Jerry Falwell, Jr., Is Flat Wrong on Gun Violence

As quoted in the Atlantic:

At Liberty’s convocation service on Friday, the school president, Jerry Falwell Jr., responded to the San Bernardino shooting, saying, “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in and killed them.” He encouraged students to enroll in the university’s gratis certification course and said he was carrying a weapon “in my back pocket right now.” He concluded by saying, “Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.”

There are at least two problems with Falwell’s statements.

First, Falwell’s focus on Muslims in a country where the vast, vast, vast majority of gun violence is committed by non-Muslims is absurd. I’m far more worried about an Adam Lanza or a Dylann Roof than I am about Muslim terrorists. Did Falwell make a statement after the Virginia Tech shooting? I very much doubt it, but it was far more relevant to the security of Liberty University than Muslim terrorism will ever be.

That Falwell’s concern in the area of gun violence is Muslims throws his bigotry into start relief. Rather than coming to terms with the harsh reality behind the threat gun violence poses to too many ordinary Americans, Falwell would rather stigmatize the “other.” That Falwell would wait to say anything about the problem of gun violence in the U.S. until after a mass shooting by a Muslim perpetrator is reprehensible.

Second, Falwell seems unaware that adding guns to an active shooter situation often makes things worse, and is in no way the fix Falwell thinks it is.

A Texas pro-gun group organized a re-enactment of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in a bizarre bid to test what would have happened if one of the murdered scribes was armed.

But the experiment set up by the group The Truth About Guns backfired — in no scenario was the “armed civilian” able to take out both “terrorists.”

Perhaps even more disappointing for the pro-gun activists, only one of the volunteers playing the role of the armed civilian even managed to survive — by fleeing the scene.

And then of course there was this, in the aftermath of the Aurora shooting:

Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, said it’s impossible to know what would have happened had someone else been armed in the Aurora movie theater last Thursday night. However, Webster added, it’s “preposterous” to boldly assert that a concealed handgun would have prevented the tragedy.

“What could have conceivably happened is that someone with a gun in the theater could have started firing rounds and hit other people,” Webster told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. “Law enforcement officers make that mistake all too commonly. What would a citizen do amid all that smoke and chaos?”

I’m not sure how it’s not obvious that adding guns to a situation with an active shooter will result in additional casualties and make it difficult for police on the scene to determine who was the original shooter. This, combined with the Charlie Hebdo re-enactments, suggests that more guns is not the solution. Do we really want to return to the oft-romanticized but actually dangerous Wild West?

Oh, and you know what else? A domestic violence victim is seven times more likely to die at the hands of her abuser if he has access to a gun. Falwell doesn’t give a second thought to this or any other unintended consequences of his planned gun ownership expansion. When gun control opponents do address domestic violence, they argue that arming domestic violence victims would cut down on domestic violence. Their ignorance of the factors involved in domestic violence—and the research on the role of guns in domestic violence situations—is appalling.

Falwell’s statements are both bigoted and wrong—and startlingly so.