The scariest gun story last week was not in Oregon

Of course the tragic mass shooting on an Oregon college campus was awful and should motivate, finally, our law-makers to pass sensible gun control legislation.

But it was not the scariest story of the week.    This one frightens me even more:

A shopper in a Home Depot parking lot in Michigan witnessed an employee trying to stop a suspected shoplifter, who drove away in his car.   This woman, who had a concealed carry license, pulled out her 9 mm handgun and fired repeatedly at the SUV speeding out of the lot.  Luckily she did not hit the driver or any other customers, although she may have hit one of the tires of the fleeing car.

What is the difference that makes the second one frighten me more?   The Oregon shooter was an obviously disturbed young man acting out of some distorted view of his place in the world.

Despite the media attention that makes mass shootings seem ever more frequent, they are actually relatively rare as handgun deaths go, considering the tens of thousands of gun deaths from domestic violence, drug deals, robberies, suicides, and accidents with a gun in the home.    And we have solutions, if we only had the will to implement them:   sensible gun control laws, increased public awareness of danger signals in disturbed individuals, and more accessible mental health services.   It worked in Australia.

The woman in the parking lot scares me more, because this incident reflects, not emotional disturbance in an individual intent on killing, but a gun culture gone wild.  That Wild West belief that it's always a potential shoot-out every time we go to the mall, or a movie theater, or a college campus is just crazy in 2015.

We have to (1) stop glorifying the man -- and increasingly, the woman -- with a gun as the solution in every exciting, action-driven movie and tv plot;  (2) we have to educate the public about the dangers of untrained and overwrought individuals thinking that the solution to gun threats is more guns, more readily available.   Arming kindergarten teachers is a very bad idea.   Random strangers with guns in parking lots playing at being an action hero is also a very bad idea.

In contrast, on the Oregon campus, there was a student at the scene who had a permit and was carrying his gun, and he wisely chose not to start firing.   He was a military veteran, trained in the use of his gun;  and he knew the dangers:  (1) he did not have a good, clear opportunity to hit the shooter;  (2) he might hit someone else;  and (3) in a crowd scene like this, if the police arrived and saw him standing there with a gun, they would likely assume that he was the shooter -- and shoot him.

Ralph