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In his article in the Moultrie Observer, Adventures of Pistol-Packing Peter, Dwain Walden writes:

Do I want to be in a restaurant, at a ballgame or in a church with pistol-packing Peter? How do I know he can safely handle a gun?

There’s a popular bumper sticker that says: “Gun control is hitting what you aim at.” That’s a cute saying. But within that short sentence is a lot of unintended food for thought. Handguns are not that accurate in the first place. You’ve got to be really good or really lucky at hitting a target at any distance with a handgun. So if you are not hitting your target, you are hitting something else. Now let’s just say someone charges into the church and starts firing away. (It happened recently but it’s not a regular occurrence.) If someone is packing a gun, could we be sure that he could take out the assailant without hitting three or four deacons?

Handguns are less accurate than rifles, it’s true, but combat handguns are more than accurate enough to hit a human-sized target at the distance at which defensive situations typically arrive. This makes sense, since they were specifically designed for that purpose! Any handgun that did not have sufficient accuracy to accomplish the task of consistently hitting a person would not have much success in the market.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that people don’t miss, but the statement, “You’ve got to be really good or really lucky at hitting a target at any distance with a handgun,” is loaded and incomplete. It is difficult for most people to hit a 3″ bullseye at 50 yards with a handgun, but I reckon that in under an hour I could teach anybody to hit a human-sized silhouette target at ten yards. I shoot IDPA competitions, and I often see novice shooters hit moving targets, pop-up targets, and so forth, all while under the stress of competition, and with surprisingly few misses. They are usually not very fast about it, but part of using a handgun defensively is knowing its capabilities and yours, and it seems that people can often judge whether a given shot is safe to take or not.

Carrying a handgun is a pain in the ass. Guns are big, heavy hunks of metal. Concealing them requires changes to your wardrobe. They are uncomfortable and press into your side and poke you. You can’t sit or lay certain ways because they will press into you. What I’m getting at is that few people will choose to carry a gun casually, and the kind of person who makes the commitment of carrying a gun is exactly the kind of person who is also likely to take the time to train with his or her weapon and to know his or her capabilities.

But we have all heard stories of police officers, hunters, or victims of crime who panicked and started firing wildly, resulting in a very high miss-to-hit ratio, so what about that? “If someone is packing a gun, could we be sure that he could take out the assailant without hitting three or four deacons?” Here’s what I say. 32 people were killed in the VA Tech massacre. Let’s say that someone in the first classroom that Cho went into had a gun and began wildly returning fire. Let’s say that person hit and killed four innocent students in addition to Cho. Congratulations. 28 lives have been saved. 13 people died at Columbine. If a private citizen had stopped them while killing four innocents, perhaps 9 lives would have been saved. Should we keep counting? Even in the case where the good guy misses and kills innocents, which is a definite tragedy, chances are that the total count of victims will be lower than if the bad guy was not stopped.

The argument that people should be disarmed in crowds because they might miss a bad guy and hit an innocent seems fallacious to me. It seems to be saying, “I would rather be shot at by a person who intends to hit me than a person who intends to hit someone else.”

The proposition that an armed citizen would make an “active shooter” scenario worse just doesn’t hold water. No matter how bad a shot the armed citizen is presumed to be, he or she is still very likely to kill fewer people than the active shooter. Add to this the fact that “active shooters” very often break off their attack or even commit suicide the first time they are confronted with resistance. Finally, even if the armed citizen is completely impotent, at the very least, he or she will draw the “active shooter’s” attention and fire away from everyone else, for which the average non-gun-carrier should be thankful.

As a real-world example of this, consider this case, from College Park, GA:

Apparently, his intent was to rape and murder us all,” said student Charles Bailey.

Bailey said the gunmen started counting bullets. “The other guy asked how many (bullets) he had. He said he had enough,” said Bailey.

That’s when one student grabbed a gun out of a backpack and shot at the invader who was watching the men. The gunman ran out of the apartment.

The result of the incident is that one criminal is dead and the other is expected to be arrested soon. One of the innocent women was shot in the crossfire, and is expected to recover. As Issa points out over on Right to Bleed:

I wonder if anti-gun people will point to the injured woman as proof that “guns are bad”. I see this as an extremely effective case of self-and-other defense, though. One woman was injured, but 10 lives were probably saved. The college student was effective in killing or running off the men intent on doing harm, and 10 people are alive and not raped. That’s a success, and this man is a hero.