Deadly attack in Belgium

[Svartalf]

gun nut? the guy was a common criminal, not a gun enthusiast.

[Gallstones]

"Gun Nut goes Mad" - blame rests on citizens without guns.

Even I have to

[Azathoth]

Let's see:
Belgium,

Strict gun control laws. Check!
Prohibition on lawful concealed carry. Check!
Ineffective police state. Check!
Large crowds of unarmed citizens. Check!
Nutter with guns and hand grenades the only armed person in the crowd. Check!

Chalk another massacre up to hoplophobia and a disarmed citizenry. Check!

The guy was in an elevated position with an assault rifle and grenades. Do you think returning fire with a handgun is the best course of action? Seriously?

[Seth]

"Gun Nut goes Mad" - blame rests on citizens without guns.

Yup. If they had been armed, some of them would have likely been able to intervene or at least distract the killer from shooting others.

But, like most of the rest of the world, they are sheeple in Belgium, at the mercy of whomever has the guns.

[Seth]

Let's see:
Belgium,

Strict gun control laws. Check!
Prohibition on lawful concealed carry. Check!
Ineffective police state. Check!
Large crowds of unarmed citizens. Check!
Nutter with guns and hand grenades the only armed person in the crowd. Check!

Chalk another massacre up to hoplophobia and a disarmed citizenry. Check!

The guy was in an elevated position with an assault rifle and grenades. Do you think returning fire with a handgun is the best course of action? Seriously?

Beats the shit out of standing there like a dumb sheeple and getting shot. Every second that a deranged murderer has to spend ducking bullets impacting around him is a second that others have to find cover.

Just like the Texas Tower incident, it should have been armed citizens engaging the shooter, even from a distance, to keep him thinking about avoiding bullets. But, there are no armed citizens in Belgium, are there? Nope.

[Tero]

12 years for murder
2 months for everything else

Check!

[Atheist-Lite]

There is a sign here, the shape of things to come, now Europe stands alone with neither the UK nor the rest of the world to rescue it. For a second the lone gunman was king and then he was dead. Yet reality is multi-layed, deep and mysterious with many things unexplained by their coincidence, and a strange synchronicity pervades our lives from the first day to our last. Written into the fabric of our reality are rules and connections, correspondences and patterns of which we are only vaguely aware. So many questions are left unanswered because they are too hard to formulate in the first place. This is surely a prescient timely symbolic abinger for the fate of Europe itself?

[amok]

Let's see:
Belgium,

Strict gun control laws. Check!
Prohibition on lawful concealed carry. Check!
Ineffective police state. Check!
Large crowds of unarmed citizens. Check!
Nutter with guns and hand grenades the only armed person in the crowd. Check!

Chalk another massacre up to hoplophobia and a disarmed citizenry. Check!

The guy was in an elevated position with an assault rifle and grenades. Do you think returning fire with a handgun is the best course of action? Seriously?

Beats the shit out of standing there like a dumb sheeple and getting shot. Every second that a deranged murderer has to spend ducking bullets impacting around him is a second that others have to find cover.

Just like the Texas Tower incident, it should have been armed citizens engaging the shooter, even from a distance, to keep him thinking about avoiding bullets. But, there are no armed citizens in Belgium, are there? Nope.

I don't know. This carnage apparently took place over the span of about 10 seconds.

"He wanted to hurt as many people as possible," journalist Nicolas Gilenne told AFP. "I heard four explosions and shots during about 10 seconds."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16172662

Even if there had been a dozen people in the crowd carrying (legally concealed) weapons, identifying and isolating the shooter to the degree of certainty that I often hear about in "righteous" shooting debates might not have made a bit of difference. And add to that the initial on-the-spot "witness" reports, stemming from Twitter and other social media, reported that there were three shooters. Wouldn't a dozen armed, innocent, well-intentioned citizens who each saw another 11 armed, innocent, well-intentioned citizens amidst bodies in the street simply assume the other people with guns were responsible for the murders, and shoot them? I can see this going very wrong, very quickly.

In the Norway case, unless I'm having a complete mental block, wasn't the shooter dressed as a police officer? Even if there had been legally armed citizens there, if you came bounding around a corner after hearing shots, and then see dead and wounded people and a "police officer" standing there, who in their right mind would shoot the "police officer"? The logical assumption would be that the shooter was either hidden, and the police officer was trying to find him/her, or the shooter was one of the dead or wounded, and the police officer had already shot him/her. Again, unless I'm mis-remembering, isn't that exactly what happened to the security officer on the scene (an off-duty police officer). He approached the killer, thinking he was a fellow police officer, and was killed.

[JimC]

Well said, Amok. I'm not denying that there may be situations where armed civilians in the right place at the right time might well be effective and save lives. However, this was probably not one of those times.

I don't believe incidents like this are useful evidence in the ongoing gun debate...

[Seth]

Let's see:
Belgium,

Strict gun control laws. Check!
Prohibition on lawful concealed carry. Check!
Ineffective police state. Check!
Large crowds of unarmed citizens. Check!
Nutter with guns and hand grenades the only armed person in the crowd. Check!

Chalk another massacre up to hoplophobia and a disarmed citizenry. Check!

The guy was in an elevated position with an assault rifle and grenades. Do you think returning fire with a handgun is the best course of action? Seriously?

Beats the shit out of standing there like a dumb sheeple and getting shot. Every second that a deranged murderer has to spend ducking bullets impacting around him is a second that others have to find cover.

