I'd wager the majority of untrained carriers would run and hide before actively fighting back, unless they were directly in the line of fire to begin with. Only the trained shooter would attempt to stop a gunman firing on others at first action.
As for cops, "misses" are an irrational stat. If you've been required to draw your weapon AND fire it, you are also required to continue shooting until the target stops moving. This isn't like most movies where every shot lands perfectly and the target is stopped after 1 hit(well, unless it's a main character who somehow survives 30 hits and automatic fire from 10 feet away always misses). Part of the steps involved in firing your weapon is being able to assess the potential collateral damage within your cone of fire before ever pulling the trigger. If there's the potential of a citizen being in this cone, a shot will not be fired(I'd bet the percentage on this is well north of 90%). This is part of all police training in every state as far as I am aware.
Simple thing really, does this make everyone safer? No, you have an armed and scared population now with greater access to places they originally didn't. While I do support guns I also believe you should take training classes, ESPECIALLY if you plan on carrying a firearm with you. At this point we are constantly having trouble with mentally troubled people getting famous because they go crazy and kill someone, and cause a "Mass Shooting". Which is purely defined as however the media perceives it and wants to wield it. Overall I think this may be a great idea and I would like to see if Ohio may make changes towards this idea as well.
Your not understanding what I'm saying I'm not a fucking Black Lives Matter protestor. Cops are trained to use guns and should therefore be accurate, and arent. Citizens arent trained to use guns and will therefore be less accurate due to lack of training, stress, people running everywhere, confusion, etc... Therefore are a non-factor in active shooter situations. There was a man at the Giffords shooting who pulled his gun but never fired because he was too confused about who the shooter was after people started running around. He later said if he had fired he would have killed a random bystander who he thought was the shooter.
When I say misses I mean reports of having drawn and fired the gun without having hit anything for the duration of the encounter not individual bullets and when I say hits I mean what they killed or injured. All I'm saying is that in the heat of the moment your averge joe isn't hitting jack.
I can say that most cops arent trained as well as they should be, most don't receive more than 40 hours of instruction, and have to re-qualify for their pistol once a year. Cops are trained to use a gun and that is it, they are from from being trained in a firefight with someone who has ACTUAL TRAINING and will probably win.
I'm basically just saying that your adding a completly untrained person into a confusing situation where other peoples lives are on the line and that people are delusional in thinking that untrained person is going to save lives. I'm using (atleast somewhat) trained cops to contrast this by saying even someone that has foreknowledge of the shooter and is prepared to engage him is still very ineffective.
OK, thanks for clearing, but in my personal experience, everyone I personally know has more training than your average cop, some of them are active officers that spend their free time practicing and training more, or are training to be cops. That said, there are even CCW classes that teach certain fundamentals, not all of them, but you can't go and classify every single average joe with a gun will be more of a danger to innocents than the shooter.
NRA seems to be hit and miss with understanding what they should represent. As for being quiet, well. The media hasn't been quiet about it. Sometimes it is better to let the dust settle instead of swarming over some dead persons apartment.
I'm with you here, but I maintain that untrained individuals are unlikely to be in a firefighter with an armed assailant unless their life were directly endangered. The first course of action in any stressful situation is flight, as per human instinct. If the threat is eminent, then the fight response kicks in. Your trained carriers, those who have taken tactical and CQ urban combat/home invasion protection training, are the most likely individuals to respond to a threat on others by drawing their firearm.
Personally I'm not anti-gun, until this year I had no opinion on gun control, but what has become painfully obvious in the past year is that purchasing guns is too easy. It's unsettling that somebody can walk in Walmart, purchase a 30-round Semi-automatic assault rifle, fill out some paperwork, and be out in under an hour. Criminals are going to find ways to purchase guns regardless of regulations, of course, but does nobody want it to be harder for them? Bringing up mental health issues when on the topic of guns is a convenient way to take the focus off of the issue, but pettifogging doesn't fix the problem. Anybody with a brain knows you don't actually care about mental health issues, you're just afraid of "getting your guns taken from you" or something of that sort.
But really i'm not a fan of this bill, hopefully there are no wacko nutjobs in this state to exploit it, because I don't think fighting fire with fire will solve this problem, i think it only results in some very, very serious burns.
I think you're pretty off on using mental health as a cover for "not losin' my 'murica things" here. Countries who have been successful in banning guns have all started with huge overhauls in how mental health is addressed. Australia attacked mental health prior to approaching gun bans, as did Sweden.
I own several guns, but none are used for protection or sport. Some are heirlooms, some are just collected items that get fired at the range every so often (I do not own any pistols except a WWI Luger I got from my grandfather before he died). I don't come down particularly on either side of the fence, but I don't think having a weapon increases the threat of violence at all either.
The "more guns than people" comments get thrown around a lot, so too does things like "everyone in the South is armed." Neither statement is truly representative of the facts. Not everyone and their mother is packing, and more often than not people have several firearms. I'd wager a large portion of these people have some form of training with their weapon as well. If for nothing more, a lot of sport/hunting applications passed down from generation to generation come with some sort of crash course in gun safety. I learned a ton from my grandfather personally and I don't think that's at all uncommon in this area.
TL;DR The guns are there already, if people wanted to use them already they would have. Giving them a chance to use them in self defense will not likely create any more situations of gun violence than already exist.
About 1,205 people died today from medical malpractice, but I don't see people up in arms about that as they are about gun violence.
I worked in the military, law enforcement, albeit with a correctional officer without a weapon, and I also own guns so my personal view is biased, naturally. But there are problems causing -more- deaths yearly than gun violence. Hell most of this gun violence committed is criminal on criminal violence, and that's fine, population control, their lives aren't valuable and expendable. Other than that, they are typically crimes of passion in which someone did something stupid and got killed.
Most gun related deaths are due to people being stupid, plain and simple. Stupid handling guns (accidents), stupid doing illegal activities, etc. The vast minority of these are 'mass' public shootings like that. Even then, 18-22 veterans kill themselves everyday due to PTSD, being homeless, or lack of support, and no one bats an eye. They'll protect the 'dignity' of someone being an idiot over the lives of those that actually did something with their lives.
Edit:
I'd also like to add that the world is not some rosy happy go lucky fun place that yall make it out to be. People will fucking kill you for absolutely no reason, and having a gun may save your life. People will kill you for your religious beliefs, because you're a certain color, because you're gay, etc.
The cops don't have an immediate response time, the bad guy holding a gun doesn't give a fuck about any 'anti-gun' laws, no gun signs, or that you strongly disagree with his owning a gun. If we -could- get rid of guns in the states then so be it, but it's not going to happen so stop bitching about it. Criminals will always have their weapons, that's not going to change. The good guys may as well have theirs too.