[Merci Alizée]

Originally Posted by Azhiri

I saw some quote from some guy somewhere who was using the incident as an example of why more people should be able to carry guns because someone could have stopped Holmes when he opened fire. Honestly, I think that's a terrible sentiment for two reasons -

1. The guy was covered in protective armor. He wouldn't have gone down too easily - and if someone managed to kill him, he wouldn't have been able to tip the police off after he was taken into custody that his apartment was rigged with explosives.

2. In the confusion with people running around, this guy armed, stalking up and down the aisles in the dark theater, anyone else with a gun on them could have easily gotten confused and ended up harming even more innocent people, and caused even more panic.

Yeah, if more people had guns then number could have easily been over 50. Instead of more people having guns if access to guns was more restricted then probably shooting might not happened. I doubt that such people would try to get illegal weapons.

In England, Wales and Scotland, the private ownership of most handguns was banned in 1997 following a gun massacre at a school in Dunblane and an earlier gun massacre in Hungerford in which the combined deaths was 35 and injured 30. Gun ownership and gun crime was already at a low level, which made these slaughters particularly concerning. Only an estimated 57,000 people —0.1% of the population owned such weapons prior to the ban.[69] In the UK, only 8 per cent of all criminal homicides are committed with a firearm of any kind.[70] In 2005/6 the number of such deaths in England and Wales (population 53.3 million) was just 50, a reduction of 36 per cent on the year before and lower than at any time since 1998/9.

There is no question, of course, that guns figure in countless murders, suicides and accidental deaths. Over the five years ending in 1997, the Justice Department says, there was an average of 36,000 firearms-related deaths a year. (Fifty-one percent were suicides, and 44 percent homicides.)

However,

Among the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws.

This suggests that there are many factors which have to be considered before taking any long term decision to prevent such cases.