Just like the Texas Tower incident, it should have been armed citizens engaging the shooter, even from a distance, to keep him thinking about avoiding bullets. But, there are no armed citizens in Belgium, are there? Nope.

I don't know. This carnage apparently took place over the span of about 10 seconds.

"He wanted to hurt as many people as possible," journalist Nicolas Gilenne told AFP. "I heard four explosions and shots during about 10 seconds."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16172662

Even if there had been a dozen people in the crowd carrying (legally concealed) weapons, identifying and isolating the shooter to the degree of certainty that I often hear about in "righteous" shooting debates might not have made a bit of difference.

Quite right, it might not have. Or it might have. What we know for certain is that the only person with a gun was the killer, so we'll never know if a lawfully-armed citizen could have made a difference.

And add to that the initial on-the-spot "witness" reports, stemming from Twitter and other social media, reported that there were three shooters. Wouldn't a dozen armed, innocent, well-intentioned citizens who each saw another 11 armed, innocent, well-intentioned citizens amidst bodies in the street simply assume the other people with guns were responsible for the murders, and shoot them? I can see this going very wrong, very quickly.

Possible, but doubtful, since armed law abiding citizens aren't the ones shooting INTO the crowd. According to FBI statistics, armed citizens are 11 times less likely to shoot in a violent confrontation than police officers are, which brings the chances of mistaken identity down quite a bit. But what we do know is that when the government disarms its own citizens, they are helpless before armed killers, and regardless of the associated risks, disarming ANY law-abiding citizen is immoral and a violation of their fundamental human rights.

In the Norway case, unless I'm having a complete mental block, wasn't the shooter dressed as a police officer? Even if there had been legally armed citizens there, if you came bounding around a corner after hearing shots, and then see dead and wounded people and a "police officer" standing there, who in their right mind would shoot the "police officer"? The logical assumption would be that the shooter was either hidden, and the police officer was trying to find him/her, or the shooter was one of the dead or wounded, and the police officer had already shot him/her. Again, unless I'm mis-remembering, isn't that exactly what happened to the security officer on the scene (an off-duty police officer). He approached the killer, thinking he was a fellow police officer, and was killed.

He was the FIRST person killed, as I heard it, as a part of the killer's plan to eliminate any possible resistance. It becomes rapidly clear when someone dressed as a police officer is shooting everyone in sight that he's a) not a police officer; or b) is a deranged police officer. In either case, a uniform should never stop a law abiding citizen from preventing an innocent person from being killed by ANYONE with a gun, uniformed or otherwise. All the uniform does is give the killer the first advantage. After that, it's blindingly obvious who the bad guy is who needs to be shot.

But even it it's not obvious, it's still immoral to disarm someone and turn them into a helpless victim.

[Seth]

Well said, Amok. I'm not denying that there may be situations where armed civilians in the right place at the right time might well be effective and save lives. However, this was probably not one of those times.

I don't believe incidents like this are useful evidence in the ongoing gun debate...

Nor are they useful as justifications for gun bans. And yet they are consistently used as such.

[amok]

Seth wrote:
Possible, but doubtful, since armed law abiding citizens aren't the ones shooting INTO the crowd. According to FBI statistics, armed citizens are 11 times less likely to shoot in a violent confrontation than police officers are, which brings the chances of mistaken identity down quite a bit. But what we do know is that when the government disarms its own citizens, they are helpless before armed killers, and regardless of the associated risks, disarming ANY law-abiding citizen is immoral and a violation of their fundamental human rights.

I'm not getting it. The scenario I was talking about was not law-abiding citizens shooting INTO a crowd. It was law-abiding citizens shooting other well-meaning, law-abiding citizens, after the non-law-abiding citizen has already blown his/her own brains out, because they see people holding guns moments after someone (or a few someones, because, who knows at that point?) has/have gone feral in the marketplace.

Coincidentally, I wandered down to an outdoor Christmas craft market here this evening on my dinner break, and was thinking about what would happen if either a nutter or a terrorist started shooting. There were probably 400 people walking around the stalls, and another 100 or so inside the various cafes and storefront locations. If I had have had a gun (keeping in mind the assumption that I'd know how to use it), if shooting broke out somewhere out of my range of vision, and also adding the possibility that not only I but everyone else was legally able to have a gun, who would we shoot? Someone holding a gun? What if he/she' turns out to be another good guy, who pulled out his/her gun to stop the bad guy(s)?

[Clinton Huxley]

@Amok - absolutely right. Having more armed people taking potshots in a large crowd like this would have lead to an even higher death toll. The average hoplomaniac seems to think that real life is like a shooting range.

[MrJonno]

Better a gun nut going on the rampage every weekend than having the general lunatic public carrying guns.

They have a discussion in the UK about whether if the police had been armed during the Cumbria shooting and its almost certain it would have saved a couple of lives but sensibly it was decided that the arms escalation if this happened would kill far more people.

You do not take actions that will save a persons life if this is at the cost of a lot more lives

[JimC]

Better a gun nut going on the rampage every weekend than having the general lunatic public carrying guns.

They have a discussion in the UK about whether if the police had been armed during the Cumbria shooting and its almost certain it would have saved a couple of lives but sensibly it was decided that the arms escalation if this happened would kill far more people.

You do not take actions that will save a persons life if this is at the cost of a lot more lives

I am perfectly happy for police to go armed; they virtually all are in Australia...

Just not keen on the idea of hordes of gun-toting civilians thinking they are reincarnations of Wyatt Earp...