One of the most ridiculous thing I saw coming out of this incident is people and especially the NRA saying the Marines need to be armed because they’re trained in the arm of dealing death so of course they should be armed.
Now even if the Marines were armed they were outgunned so they probably need to carry machine guns with them to even the odds to account for the attacker’s element of surprise. So basically this is saying members of the military should walk around like it’s a warzone the whole time. This is kind of like Mr. Fullswing where the military high school team has its members with ammo belts and machine guns while playing baseball, which turned out to be surprisingly useful since one of the guy on the protagonist team was a cowboy and pulled out a gun and starting shooting at them in the middle of the game.
It seems like a lot of guy’s idea of peace is everyone walk around with military weapons and that way if the bad guys shows up everyone just turns around with their big guns and take that guy out, because the bad guy is always labeled very clearly so that if anyone sees two guys shooting at each other with machine guns they’ll always know which guy is the bad guy and shoot the right guy instead of the wrong guy and start a chain reaction. Wikipedia estimates the friendly fire accounts for 2-20% of causalities in battles, and that’s relatively trained people who generally have systems to at least try to distinguish guys on your side. In fact let’s imagine the exact same scenario as Mr. Fullswing, so you got the Marine baseball team playing in a game and every member of the team is carrying a machine gun while still playing baseball adequately by magic. You also have random fans carrying guns because because more guns are always good. So one guy pulls out a gun and starts shooting at the Marines, and unlike Mr. Fullswing the attacker isn’t a guy in a cowboy hat so you can’t easily tell who is the attacker. So are the marines supposed to just start shooting guys in the crowd carrying guns (and there would be a lot of those guys)? It’s one thing to discuss some additional security measures over these incidents, but the ‘everyone should be armed’ argument is literally a friendly fire accident waiting to happen. I guess it’d look like some gangster movie where you got a bunch of guys and after a dispute everyone pulls out a gun and start shooting at each other, except in the movies the gangsters usually magically know who the enemies are, while in real life you’d just be seeing a lot of guys randomly shooting at each other and there isn’t a convenient way to tell who is the bad guy. USA already leads the world by far in the number of accidental firearm deaths and I think those are literally like 'my hand slipped' as opposed to say I got mad at someone and accidentlaly shot him in anger and I think the number of accidental deaths from discharged firearms already beats most nation's total number of deaths from violent crimes, and even if not one would imagine that's got to go up by a lot if everyone walks around carrying big guns, including machine guns.
Now even if the Marines were armed they were outgunned so they probably need to carry machine guns with them to even the odds to account for the attacker’s element of surprise. So basically this is saying members of the military should walk around like it’s a warzone the whole time. This is kind of like Mr. Fullswing where the military high school team has its members with ammo belts and machine guns while playing baseball, which turned out to be surprisingly useful since one of the guy on the protagonist team was a cowboy and pulled out a gun and starting shooting at them in the middle of the game.
It seems like a lot of guy’s idea of peace is everyone walk around with military weapons and that way if the bad guys shows up everyone just turns around with their big guns and take that guy out, because the bad guy is always labeled very clearly so that if anyone sees two guys shooting at each other with machine guns they’ll always know which guy is the bad guy and shoot the right guy instead of the wrong guy and start a chain reaction. Wikipedia estimates the friendly fire accounts for 2-20% of causalities in battles, and that’s relatively trained people who generally have systems to at least try to distinguish guys on your side. In fact let’s imagine the exact same scenario as Mr. Fullswing, so you got the Marine baseball team playing in a game and every member of the team is carrying a machine gun while still playing baseball adequately by magic. You also have random fans carrying guns because because more guns are always good. So one guy pulls out a gun and starts shooting at the Marines, and unlike Mr. Fullswing the attacker isn’t a guy in a cowboy hat so you can’t easily tell who is the attacker. So are the marines supposed to just start shooting guys in the crowd carrying guns (and there would be a lot of those guys)? It’s one thing to discuss some additional security measures over these incidents, but the ‘everyone should be armed’ argument is literally a friendly fire accident waiting to happen. I guess it’d look like some gangster movie where you got a bunch of guys and after a dispute everyone pulls out a gun and start shooting at each other, except in the movies the gangsters usually magically know who the enemies are, while in real life you’d just be seeing a lot of guys randomly shooting at each other and there isn’t a convenient way to tell who is the bad guy. USA already leads the world by far in the number of accidental firearm deaths and I think those are literally like 'my hand slipped' as opposed to say I got mad at someone and accidentlaly shot him in anger and I think the number of accidental deaths from discharged firearms already beats most nation's total number of deaths from violent crimes, and even if not one would imagine that's got to go up by a lot if everyone walks around carrying big guns, including machine guns.
