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Originally Posted by MrSelfDestruct
You may also remember an incident about three or four weeks ago that made national news. An armed robber shot and killed two jewelers in Fairfield, CT. The Donnellys were unarmed, and because of this, they were both killed in cold blood. I had met them previously, and they were two of the nicest people you could imagine. I pride myself (maybe wrongly) on being desensetized to almost everything, but when I saw security camera footage of Mrs. Donnelly on her knees pleading for the robber not to shoot her, I knew what I was seeing, and I was physically ill after seeing that. If even one of them had been armed, a man who had killed several people before in robberies that he carried out to support his drug habit would be dead instead of two innocent people who remind everyone of their favority aunt and uncle or grandparents. If one person walking by had been armed, he or she could have saved those innocent people, even if he or she didn't feel the need to own a gun because they live in this town where yearly violent crimes (aside from the occasional high school fight or drunken bar fight) can be counted on one hand.
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While the scenario you described is certainly tragic, I think it's important to seperate causal inference from speculation.
You premise this paragraph on the assumption that the couple was killed because they were unarmed, and later that others in the area weren't armed. I want to point out that neither you nor I will ever know if the situation would have been different had the people been armed. We also don't know how this relates to the millions of people robbed without being killed--possibly because they weren't armed, or possibly due to luck or whathaveyou.
The only causal statement we can accurately make, with certainty, in this scenario is that the couple died as a result of someone being armed with a gun. So while your statements seem to make sense, and resonate with myself and no doubt others, they can not be made to relay a truth from this story. There is no overarching moral to this story suggesting that armed victims or populace would have de-escalated the situation you described. The speculations confirm your suspicions, but that's about all they do in this situation. Not much to be done about it, it's not as though we can really do a pre and post test of these kinds of interations--so we need to look to quasi-experimentation and see what the literature says rather than create social policy as a response to heartwrenching stories and speculation on what could have changed the interaction.