20/20 last night

[Bman505]

Did anyone watch the 20/20 show last night? It was titled "Only if I had a Gun".

It was interesting and informative. Here is the link to the show.

http://abcnews.go.com/2020

[Grampa]

I thought it was predictable reporting.
Lets see....
1. Put a person with minimal training and practice up against a professional.
2. Put a person with minimal training and practice and gun holstered up against a professional with gun already drawn.
3. Make them do it with gloves on.
Yeah, the outcome is pretty much a given, don't ya think? Even so, the guys still got some hits on the pro, and gave some extra escape time to the rest of the "class", the latter of which was not mentioned in the report.
4. The "Gun Show Loophole" is still at the top of the list of things that when fixed is going to cure all the ills in the world.
The show was supposed to include John Stossel, but didn't. I guess his segment didn't jive with the point they were trying to make.
It did point out the need for practice, practice and more practice with different skills, moving, drawing while moving and shooting while moving. And don't forget to keep a low profile. And practice from your concealed carry condition.
Maybe these guys should take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night:D Hey, can I be a TV critic now?

[paul9mm]

yup setup for failure from the get go. Big gloves,helmot ,holster,clothing . The moment i saw it i knew how it was going to go.A very onesided message antigun dribble

[Bman505]

The other thing is that the person with the gun was always sitting in the same seat every time. The BG that came into the room with gun already drawn knew exactly who to go after. I thought this was unfair as well. I do think it is still good training though. I would like to see more training like this locally. I have never seen those kind of shells before. It would be good training though to do something like this.

[Jizzle]

who carries a snap holster for cc under a huge shirt? r u serious? also.

onsided. concentrate on your front sight like your life depends on it and you will hit every single time.

this was so one sided it isn't funny.

[Chuck]

Bman, that type of training is the best way to teach use of force. The rounds used on that program looked like simunitions but there is another round called FX that is very similar. Both are expensive and the vendors cater more to law enforcement and military than they should. The expense is so great that even when I had a say in an $8.5 million budget, we couldn't afford it. The best alternative I have found is airsoft. I have used it professionally for training. While it is second place to simunitions, it is still a very valuable training tool. Maybe we should continue that thought in a thread dedicated to force on force training?

On the topic of the program from the Ministry of Truth last night, with all respect to you as a friend, I must differ with the idea it was "interesting and informative." This program definately had a slant to the reporting. The scenarios were set up to demonstrate the results they wanted to show rather than to gather the real facts. The trainer taught basic marksmanship to the test subjects, not tactics. That is the difference between square range training and a real fight. If I recall correctly, the training shown was all in normal clothing with only eye protection, not with the masks, gloves, and a concealment garment that were used in the actual tests. Basically, the trainer set the test subject up to fail when they needed to draw under pressure and shoot while moving to cover.

I also detest the term "gunshow loophole". That term implies that there is something wrong or quasi-illegal about people conducting sales that are within the law. Legislation controlling these sales is another step toward the goal of outlawing any transfer of a firearm without prior government approval.

There was also a statment made that there were no studies to prove the value of firearms for self defense (I may be paraphrasing this a bit but that was what I understood). Did these folks miss John Lott's research?

I could go on but you get the idea. I don't believe the program was honest about the facts of gun ownership or self defense.

[Luvs2Play]

Semi-automatic assult weapons?

Every other day in America a kid is killed with a gun??

Bashing the NRA videos?

The VT gunman did not buy his guns at gunshows, he bought them at a gun store. Everything was done legally.

The people with minimun training also had minimal life experience. It worked just the way they wanted it to.

[Jizzle]

not to mention the BG went after the only armed person in the room each time. what if everyone was armed? huh? he'd have been in a world of hurt no matter how good or how untrained the people where. that kinda reporting really pisses me off. i didn't see it last night i just watched the one video today. my wife saw it last night and told me not to watch it... but i did anyway.. i should learn to listen to her. now i have a migraine.


BTW, i would be willing to bet a couple months pay that had you let me OC and i was the "test subject" that guy MIGHT have gotten the one round off at the teacher prior to being dropped on his head.

[AGust82]

I watched it, I wasn't surprised. The part with the gunman entering the room and shooting the student was absurd. Typical T.V. I guess.

[rtuck77]

the show was made to try to get people that dont much about guns to forget about guns another goverment attempt to try and get guns away from the public,also an attempt to convince us that do know something about guns and carrying them, to lie them down and say the gov is right that the bad guys are the only ones that need guns, that is only my opinon.

[Chuck]

John Lott wrote this on the 20/20 program. His analysis is accurate.
The link is here if you wish to verify: http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/04/15/lott__gun_control_experiment_rigged/

April 15th, 2009 5:08 PM Eastern
JOHN LOTT: ABC’s Shameful ‘20/20′ Experiment
By John R. Lott, Jr.

Gun control advocates look desperate. Last Friday night, on April 10, ABC aired a heavily promoted, hour long “20/20″ special called “If I Only Had a Gun.” It is ABC’s equivalent of NBC’s infamous exploding gas tanks in General Motors pickups where NBC rigged the truck to explode. With legislation in Texas and Missouri advancing to eliminate gun-free zones at universities, perhaps this response isn’t surprising.

The show started and ended by claiming that allowing potential victims to carry guns would not help keep them safe –- not even with hundreds of hours of practice firing guns.

No mention was made of the actual multiple victim public shootings stopped by people with concealed handguns nor did they describe who actually carried out such shootings. Instead, ABC presented a rigged experiment where one student in a classroom had a gun. But sometimes even the best editors can’t hide everything the camera sees.


