There's been a chorus of claims from idiots like Louie Ghomert and various NRA types that if only there had been someone packing in the theater, many lives could have been saved. This is such an intensely stupid claim that it's hard to believe it requires refutation. However, never underestimate the stupidity of the denizens of Lower Wingnuttia.
First off, we'll start with the obvious...
* Pitch black theatre with the only light coming in flashes from the screen (strobe effect)
*Loud noises, including gunshots, from screen, loud gunshots in theater
*Clouds of tear gas
*Hundreds of screaming people literally falling all over each other in a total panic
Plus this guy...
...who, in addition to wearing head to toe bullet stopping tac gear, is packing a 12 gauge shotgun, an AR-15 assault rifle with a 100 round clip and a Glock .40, methodically pumping out 4 rounds per second or so.
Under these conditions even an expert pistol marksman is highly unlikely to get of a hit in the tiny area of vulnerability in the shooter's tac gear. Not to mention, odds are you could put 12 rounds center mass into this guy with a compact 9, the most common handgun used for concealed carry, and not leave anything more than a bruise.
But it gets worse...
Imagine if there had been multiple people packing. Now you have a bunch of people firing from a bunch of different places. Crossfire vectors everywhere. Two more theaters at full capacity are on either side, separated only by paper thin walls.
What you have now is a recipe for total disaster. But it gets worse....
Imagine you're a cop who happens to be in a position to respond almost instantly. You walk in to this darkened theater completely blind; It'll take 90 seconds or so for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. Shots are coming from every direction from a number of shooters. Who do you shoot?
From any of these scenarios the probability of a better outcome is virtually nil while the odds of an even worse outcome are astronomical.
If you have any remaining doubts about what happens when a guy with a handgun tries to take on a guy with an AR-15 in full tac gear, take a look at the following videos, courtesy of weapons testing company BrassFetcher...
Here's a super high speed video that shows the damage from a 9mm high velocity round using ballistic gelatin that mimics human flesh. This type of round is the most common for concealed carry and is easily stopped by the type of gear the shooter was wearing.
Here's a high speed video of a Remington .223, the round used in the Colorado shooting, into ballistic gelatin. Notice the massive trauma caused by the "spall" effect as the bullet tumbles into the gel.
Now, ask yourself, what kind of idiot would take on a guy with a .223 AR-15 and a 100 round clip with his compact 9 and 12 shots at most? I'll tell you what kind of idiot. A dead idiot.
Caveat: I am a gun owner. In fact, in addition to a 9mm and a .40 cal, I have high power weaponry that's actually superior to what the Colorado shooter had. But I didn't have to trade in my brains to get my guns. Like the vast majority of gun owners, I support common sense regulation of firearms.
Violence Prevention Summit Convenes Experts and Activists, Collaboration and Coordination Urged
"So which Florida county is the most armed? You guess it -- Miami-Dade, which as of June 30, had 84,940 citizens packing heat"
Keynote speaker Queen Brown called for creative action to stem the violence
A year ago, Queen Brown’s 24-year-old son Eviton was sitting in a car on Miami Ave. at NE 156th Street when he was shot to death by a passerby. The new father and member of the 5000 Role Models for Excellence program had become yet another victim of gun violence in Miami. Her grief drove Queen to action.
“When my son was murdered, I didn’t have a dime, but I had everything I needed to make a difference. There are resources all around you, but how creative are you to make a difference?” asked Ms. Brown, a keynote speaker at the two-day Community Youth Violence Prevention Summit held this fall at Florida Memorial College.
The conference, sponsored by The Children’s Trust and the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, convened national experts, community activists, a wide range of service providers, law enforcement officials, parents and youths seeking ways to share resources, good will and persistence to “build a strong wall against violence in our community.”
“I was like many of the children that you have in your programs,” Queen said, referring to the agencies in attendance that provide services for children and youths. She said she’d dropped out of school in the 8th grade because of family problems, but got a pass to go on to the 9th grade. Yet that pass didn’t address the deeper problem, not then and not today.
“You can’t just deal with the murders, with the killings, that’s not the answer,” Ms. Brown said. “We have to strengthen the coalitions and deal with the issues – substance abuse, joblessness, economics. Once we address these issues we’ll see the murder rate decline.”
