties than a situation where everyone is unarmed except the guy doing the killing. I mean you could argue that having guns at college would have other negative consequences that justifies outlawing them at the cost of leaving students unable to protect themselves, but actually denying that carrying a firearm increases someone's potential for effective self-defence is fairly perverse.
Anyway, this is ultimately all fairly speculative. Maybe if the students were armed they would have been able to stop him, maybe if guns were banned entirely he wouldnt have been able to get one, maybe if his mother had cuddled him more as a child he woudlnt have wanted to kill anyone. The underlying point is that claiming this sort of thing only happens because guns are legal, or that banning guns would have a significant positive effect on crime rate, is baseless emotionalism without a shred of evidence to back it up.