In Indiana, Gun Controllers Miss the Point

CNN reports that, for the second time in six weeks, a concealed carrier has halted a mass shooter in the act:

Three people are dead and two others injured after a shooter opened fire in the food court of a Greenwood, Indiana, shopping mall Sunday evening, police say.

Around 6:00 p.m. local time, multiple people called 911 to report an active shooter at the Greenwood Park Mall, Greenwood Police Department Chief Jim Ison told reporters.

Investigators believe the unidentified gunman, an adult man, was shot and killed by a lawfully armed 22-year-old man who “observed the shooting in progress,” Ison said.

The police seem pleased that that “lawfully armed 22-year-old man” was there:

Ison said the Greenwood Police Department has trained for a mass shooting scenario and has performed “multiple mall exercises” to prepare for active shooter situations.

“But I’m going to tell you, the real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop this shooter almost as soon as he began,” Ison said.

Gun-control activists, by contrast, seem unimpressed:

In a follow-up tweet, Sarah Reese Jones writes that “anyone who replies good guys with a gun is missing the entire point.” But, at the risk of disappointing her, I’m going to do exactly that. Really, I’m not sure what the alternative is here. Yesterday evening, a man who hoped to commit mass murder walked into a mall and started shooting. What, in Sarah Reese Jones’s estimation, should ideally have happened next?

Reese Jones says that Republicans “think this country needs more guns.” Some do, yes. But our debate is not, at root, about that. Our debate is about whether, in a country that already has 450 million privately owned guns, law-abiding people should be able to own and carry them. I understand that some Americans wish that the United States had Japan’s gun laws. But the United States does not have Japan’s gun laws, the United States is almost certainly never going to have Japan’s gun laws, and, even if the United States were to pass Japan’s gun laws, the citizenry of the United States would still have 450 million guns in private hands.

So, I’ll ask again: Yesterday, a man who wanted to commit mass-murder walked into a mall and started shooting. What, in Sarah Reese Jones’s mind, should have happened next?

I do not think that this is an unfair question. Reese Jones notes that this incident happened just “days after Gov. Eric Holcomb’s new law that eliminates the license requirement to carry a handgun went into effect on July 1.” That law, and its effective date, were also pointed out by Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action. But this, of course, is entirely irrelevant. Prior to July 1st, Indiana already had a “shall-issue” permitting system (meaning that anyone over 21 who could pass a background check could get a carry license with no further questions asked), and the abolition of those permits within the system has had no effect on the eligibility requirements that were previously used. If you were eligible to carry a gun before June 1, you are eligible to carry a gun now; if you were prohibited from carrying a gun before, you are prohibited from carrying a gun now. All the new law has done — as in America’s 24 other permitless carry states — is remove the need for eligible carriers to apply for a license before they start carrying. The police in Indiana noted that the man who took down the shooter was “lawfully armed.” This, by definition, means that he was eligible under the law. (The mall in question is a “gun-free zone,” but, in Indiana, gun-free zone signs do not have force of law, which means that it is not a crime to ignore them per se, but only to refuse to leave when asked by the owners.)

Likewise, the new law has had no effect on where and when it is legal for eligible residents to carry firearms, and it has had no effect on Indiana’s existing laws against brandishing rifles inside shopping malls or against murdering people. All it does — the whole purpose — is to cut out some of the paperwork. In how it relates to Indiana’s statute, this incident would have unfurled identically on June 30 and on July 2. Before, and after, the hero of the story would have been legally carrying, and the villain of the story would have broken every law under the sun.

So, I’ll ask once more: Yesterday, a man who wanted to commit mass-murder walked into a mall and started shooting. What, in Sarah Reese Jones’s mind, should have happened next?

One can only conclude that the complaint advanced by Reese Jones and Watts are a stand-in for a broader objection: That, by moving to permitless carry, Indiana is going in what they consider to be “the wrong direction.” If so, they should own that — and its consequences. Let’s assume that, instead of abolishing its permitting system, Indiana had moved from a “shall issue” permitting system to the type of constricted “may issue” system that the Supreme Court has just ruled unconstitutional. Clearly, such a change would have had no effect on the shooter, who was not affected by the carry laws in any direction, and for whom Indiana’s other laws were irrelevant. But it may well have had an effect on the hero of the story — who, if concealed carry had been heavily restricted, would likely not have had a firearm on him in the first place, and who would have therefore sat there waiting for the police while the criminal had free rein. Is that what Reese Jones and Watts wish had happened?

That so many of America’s gun-control activists remain so steadfastly opposed to legal concealed carry has always baffled me. This is in part because legal concealed carriers are not the problem, and it is in part because America’s carry laws do not intersect with America’s mass-shooting problem — except insofar as those laws occasionally allow someone with a gun to halt a mass shooting. To watch figures such as Sarah Reese Jones and Shannon Watts read a story about a man taking down a killer, and move immediately to blaming the laws that made his actions easier, is astonishing.