She delivered her own call to action, urging citizens to intervene to stop the violence. Following her son’s murder, Ms. Brown went to a number of radio stations, looking for a way to get the word out about the problems of youth violence. She met with only closed doors, and had to use her own money to finance a radio show.
Administrators and graduates of the GATE progam shared their personal stories at the summit
With financial sponsors, Ms. Brown now has a one-hour radio show every Sunday on WINZ 940 with invited guests to talk about community violence and ways to address it.
On July 1, 2006, Sherdavia Jenkins was playing with a doll on her front steps when she was fatally shot by a stray bullet. The 9-year-old became the 18th victim of gun violence in Miami-Dade County over that half-year span. In the wake of the spate of violence, Miami-Dade County Commissioner and Children’s Trust Board Member Barbara Jordan urged The Children’s Trust’s board to generate a tangible process to aid the community.
The Children’s Trust board took this call to action as consistent with and fundamental to its vision and principles, and identified $3 million in first-year funds to apply towards a competitive process seeking community-based solutions. Following a series of town meetings in the late summer and early fall, The Children’s Trust launched its Violence Prevention initiative in 2006. The initiative provides more than $12 million in funding spread over three years to a coalition of agencies and organizations. The funding targets seven Miami area neighborhoods in an attempt to uproot the problems that lead to the violence. Community agencies and organizations are empowered to collaborate, develop strategy and take action under the guidance of the designated lead agency and The Children’s Trust.
Deborah Montilla, administrative director for the Division of Student Services in the public schools, said the conference was another step in the process to address the issue of youth violence in the county.
“A year ago, every Monday our team was responding to yet another senseless death in our community,” Ms. Montilla said. “We went to town hall meetings, but recognized that wasn’t going to be enough. The Children’s Trust took some big and bold steps and the first was to stop hiding what’s happening.”
Chief Gerald Darling, of the public schools Police Department, explained that collaboration is the key.
“We’re bringing everyone to the table who has a stake. What we do on the law enforcement side impacts the community. We want each and every service provider to coordinate and collaborate,” Darling said.
Majendie Chevalier, an 18-year-old senior at Miami Jackson Senior High, attended the conference. Chevalier, whose family moved from Little Haiti to Miami Shores in hopes of finding a safer neighborhood, told an expert panel on violence that “we’re always told that guns are bad, but we see police carry them, wouldn’t it be better if young people were trained in the safe use of guns?”
Dr. Judy Schaechter, on the panel, said the question was a good one, yet all the evidence and studies have shown that when young people have access to guns there are always more accidents and not less, regardless of safe-training.
Rick Beasley, of the South Florida Workforce, spoke on the Best Practices Panel, an array of experts who discussed practices and programs adopted in other cities around the country that have proved effective in addressing violence and related problems, among them the Boston Gun Project’s Operation Ceasefire.
Beasley emphasized the importance of education, employment and earnings to address the problems of violence and said the efforts in Miami-Dade County were unique around the nation.
The director of the GATE Program for Juvenile Weapon Offenders, Mimi Sutherland, offered a presentation called “Against All Odds-Fostering Hope.” Forty of the offenders have gone on to finish high school and are now in universities. Seven, formerly “police haters,” are now pursuing careers in law enforcement and believe they can make a difference, Sutherland explained.
Xavier Miranda, who was 14 when he joined a gang, graduated from the GATE program in 2002.
“Throwing us in jail is only making the problem worse. Education is the key for our youth and for everybody. The program helped me a lot and showed me that I could do something with my life. I’m not just a number. I’m someone who turned his life around,” Miranda said.
It goes without saying there are many factors leading to gun violence other than the number of concealed weapon permits (see below) .. ooi, Florida sits roughly halfway on a "Gun homicides by 100000 population" list
Published: Tuesday, April 10, 2012 - LEESBURG - Staff Report
Nearly one in every 17 Florida adults has a license to carry a concealed weapon, with Lake County ranked 13th statewide in the issuance of such permits, according to figures compiled last month by the state.
Florida's gun laws have been in the headlines since the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, who was killed in February by a neighborhood watch member in Sanford. The shooter, who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon, contends he was defending himself under Florida's Stand Your Ground statute and has not been charged.
