I was referring to Wayne LaPierre's statement.
This has been rebutted by people who know far more about guns than I do:
http://gawker.com/its-really-h...
It's Really Hard to Be a Good Guy With a Gun
Adam Weinstein
6/10/14 4:20pm
Fine. I leave it to you, the hypervigilant. Even though the statistics show mass shootings are on the rise, and not one has been stopped by armed good guys—armed civilian good guys. In fact, they've been shot more often than they've shot the baddies. Which is natural, since assault weapons are on the rise, and it's hard to conceal a weapon that can outshoot someone with a Bushmaster. I leave it to you, because I still puzzle in my mind over all the tactical difficulties posed by someone in civilian clothes carrying a gun during a shooting. (How do you telegraph your goodness to the cops and bystanders?)
One of the things LaPierre blamed for the killings was the absence of "an active, national database of the mentally ill." Since he didn't take questions at his press conference, nobody was able to ask him who would decide who goes into the database, how they would decide, and whether they would then prevent people in the database from buying guns.
One thing I do know about is the medical evidence.
In fact, psychiatrists (the people who decide who is mentally ill) say that such laws would be useless. There was a debate about that in the Annals of Internal Medicine between a gun-owning doctor and a doctor who wanted to stop people with mental disease from buying guns. The gun-restricting doctor admitted he was wrong. Only a tiny minority of people with mental illness are a danger to anyone else. About 30% of the population over 65 has clinical depression. Does LaPierre want to take the guns away from 30% of the population over 65?
In fact, the NRA has lobbied for laws that let people who were prevented from possessing guns, because they were convicted of violent crimes, appeal and have those convictions set aside again in a rubber-stamp procedure, so they could buy guns again. And several of those people have committed murders as a result. So LaPierre wants to give guns back to murderers to let them murder again.
Unfortunately, as a story in Nature said last year, there is no good evidence on gun violence one way or the other. That's because the NRA lobbied congress to stop the Centers for Disease Control from doing gun-related research. That was in response to a study that found that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than to defend themselves. That study would be impossible today, because of the network of NRA-supported laws that prevent researchers from even getting information about guns.
But in the absence of hard data, most doctors and scientists say that the cause of this level of gun violence is the widespread ownership of guns, and that if there were fewer guns in circulation, there would be fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. They also say it's politically impossible to do anything significant about it in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. So our NRA-protected gun access makes it impossible to stop terrorist attacks in malls. Anyone with basic gun skills can get a quick-firing gun and kill 20 people in a crowd before even a more-skilled gun owner can stop him. And if a group of terrorists plan a coordinated attack, they could kill hundreds. If a concealed-gun owner jumps into the fray, on the average he seems to do more harm than good.
