The Law of Averages

It has finally caught up with the whole “the criminal will just take your gun away from you,” meme long beaten to death by our opponents. Only took them nearly a quarter century of shall-issue to finally come up with a concrete example, but here it is.

A bit more on the law of averages, unrelated to this incident, which suggests that if there’s, say, six million people with concealed carry permits, that some percentage of them will be total morons, even though they will have cleared the hurdles and jumped through hoops. That percentage can be extremely small, but it’s still going to be the case that in any group as large as the number of concealed carry permits holders, or gun owners in general, not everyone is going to be a real genius.

This creates an interesting paradox for our opponents. On one side of the paradox, there will be more incidents of stupid people doing stupid things with guns, or incidents where a long time meme plays itself out. On the other side of the paradox, more people keeping and bearing arms means there’s a larger constituency to fight new gun control, so I’m not certain it really helps our opponents any.

I’ve generally of the opinion that the vast majority of people can be trusted to do the right thing, exercise good judgement, and be responsible. For me that’s reason enough in society to tolerate the very small minority of morons and losers. A primary difference between us an our opponents is that particular philosophy. They are more of the mindset that everyone freedom needs to be restricted, because you might be a moron or a loser. It kind of makes you wonder what they really think about their fellow citizens that they are willing to do that over the poor judgement and actions of the very few.

Hat Tip to Common Gunsense for the link, who hopefully won’t think this post amounts to illegal harassment.

11 thoughts on “The Law of Averages”

  1. Sounds like the victim suffered a sudden broken arm. Not much you can do to defend yourself from that. I’m not sure what the gun had to do with anything, even without the gun the victim would have lost the fight. The gun was a non issue.

  2. Sigh. Really Sebastian? Total moron? Cause he got bushwhacked, injured, and robbed?

    You were on the right track. I don’t do averages, got hardly no math left. But I know that nobody, no matter how alert they may be, maintains a perfect state of readiness all throughout the waking day. Sooner or later, probably several times an hour, everyone slips into Cooper’s “condition white”, if only for a minute or even a few seconds. It happens to soldiers, to cops, to you, and to everybody.

    So what the averages probably say is, with 6 million ccw carriers, sooner or later one was going to be, maybe only momentarily, distracted and witless and armed just when sumdood decided to jump ’em. That’s most likely what happened here, and it could as easily have been you, or me.

    If that makes you a moron, well, I’ll retract this criticism cause I guess we all are.

    JCB

    1. “Sigh. Really Sebastian? Total moron? Cause he got bushwhacked, injured, and robbed?”

      I missed it at first, too, but note the opening sentence of Sebastian’s second paragraph:

      A bit more on the law of averages, unrelated to this incident

      Emphasis mine.

      You are, however, correct in the rest of your comment. I would also add that, based on the media account, this is one of what I would consider the “nightmare scenarios” – in other words, something that is difficult or impossible to consistently defend against, regardless of one’s situational awareness, due to it’s very nature, and a classic example of the bad guy having the advantage of the initiative. Is the guy walking down the street towards you just walking down the street towards you, or does he have nefarious intent? Unless he’s giving off some kind of obvious warning sign, and especially if he’s managed to camouflage himself to “fit in” (i.e., for my area a younger guy with a backpack wearing Virginia Tech clothing would blend in perfectly), you can’t see it coming.

      It sucks for this guy, but being blindsided can happen to anybody even if you’re paying attention.

      1. As I recall, one of the worst real life nightmare scenarios was a killer who frequented the Appalachian Trail and would shoot individual hikers after they’d passed each other.

        And agreed, no matter how much you say CONSTANT VIGILANCE! to yourself, no matter how much you put into practice the Iraq advice of General James Mattis, USMC and current Commander of the US Central Command (and said to one of our “good” top commanders): “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet“, sometimes someone will get caught out. Although sometimes body armor can save you, if you can quickly cycle into something better than Condition Black.

        (Lots more good Mattis quotes at Wikiquote. How can you not love a guy who says “PowerPoint makes us stupid.“?)

    2. I actually added that bit in a second pass, to make it clear that I was not speaking of the incident linked, but was continuing on about the subject of rare events which could happen more often because more people are carrying.

      I didn’t want anyone to think I was speaking of the person linked as a moron, because I agree with your assessment of the situation.

      1. Fair enough! I certainly took it the way you didn’t want. The four added words make a significant difference. Won’t happen again. ;)

        1. Am deeply familiar with reading through things fast, so I take no offense. But I did bold the portion so others would get that I’m changing subject. Well, not subject, but away from that particular case. I do think that guy was just really unlucky. It can happen.

  3. Three comments: First, 360-degree security is difficult to maintain by one person, but anything less leaves the opening for the sucker-punch; second, to the people who insist that “limp-wristing” is at fault for some malfunction, the shooter is not always guaranteed the perfect grip, with two hands, full strength, unimpeded by broken bones, blisters, lacerations, crushed fingers, etc. I have had fingers stung, slashed, mashed, jammed, and nearly sawn off and I want that gun to fire even if my nearly cold, dead fingers can barely press the trigger.

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