Good Guy With A Gun

NBC's Ali Velshi on March 1:

A key point of the NRA's plans to "make our schools and communities safe" is simple: more guns. Does that actually hold up? For fact's sake, let's take a look.

In 2003, a study on -- building on research from the 1990s showed a 41 percent higher chance of homicide in homes with guns versus homes without guns. Fact. It found a 244 percent spike in suicides when compared to gun-free homes. This data isn't alone, but I want you to always remember this one: many -- most gun deaths in America are suicides. Nobody else in the world has numbers like American suicide deaths because of the number of guns we have. We'll come back to that another time.

A more recent analysis, in 2015, based on more than a dozen different studies -- and there has been a lot of research, while the CDC  [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] doesn't do it, lots of people do. It found that people with access to guns at home were almost twice as likely to be murdered compared to those without guns in their home....

The NRA argues the states with looser concealed carry laws are safer than those without. Again, not true. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at states that adopted "Right to Carry" concealed handgun laws, RTC, "Right to Carry." It found violent crime was 13 to 15 percent higher 10 years after the Right to Carry laws were adopted than the projections would have been if the laws had not been passed. And a 1998 survey of shootings in three cities found that for every time a homeowner used a gun for self defense or some other legally-justified shooting, there were four unintentional shootings. All the data shows that more guns do not mean more safety.

One week after Adam Lanza shot and killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, Wayne LaPierre held a news conference and famously contended "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."  He gave three examples, including "and  when you hear your glass breaking at 3 a.m. and you call 9-1-1, you won't be able to pray hard enough for a gun in the hands of a  good guy to get there fast enough  to protect you."





The good guy in that scenario would be a police officer.  As of March 2, one of  the "good  guys" was a 48-year old Iraq War veteran and member of the Illinois Army National Guard- and police officer.  Mount  Pleasant, Michigan police believe his son, James Eric Davis Jr, a student at Central Michigan University

shot and killed parents James Eric Davis Sr., 48, a police officer, and Diva Jeenen Davis, 47, around 8:30 a.m. Friday in his fourth-floor dorm room as they were packing his belongings for a trip back to their Chicago-area home.

The shooting capped a series of events that stretched back to the previous night when campus police twice encountered Davis Jr. behaving strangely -- and sent him to a hospital suspecting an adverse reaction to drugs, school police Chief Bill Yeagley said Saturday.

t wasn't immediately clear how Davis Jr. obtained the gun that was registered to his father, Yeagley said.

But investigators believe, citing a witness and video, that the teen brought the gun from a parking lot into Campbell Hall, the dormitory where his parents were, shortly before the shooting, Yeagley said.

"What we know for sure is that the gun was registered to his father, and that we saw ... (Davis Jr.) came from the parking lot into our residence hall with the gun, and the father was upstairs at that time," Yeagley said at a news conference Saturday morning.

If it were a knife available to the assailant, either or both parents almost surely would still be alive. Instead, -as far as is known at this time- there was a gun legally purchased and carried by a good  guy.

Tragically, Ali Velshi is right and Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of  the National Rifle Association, is wrong. Or if the latter chooses: Guns don't kill people; gun lobbies kill people.

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