But let's suppose for a moment that they do break into your house when you're there. Guy's standing in your living room, pointing a pistol at you.
If he silently picks the lock then pads into the living room with catlike grace and could poison you instantly with one flick of his poisoned shuriken it doesn't help to own a gun. Luckily most home intruders aren't Ninjas. The sound of a screwdriver jimmying a window is unmistakable.
Yes, when I think "defusing a violent situation", the first things that comes to mind is "crossfire".
Well, yeah. If the perp takes cover it impairs his ability to stalk new victims until the professionals arrive. If he is too psycho to care maybe you'll get him before he gets you. Or maybe the police arrive just as you return fire and mistake you for a hostile. The outcome is unpredictable, but unpredictable survival is preferable to predictably getting killed.
You're trying to dress up what's really happening - a bunch of idiots with metal penises imagining themselves as the lead role of an action movie - in this formalized language of a military encounter. In the real world, where people are not expecting a gunfight to break out at any moment, everyone in the room but the guy who broke in are going to be flatfooted every time. The first guy to resist loses his head, then there's a shootout where maybe the original perpetrator goes down, taking several with him. What exactly has been prevented that a locked door and better campus security would not? ... I hate to break it to you, but allowing concealed carry on campuses will not turn the student body into a SWAT team. ... This whole conversation is an unending litany of machismo masquerading as expertise.
What locked door? What campus security? Arming oneself gives one a chance to survive situations not when these very practical and useful security measures succeed but when they fail.
The larger problem here is that you see firearms as symbols or totems rather than as tools. "Metal penis". "Action movie". "SWAT team." "Machismo." In the real world firearms are tools that, taken together with proper training, improve a person's chances to survive a violent situation.
Fire extinguishers aren't metal penises, either. They exist to put out fires. One needn't be a firefighter to use one to put out a fire. People learn CPR, too, even though they're not doctors. We can't put out big fires and we can't do open heart surgery, but we can improve our chances of surviving a violent situation. A bullet is a bullet, whether it comes from a SWAT sniper or a scared civilian who remembered his training at a moment of decision.
If the first CHL was caught flat-footed, the second one has time to react. It's not an ideal scenario, but again it's not about "saving the day", it's about limiting the tragedy.
By definition, all statistics on gun violence, or crime prevented by gun violence, is anecdotal. Mostly anecdotes made up by people who want to sound tough, in studies funded by people like Wayne LaPierre who watched too many old westerns and think the solution to urban crime is to turn America into Yemen.
"By definition" statistics are statistics and anecdotes anecdotes ... unless of course you're defending a belief system steeped in symbolism from the rude intrusion of reality, in which case whatever hand-waving is required to make the cognitive dissonance go away will be done.
I don't know about Yemen, but Detroit has a higher murder rate than Iraq. Private ownership of firearms won't "solve" the crime problem, but wishing it away only leads to a false sense of security.
That doesn't mean I think CHL's have all the answers. We're no more social scientists or urban planners than cowboys or SWAT wannabes. We're taking sensible precautions against realistic threats.
Allowing people to carry concealed weapons just makes it that much easier for someone who wants to commit a crime to get the drop on someone else. It will mean maybe a dozen guys will strut around campus with Colt .45s they've never fired, just waiting for someone to start trouble so they can save the day. Your bullcrap about frat boys taking training is the most laughable thing I've heard in the whole thread.
Do you even know what the requirements are to get a license? A presumptive CHL who has "never fired" his weapon couldn't have passed the training and so couldn't be a CHL.
Licensees, meanwhile, are hyper-law-abiding citizens far less likely to commit crimes than non-licensees. We are trained in combat shooting and the legal parameters of self-defense, and our behavior regarding both self-defense and other areas of compliance with the law has been exemplary.
But what you're really attacking are symbols, in a kind of "Pink Floyd: The Wall" acid trip filled with strutting fratboy policemen and marching metal penises. The science of statistics doesn't really have an answer for that.
