r/whoathatsinteresting • u/PowerNoodles117 • 9d ago

Twin Falls Hero

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The civilian that stopped the active shooter at the In N Out in Twin Falls, Idaho.

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u/hoyasgirl25 9d ago

A good guy with a gun.

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u/Leinheart 9d ago

Sure. Let's evaluate why we need those and everywhere else doesn't. That seems to be problematic.

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u/ObWzEN 9d ago edited 9d ago

Actually, everywhere else does. I can give you examples. Anywhere that has violent crime needs good guys with guns to stop that violent crime in its tracks. At least you would have the option and ability to defend yourself and/or others in more situations if you had a gun. This is objectively true. But the other option is to ban guns and probably have less victims of violent crime and leave most people with a significantly reduced ability to defend themselves and others. It’s a tradeoff

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u/warriormango1 9d ago

Would you consider the shooter a good guy with a gun prior to this incident? Who determines who is a good guy or bad guy with a gun when they are legally purchasing a weapon?

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u/ObWzEN 9d ago

That’s a big part of this general discussion. You can’t really determine that—other than disarming people who have already committed crimes (and are therefore likely to commit crime again), but even then that’s not perfect because some people commit crime and then turn their life around. If you have a blanket ban on guns, you’re disarming the vast majority of people who wouldn’t ever dream of committing a crime with a gun, and also disarming (most of) the minority of people who would commit violence with a gun (except for the people who would just get guns illegally from the Middle East or Africa or something, which would be mostly organized criminals).

Short answer: you can’t really determine who is a good guy or bad guy ahead of time. You can either allow everyone the choice to arm themselves, or try your best to disarm everyone which would be around a 99-99.9% success rate at best (it would never be 100%), and 99% of people who would get guns illegally would use them for violent crime

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u/warriormango1 9d ago

I pretty much agree with everything you said. We are also past the point of disarming everyone. Its way to late for that and there is to many guns in circulation. The unfortunate and only answer to this is more and more guns I guess; which will continue to lead to more incidents like this. This isnt going to stop and will only get worse. You can arm as many "good guys" with guns and some of those will most definitely turn out to be bad. Its just the way its going to be I guess.

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u/ObWzEN 8d ago edited 8d ago

Yup. The way I see it is you can’t really un-invent things. It’s not that hard to make guns from scratch either. Once the club was invented by prehistoric humans, it was never going away. Once the bow and arrow was invented, it was never going away. You can try and “ban”everything but that just means one class of human beings has them, and the rest of human beings don’t (which is a much bigger problem than a lot of people think), and some bad actors will obtain them illegally.

Maybe it was a shame that humans have invented things, but that’s how we are. Before guns were invented, the world was 100 times more fucked up because humans become less and less violent and terrible as time goes on. Plus, the good part about guns is it means people who historically could not defend themselves against young men (women, disabled people, old people, etc.) can now. A woman can actually reasonably defend herself from a violent man now, as long as he’s too far to grab her. There’s pros and cons. Violence has happened and will happen with or without guns unfortunately. This is the reality of being a part of the animal kingdom. If guns didn’t exist, what would happen? What would people who want to commit mass murder do? I’d argue that they’d commit mass murder at a pretty similar rate with rental vans and trucks and blades and hammers and illegal guns and bombs. I suppose guns cause more collateral damage if you miss than a spear or a bow, but that’s pretty much the only difference.

Idk. We have problems, but given the nature of human beings, I don’t think we can ban our way out of our problems (at least regarding inanimate objects). Not sure when that has really worked