The gun nuts are always telling us that guns are for protection and that if only more people carried guns, we would have less gun violence. The head of the NRA famously said, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” There are all kinds of statistics that prove that idea wrong (see other posts on this site), but I felt it was the right thing to do to post this very unusual story.

A “good guy” with a gun, witnessed someone starting to shoot into a crowd of people in Chicago, and used his gun to stop the “bad guy” with a gun.

But let’s not forget. We still have over 30,000 gun deaths a year in this country, have averaged more than one mass shooting a day in the US (337 as of 11/20/15 – http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Mass_Shootings_in_2015), and so far this year, 13 toddlers have killed themselves when they got a hold of a gun (plus 18 more injuring themselves, 10 injuring other people, and two killing other people). So we’re still a very long way from any proof that guns make things safer in the US. But I thought it would be nice to give the gun rights crowd something to crow about. It doesn’t happen very often.

But let us not forget that the very same week that this miraculous event occurred, there were seven mass shootings in eight different cities, spread across eight different states, that resulted in seven dead and 24 wounded.

Not letting people have guns seems very extreme given that only 30,000 people a year are killed by guns in the US every single year. It doesn’t make nearly as much sense as, say, refusing Syrian refugees when we’ve had one single Muslim terror event in the US in 2015 that killed five people and wounded two. It doesn’t make nearly as much sense as requiring state issued IDs for voting when 31 credible voter impersonation episodes over 1 billion ballots. It doesn’t make nearly as much sense as torturing prisoners even though there is no evidence of terrorist acts this torture stopped.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-uber-driver-shoots-gunman-met-0420-20150419-story.html