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You Be the Judge: The Case of the Glass Eye
A man is on trial for puncturing another man’s eye with a key during a fight outside a Philadelphia bar. The victim is on the stand, testifying, when his prosthetic eye suddenly pops out and falls into his hand. (What the judge decided) For links to CJA posts as soon … Continue reading →
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At some point, you just gots to roll the dice and takes your chances. You can’t control for every zealot or insane person without becoming “1984.”
It wouldn’t have made a difference in Aurora, as the alleged gunman came in through the emergency exit. And depending on where you are in Colorado, (I lived there for 10 years), there would have been return fire from movie patrons who were packing heat. Lord knows what kind of carnage that would have caused.
Yeah, funny about that. Let me quote you something I saw online today elsewhere:
We’ve had all these shootings over the last decade or so; the chances are effectively nil that every single person in every single case was unarmed. So why is it that we haven’t seen a single armed pro-gun carrier whip out their firearm and shoot the nutjob? It doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen because being armed is basically useless, and all the pro-gun people do by being pro-gun is make it easier for the nutjobs to get their weapons in the first place.
Agree times three.
Actually, there are dozens of cases every month of armed people stopping attackers. You probably don’t hear about them because the news media is more interested in stopping gun ownership than they are of objectively reporting the news.
http://gunssavelives.net/
Do you have any idea how cliched you sound when you use the “the Media is trying to keep my favorite viewpoint down!” argument?
This might be the case, Tim, but I suspect none of those cases took place inside a dark theatre. I believe it’s inevitable that a second gun drawn would only have meant more deaths.
On the other hand, if a potential criminal expects EVERYONE to likely be armed, he may be more reluctant to commit his act because he knows that SOMEONE with a gun may not be “sensible” and actually respond in kind.
Excluding singular cases (e.g., Fort Hood) I assume that most guys planning on walking through a theater shooting patrons would be reluctant to try it in a theater of armed soldiers, unless he was 100% suicidal.
[FWIW, I think that the Fort Hood case was different because since the perpetrator was a fellow soldier, in the heat of the moment it was not obvious to the other soldiers whether he was shooting at another criminal shooter or he was the criminal himself. Soldiers would understandably be hesitant to shoot at other soldiers because they would assume that fellow soldiers are on their side.
This guy did not bring his guns in the front door. He bought a ticket, entered the theater, left by the emergency exit (which he propped open), went to his car and got his guns, then came back in thru the emergency exit. What is needed is better monitoring of emergency exits, like an alarm that goes off when the door is open too long
Or actually, when it’s open at all: “emergency exit,” you know…
Sometimes the emergency is personal rather than institutional, though, and it’s needlessly disruptive to sound the alarm just because someone is about to throw up or has to leave to attend to a family matter or what have you.
Powers, in most cases, you save no time leaving by the emergency exit: they generally leave you on the side of the theatre, or in back of the theatre, and it will only take you longer to get to your emergency destination.
And practically speaking, if you’re going to throw up and you can’t make it to the bathroom, you’re probably not going to make it to the emergency exit.
I doubt you can profitably run a secured movie theatre, so, no, they’ll either go out of business or continue on with the (very small) threat of shootings.
Also: shooting people *leaving* a movie theatre would be much more lethal. A crush would occur as the people in the front try to turn around while the people behind wouldn’t, or couldn’t, get out of the way, and there’d be gun deaths, trampling deaths, and suffocation deaths.