dk:
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The benefits will far outweigh the consequences now that people can walk down a public street and worry less about finding themselves at the total mercy of a gun toting criminal.
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it seems to me that the person who operates in this thread with a priori assumptions is you. you appear to use this scenario to limit the implication of this legislation. you seem to want to reduce discussion to a switch-the-scenario game.
i simply presented an example of something that i, for better or worse, see happening on a semi-regular basis (usually as i am coming home from somewhere else) and imagined what would happen if that same type of situation unfolded if more people involved were armed
i would imagine that the "collateral damage" would cancel out the profit/loss calculation you present.
do you live in a city?
could you try again to explain to me how the possibility of bullets being sprayed on an even more regular basis than they presently are is supposed to make anyone safer?
particularly in an urban setting.
i can sort of understand how this legislation might be confused with something rational if you live in an rural area, say, with a small police force that may have to travel a considerable distance to get to a problematic situation--but in a city, things go otherwise--in philadelphia, for example, there are lots of cops. they arrive fairly quickly to where they are called to (well...more quickly than would a cop who has to drive 20 miles to get to it would)
say the cops turn up during one of your Law Abiding Citizen vs. EvilDoer situations--how do you imagine the cop would be able to sort out who was who, which gun was the good one, which the bad? would you not expect the cop to feel equally threatened by all the guns?
would this not escalate the situation unreasonably, adding more folk who feel threatened into an already volatile mix, increasing the possibilities of death, not just for those involved, but for people standing nearby or walking on the same street somewhere before the bullet's weight causes its trajectory to cease, or someone sitting in a nearby apartment watching tv, just anyone, a man, a woman, a child?
you cannot seriously believe that in such a volatile situation that everyone would be able to muster the concentration required to be sure that no bullets missed their target....i dont care what you assumptions are behind the notion of "responsible gun ownership" or "law abiding citizen"--panic is panic and panic with guns means that innocent people will be wounded or die in greater numbers than they already do--which is already too many, because there are already far too many guns in urban situations.
i'm sorry but the more i think about this legislation, the less sense it makes to me. it almost seems motivated by a resentment toward those of us who live in urban spaces, based on arguments that in a city seem moot, evaluated on the basis of an everyday experience that has nothing do do with living in a city. it does not seem to have been thought out as a law at all, one that would apply equally in all types of socal space.