The experiment was set up to make the student fail. It did not resemble a real-world shooting. The same scenario is shown three times, but in each case the student with the gun is seated in the same seat –- the center seat in the front row. The attacker is not only a top-notch shooter –- a firearms expert who teaches firearms tactics and strategy to police -– but also obviously knows precisely where the student with the gun is sitting.

Each time the experiment is run, the attacker first fires two shots at the teacher in the front of the class and then turns his gun directly on the very student with the gun. The attacker wastes no time trying to gun down any of the unarmed students. Thus, very unrealistically, between the very first shot setting the armed student on notice and the shots at the armed student, there is at most 2 seconds. The armed student is allowed virtually no time to react and, unsurprisingly, fails under the same circumstances that would have led even experienced police officers to fare poorly.

But in the real world, a typical shooter is not a top-notch firearms expert and has no clue about whether or not anyone might be armed and, if so, where they are seated. If you have 50 people –- a pretty typical college classroom –- and he is unknown to the attacker, the armed student is given a tremendous advantage. Actually, if the experiment run by “20/20″ seriously demonstrated anything, it highlighted the problem of relying on uniformed police or security guards for safety: the killer instantly knows whom to shoot first.

Yet, in the ABC experiment, the purposefully disadvantaged students are not just identified and facing (within less than 2 seconds) an attacker whose gun is already drawn. They are also forced to wear unfamiliar gloves, a helmet, and a holster. This only adds to the difficulties the students face in handling their guns.

Given this set-up the second student, Danielle, performed admirably well. She shot the firearms expert in his left leg near the groin. If real bullets had been used, that might well have disabled the attacker and cut short his shooting spree.

Nevertheless, even terrible shooters can often be quite effective. Despite all of ABC’s references to the Columbine attack, the network never mention the armed guard at the school. He had an unusually poor target shooting record –- indeed it is reported that he couldn’t even hit a target. Yet, his bravery still saved many lives because his poorly aimed shots forced the two killers to engage in gunfire with him. This slowed down their killing spree and gave many students a chance to escape the building. The guard was only forced to retreat and leave the school himself because of the homemade grenades that the Columbine murderers had.

The Columbine murderers strongly and actively opposed passage of Colorado’s right-to-carry law, particularly the part that would have allowed concealed handguns being legally carried on school campuses. What goes unnoticed is that the Columbine attack took place the very day that the state legislature scheduled final passage of the concealed handgun law.

Time after time the attackers in these multiple victim public shootings consciously avoid areas where people might be able to defend themselves. In the attack on the Jewish community center in Los Angeles in which five people were wounded, the attacker had apparently “scouted three of the West Coast’s most prominent Jewish institutions—the Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the University of Judaism—but found security too tight.”

In the real world, even having a gun and pointing it at an attacker has often convinced the attacker to stop shooting and surrender. Examples include high schools in Pearl, Mississippi and Edinboro, Pennsylvania, as well as the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. Street attacks in Memphis to Detroit ended this way, too, without any more shots fired.

Even if the cases don’t get much attention, gun permit holders stop these multiple victim attacks on a regular basis. Ironically, just this past Saturday, the day after ABC’s broadcast, a permit holder in Columbia, Texas stopped a mass robbery by fatally shooting the criminal. Some Web sites have started collecting these and other defensive gun use cases (e.g., see here, here, and here).

ABC’S “20/20″ exaggerates “the danger of accidentally hitting a friend” when confronting an attacker. The show cites as an example is a man who mistook his wife for an intruder. Obviously that case is a tragedy, but those cases are exceedingly rare. But why didn’t they present a single multiple victim attack as an example? Simple, because it has not happened.

ABC pushes the notion that gun show regulations, rather than arming potential victims, can stop these attacks. But very few criminals get their guns from gun shows: a U.S. Justice Department survey of 18,000 state prison inmates showed that less than one percent (0.7%) of prisoners had obtained their gun from a gun show. Even adding flea markets and gun shows together raises the number to just 1.7 percent. There is not a single academic study showing that regulating private individuals selling their own guns — the so-called “gun show loophole” — reduces any type of violent crime. What the regulations have accomplished is cutting the number of gun shows by 25 percent.

The show ends with this claim:

“If you are wondering where are all the studies about the effectiveness of guns used by ordinary Americans for self-defense, well keep searching, we could not find one reliable study and the ones we found were contradictory.”

Yet, “contradictory” is an overstatement. There have been 26 peer-reviewed studies published by criminologists and economists in academic journals and university presses. Most of these studies find large drops in crime. Some find no change, but not a single one shows an increase in crime.

You would think that if gun control worked as well as ABC implies, there wouldn’t be these multiple victim public shootings in those European countries with gun laws much stricter than those being publicly discussed in the United States or by ABC. Yet, multiple victim public shootings are quite common in Europe. In just the last few days, there have been a shooting at a college in Greece and in a crowded café in Rotterdam. Of course, the worst K-12 public school shootings are in Europe.

Given the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent annually in the United States for police officers on campus and other programs, one would hope that this relatively inexpensive alternative, where people are willing to bear the costs themselves to protect others, would be taken more seriously.

ABC never mentions a simple fact: all multiple victim public shootings with more than 3 people killed have occurred where permitted concealed handguns are prohibited. Rather than studying what actually happens during these shootings, ABC conjured up rigged experiments aimed at convincing Americans that guns are ineffective. Unfortunately, ABC’s advice, rather than making victims safe, makes things safer for attackers.

John Lott is a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland and the author of More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, second edition, 2000) and The Bias Against Guns (Regnery, 2003). Much of the discussion here is based on both books.