Slim is better than zilch.

Somebody asked me this week, “What would you have done if you were at the concert in Las Vegas?”

I would have done what everybody else did, get to safety, and hopefully helped others to safety.  The point of their question was what can an armed citizen do in a situation like that?  I understand the question, but it gets back to my earlier writings, having a concealed carry pistol is not going to protect you from everything.  Self-defense is a percentages game.  When somebody dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it didn’t matter how many pistols they had, but I’m sure some shot at the B29 anyway, which is the point of the following.

There are two issues I want to talk about in regards to the Las Vegas shooting.  The first is the following hypothetical in response to the question I was asked.  If I was at the concert could I have done anything?  No.  But, what if the guy across the hall had a Glock?  Or the guy in the next room over had a Berretta?  He was allowed to shoot for nine minutes into the crowd because it took the first responder nine minutes to get to him.  If there was a good person with a gun closer to end his murderous rampage, maybe fewer people would have been victims.

So, the question to ask is not: what would you have done if you were at the concert?  The question is: what would you have done if you were in a place where you could affect the outcome?  Nobody in the crowd could affect any outcome other than through treatment of wounded, which by the way was incredibly heroic and the example we should aspire to and the lesson we should learn from this heinous act.  But, if an armed citizen had been in proximity to the shooter, innocent lives MAY have been saved.  Which leads me to the philosophical, larger picture perspective used to respond to proponents of tighter gun control: we are not safer if we are weaker.

The proponents of more gun control will be successful in arguing in the coming weeks that certain types of firearms are what led to the scale of this heinous act in Las Vegas.  They may have a point.  But, in general, making people weaker makes them more susceptible to being victimized, not less so.  The proponents of gun control will argue that in this situation the probability of an armed citizen being effective in stopping the mass shooting would have been very slim.  Which brings me to the second point.

Slim is better than zilch.  That is one of the cornerstones of my self-defense philosophy.  Even if you are getting your butt kicked by Chuck Liddell, you have to at least try to fight back.   The odds are, you are going to lose.  But, even if you only have a one percent chance of winning, that is still one percent more than if you surrender your life.  Probabilities matter to statisticians; if it is your life on the line, a tiny margin for success is better than certain death.  Todd Beamer and the heroes of United Flight 93 taught us that.  Even if you only have a tiny likelihood of success, failure to act is a one hundred percent chance of failure.  Marcus Luttrell talks about that in his book Lone Survivor, about crawling seven miles with a shattered face and multiple bullet wounds.  He just refused to give up to certain death.

I am not saying everybody has to be a Navy SEAL.  I am saying that even when your chances are extremely slim, when death is certain if you don’t try, then you must take the chance and try to win.  If somebody is going to shoot or stab you anyway, or fly an airplane into a building, or detonate their shoe on a plane, you have nothing to lose by attacking.  This is what untrained, unexposed people never seem to understand.  They want a world of absolutes.  Either we are absolutely safe, because we get rid of all the guns, knives, wars, racists, sexists, et cetera, et cetera, or they think they are in absolute danger.  It is a black and white way of thinking about the world.  But, the fact is, in a violent situation, it is all about percentages.  Two evenly matched people in a street fight each have a fifty-fifty chance.  But, even if you are completely out-matched and it’s a ninety-ten split on odds; you have to take the ten percent chance in a combat situation.  If you don’t, you become the victim.  Refusal to be a victim means you might lose, and you might even die, but you will not be taken easily like some crying lamb to the slaughter.

Also, you should train.  You should get to where the odds are in your favor, recognizing that there are some truly evil people in the world who you can't predict.  That is what happened in Las Vegas last weekend.  But, being weaker does not make you safer.

Slim is better than zilch!

Soule

(Easy 6)

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