I try really hard to not use shootings as platforms to argue philosophical points but since everybody has been, shall we say, interested in my thoughts I’ll state them.
Until somebody can make a convincing argument of why people caught up in shootings are better off being unarmed I will continue to actively support people’s right to defend themselves with the most effective tools available.
Carry on.
Playing devil’s advocate here It’s that the populace represents an unknown therefore should not be trusted in the dire matter of defense. Leave it to the professionals, as it were.
Too, to resist carries the real risk of escalating the situation including antagonizing sympathizers of the bad guys. This would provoke a show of force which would require a greater amount of assets needed to quell that demonstration. This tends towards destabilizing the society. This becomes ever greater a draw against the needs of a civil society. It then becomes that the needs of society are superior to those of the individual.
That’s all I got for now.
It’s true. In fact this is the very reason you can ultimately only trust yourself with your defense. You have no guarantee that anybody is actually going to defend you when the time comes so if you want the closest thing to a guarantee you have to do it yourself. As for the professionals, they are included in that unknown that is humanity so I can’t rely on them either (in fact, in the United States, the police are under no obligation to protect you according to several Supreme Court rulings).
But to not resist carries with it the risk of immediate death. In a shooting situation you already have no guarantee of not being shot. Usually you won’t have the luxury of knowing the motives of the shooter and even if you did you have no way to guarantee they will keep their word if they promise you’re not on the list of people they want dead.
Provoking their sympathizers is a hypothetical possibility, but dying from a person actively shooting you is an immediate situation that carries a high risk of death. You can’t even worry about possible sympathizers rising up against you if you’re killed immediately.
As I am an individualists, not a collectivist, I see society as nothing more than a group of individuals. I don’t believe there is a “good” for society or that one can “wrong” society. One can do good or bad to an individual.
Individuals tend to be less prone to violence when they perceive the risk of retaliatory violence being high. Putting everybody on equal footing as much as possible as far as the capacity for violence goes lowers will tend to make individuals less willing to initiate violence.