G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Every day, somewhere in the United States, someone is shot and killed—lots of someones, really. It’s not an uncommon thing.
This summer, though, it seems to be happening with an eerie regularity. A new week, a new high-profile shooting incident.
Eleven people were hit in midtown Manhattan, but it appears that the shooter—the fifty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Johnson—may have only shot one of them.
The rest, it seems, may have been shot by the two police officers trying to bring Johnson down.
The old way of doing things “was really dumb, because we let people get murdered,” Klinger says. So since Columbine, “the operational doctrine of American law enforcement has shifted away from ‘he’s probably going to stop’ … to ‘someone who is in a public space where there are multiple victims available needs to be stopped as quickly as possible.’”
Those people who support ever more unfettered access to guns would agree, no doubt, and suggest that an armed citizenry could play an invaluable role in stopping shooters like this.
But in this case, two trained officers were the ones who took down Johnson; in the process, nine civilians were wounded.
How many more would it have been if those officers had just been amateurs off the street?
This summer, though, it seems to be happening with an eerie regularity. A new week, a new high-profile shooting incident.
Eleven people were hit in midtown Manhattan, but it appears that the shooter—the fifty-eight-year-old Jeffrey Johnson—may have only shot one of them.
The rest, it seems, may have been shot by the two police officers trying to bring Johnson down.
Those people who support ever more unfettered access to guns would agree, no doubt, and suggest that an armed citizenry could play an invaluable role in stopping shooters like this.
But in this case, two trained officers were the ones who took down Johnson; in the process, nine civilians were wounded.
How many more would it have been if those officers had just been amateurs off the street?