Last month, Leesburg was sued for not throwing out its outdated gun control laws following a new state law that supersedes all local ordinances. The lawsuit was filed by Florida Carry Inc., an organization backed by Florida gun owners.
While conventional wisdom may lead some to believe the population rank of a county would mirror its concealed weapons permit rank, this is not the case, according to figures compiled in March by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which administers the licensing program.
Lake County is ranked 19th among Florida's 67 counties in population at 297,052, but it is ranked 13th statewide in the issuance of permits for concealed weapons -- 19,713. Sumter County, on the other hand, is ranked 36th in population at 93,420, but 45th in concealed weapons permits -- 2,440.
Lake actually has more concealed weapons permits than the combined totals of more than 20 mostly rural Florida counties.
Of the other six counties adjoining Lake, half of them -- Orange, Polk and Volusia -- have some of the highest rankings in the state for concealed weapons permits, the agriculture department said. Orange is No. 5, followed by Volusia at No. 10 and Polk at No. 11.
Under Florida's concealed-carry law, gun owners don't have to explain why they want to carry one or demonstrate they can hit a target. Applicants must pass a criminal background check and a class lasting up to four hours on self-defense law, safe gun handling and marksmanship.
Some states set stricter requirements, according to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times.
In Texas, applicants must pass a 10- to 15-hour class and a timed shooting test with a minimum score of 70 percent while firing 50 shots over three distances, the Times reported.
Texas has about 6 million more residents than Florida but half as many concealed-weapons permits, according to records from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Texas' 461,724 permits amount to one for every 37 adults.
California, twice as populous as Florida, has just 38,122 active concealed-weapons permits, according to the state attorney general's office. That's one for every 688 adults, the Times reported.
The map below, by my colleague Zara Matheson at the Martin Prosperity Institute, charts the geography of gun violence across the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [PDF]. .. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_10.pdf .. The data (from 2008, the most recent year available) include accidental shootings, suicides, even acts of self-defense, as well as crimes.
There were 10.3 deaths by firearms per 100,000 people in Colorado in 2008, exactly the same as the national average. Gun deaths were highest in Alaska (20.9 per 100,000) and lowest in Hawaii (3.1 per 100,000).
Gun violence and drug abuse are often presumed to go together, but we found no association between illegal drug use and death from gun violence at the state level. While it is commonly assumed that mental illness or stress levels trigger gun violence, we found no association between gun violence and the proportion of neurotic personalities in any given state.
Some might assume gun violence would be higher in states with higher levels of unemployment and higher levels of inequality. But, again, we found no evidence of any such association with either of these variables.
We did find several factors that are associated with firearm deaths at the state level. On the economic front, gun violence was higher in states with lower average incomes. Similarly, gun violence was less likely in states with more college graduates and stronger knowledge-based economies. Gun violence was also higher in states that tend to vote Republican.
In a separate post, I examined the pyschogeography of gun deaths. .. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/the-psychogeography-of-gun-violence/69353/ .. The classic study of the subject is by Richard Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan. In "Violence and Regional Culture," published in American Psychologist in 1993, Nisbett examined the higher rate of violence in the U.S. south. After considering possible explanations having to do with poverty, the legacy of slavery, and even the region's hotter climate, he found a different answer in a cultural vestige of pastoralism: a deep "culture of honor" in which residents place an extraordinary value on personal reputation, family, and property. Threats to these things provoke aggressive reactions, leading to higher rates of murder and domestic violence.
A more recent study by Ryan P. Brown, Lindsey Osterman, and Collin Barnes of the University of Oklahoma, published in Psychological Science in 2009, reinforces Nisbett's findings and suggests that a culture of honor plays a particularly significant role in high school violence. The study found a culture of honor to be significantly associated with two indices of school violence: the percentage of high school students who reported having brought a weapon to school during the past month; and the prevalence of actual school shootings over a 20 year period.
My research also found a correlation between state policies toward guns and gun ownership:
Firearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation. Though the sample sizes are small, we find substantial negative correlations between firearm deaths and states that ban assault weapons (-.45), require trigger locks (-.42), and mandate safe storage requirements for guns (-.48).
Richard Florida is Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities. He's also a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, whose current client list can be found here. All posts »
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
