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Originally Posted by Paul M
or perhaps everyone just got bored of the same thing being posted again and again.
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That's pretty much the case. This argument has been had repeatedly.
First, if someone stops a mass shooting before it becomes a mass shooting then no mass shooting occurred so those who wish to ban guns don't count it in their statistics.
Second, the majority of mass shootings occur in places where lawful gun owners are prohibited from carrying firearms. If a lawful gun owner is prevented from being armed then they really can't stop anything.
Third, it's nearly axiomatic that when a rampage shooter is engaged by an armed defender they "self terminate". The anti-gun crowd generally doesn't count that as an armed responder stopping the massacre.
For example, in 2012 a 20 year old kid with an AR-15 went into a shopping mall in Clackamas Oregon. The kid shot up the area outside a department store killing two people. He was confronted by a civilian who was carrying a concealed handgun. The civilian didn't shoot because of the potential to hit someone in the crowd but the assailant took that opportunity to head into a stairwell and commit suicide. The event isn't considered to be a "mass shooting" because less than 4 people were killed.
Last November a deranged man walked into a Costco (warehouse style retail store) in Lenexa, Kansas. The man announced that he was an off duty US Marshall and that he was there to kill people. An off duty Kansas City police officer confronted the deranged man, ordered him to drop the gun and killed him when the suspect turned to shoot. Again, no mass shooting will get counted because no mass shooting occurred. In this case it was stopped before it even got started.
In June of 2016 a man started shooting at a crowd outside a nightclub in Lyman, South Carolina. Someone in the vicinity was armed and returned fire. The shooter was struck in the leg and stopped shooting. Again, it isn't counted as a mass shooting because it doesn't fit the criteria.
When impossible or unrealistic parameters are put on any reply to a given argument it becomes useless to respond.