Though coverage and commentary of the killings in Charleston is saturated, I did want to share this link to an excellent article that appeared in Time magazine in 2013, entitled "Your Brain in a Shootout: Guns, Fear and Flawed Instincts."
As widely reported, National Rifle Association board member Charles Cotton posted remarks online stating that most of the victims in the Charleston shooting, had they been armed, "might be alive." This is more or less the organization's stock response. Likewise, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre said in a now oft-quoted comment three years ago after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
Shootings such as these, I suspect, are due to a confluence of multiple factors that go beyond the issue of guns. Yet, guns and gun legislation should clearly be part of the discussion. But when it is suggested (invariably with an air of cowboy grit) that pastors and school teachers should be armed, pause should be encouraged for thought. This article comes to mind.
I'll forgo a summary, but would like to offer one particular image in the article that made an impact on me. An interviewee recounts his involvement in a shootout. At the time he was a police-academy trainer and, as stated in the piece, "unusually well schooled in survival skills." Yet, at one point during the incident, the officer had unknowingly dropped his gun, and soon realized he was pointing his finger instead, like a schoolboy might. (The stress of such a situation can have severe and strange effects on thought and perception—not something one hears about on television or in westerns.) Now the owner of a law-enforcement training company, he says concerning proposals that staff in schools should carry firearms: "Cops aren't trained well enough, so what do you think they're going to do with teachers?"
Interesting article.
