… in the circumstances as described I'm not sure return fire would have been wise …
It would have been a horrendous mess. You have to remember, though, that my basic perspective differs from yours. Yours is that of a regular citizen, law-respecting and law-abiding and (since you don’t evince a knee-jerk blanket disapproval of firearms) properly conscious of the necessity of using those implements in a safe, responsible fashion. I start in the same place, but in me those attitudes and beliefs are supplemented and modified by training for (and then experience in) active combat zones. The upshot is, you’re thinking of ideal circumstances, whereas my background accustoms me to the thought that one sometimes has to take action even when circumstances are far from ideal.
In that venue, under those conditions, dozens of things could easily have gone wrong for one or more persons attempting to apply effective preventive return fire, and almost certainly some of those things would have gone wrong. Innocent people struck, even killed, by ‘friendly’ fire? Bad, horribly bad. But would that have been worse than allowing a heavily armed man clearly intent on mass murder to continue without interference?
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” We just have to make sure that the perfect doesn’t rule out the good so that we’re left only with the bad, the worse, and the unbearable.
no subject
It would have been a horrendous mess. You have to remember, though, that my basic perspective differs from yours. Yours is that of a regular citizen, law-respecting and law-abiding and (since you don’t evince a knee-jerk blanket disapproval of firearms) properly conscious of the necessity of using those implements in a safe, responsible fashion. I start in the same place, but in me those attitudes and beliefs are supplemented and modified by training for (and then experience in) active combat zones. The upshot is, you’re thinking of ideal circumstances, whereas my background accustoms me to the thought that one sometimes has to take action even when circumstances are far from ideal.
In that venue, under those conditions, dozens of things could easily have gone wrong for one or more persons attempting to apply effective preventive return fire, and almost certainly some of those things would have gone wrong. Innocent people struck, even killed, by ‘friendly’ fire? Bad, horribly bad. But would that have been worse than allowing a heavily armed man clearly intent on mass murder to continue without interference?
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.” We just have to make sure that the perfect doesn’t rule out the good so that we’re left only with the bad, the worse, and the unbearable.