The good guys with guns myth Part II: Identifying good guys

Earlier, we asked whether good guys with guns are really a deterrent to bad guys with guns. Spoiler: They aren’t. Today, we’ll delve a little deeper and ask, ‘what exactly is a good guy, and how do we recognize him so that we can make sure he’s armed?’

Here are a few examples of people with guns. See if you can spot the good guys.

• Two year old Caroline Sparks was killed by her five year old brother. He accidentally shot her with his own rifle.
• Eleven year old Jarvin Jackson was killed when he tried to take a gun away from his two and four year old siblings. 
• A two year old is amazingly expected to recover after firing a gun he placed in his mouth.

I don’t bring up these examples to suggest that any possession of a gun will inevitably lead to grief. Obviously, that’s not the case (though these kinds of disasters occur more often than you might think). My point is that the idea that you can protect society from gun violence by arming ‘good guys’ is absurd. Don’t you think the parents in this and every other such tragedy would have sworn that they were responsible gun owners? In the first case, the parents were teaching their son how to use a rifle from the age of four. I think it's fair to assume that they were very familiar with their own guns.

Up until the day you shoot your own granddaughter because you’ve mistaken her for an intruder, you’re a good guy with a gun. Up until the day a four year old shoots and kills your wife with a gun you left lying on a bed, you’re a responsible gun owner.

Let’s make an analogy with another dangerous invention: the car. Tens of thousands of people are killed each year in motor vehicle accidents. Many of those deaths are caused by what we could term ‘bad’ drivers, though more descriptive adjectives might be ‘reckless’, ‘inattentive’ or ‘intoxicated’. Does anyone think that a solution to the problem of bad drivers is to increase the total number of cars on the road by putting more 'good' drivers behind the wheel? Leaving aside the problem that on any given day, the same person might be a good or a bad driver, how could adding more cars to the road possibly result in fewer accidents? 

Like with drivers, there’s simply no such thing as a ‘good guy’ with a gun, there’s only good behavior and bad behavior. There’s safe behavior and reckless behavior. And just like with drivers, the same person might fall into one category one day and the other the next, depending on the circumstances. The fact is that guns are dangerous and accidents happen. The more guns in circulation, the more chance for errors in judgment, as many families have found to their sorrow.