...an unregulated militia...

On February 12, 2007, armed with a Remington 870 shotgun and a .38 revolver, Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Bosnian refugeee, entered the Trolley Square shopping mall in Salt Lake City, Utah. He killed five people and wounded four others before being killed by Salt Lake Police sergeant Andrew Oblad.

Recently the Supreme Court ruled that every American has the right to a gun. That well-worn amendment, “the right to bear arms,” “a well-regulated militia,” amendment has been interpreted by the highest court in the land to mean that we can all start packing.

Even if I was rabidly anti-gun I’d have to go along, just from the sheer weight of numbers. There are something like 50,000,000 guns out there. Enough that someone, somewhere, with relatively little trouble can get his hands on a gun. You’d have as much luck stopping a tsunami with your hand as stopping the flood of guns in this country. Talovic got his weapons with relative ease.

Off-duty Ogden City Police officer Kenneth Hammond was in a Trolley Square restaurant with his wife when he heard gunshots. His wife is a 911 dispatcher, so she called 911 and said there was shooting, that her husband was in the mall in civilian clothes, but he had a gun and was going after the shooter. When SLC police arrived at the mall he was shouting that he was an off-duty police officer. If he hadn’t police could have seen him with a gun and at the least ordered him onto the ground, at worst shot and killed him.

Utah citizens are permitted, after passing some requirements, to have a concealed weapons permit. Several of my coworkers have permits. Whether they carry guns or not I don’t know. They’re concealed! But any citizen, without any requirements at all, can carry a gun outside his clothing. He just can’t have a loaded gun. I wonder how many people who carry like that—and there aren’t many—live with that restriction. Of course gun-carrying civilians are met with suspicion and even fear by people they encounter. One gun-totin’ man was in front of a city council complaining that police were hassling him because he wears his gun outside. Well, they might do that because they wonder why the guy is wearing a gun in the first place.

I think some of these folks imagine themselves as heroes in the Kenneth Hammond mode. Maybe the Trolley Square killings brought dreams of glory to some of our local gun carriers. The Trolley Square killings are usually mentioned when defending the right to carry a gun: “If a citizen had a gun Talovic would have been stopped in his tracks.” It could also be that people who carry guns might be targets of people carrying concealed weapons out to commit a crime. Rather than being a deterrent, maybe a bad guy could see the weapon, then come up from behind the holstered person and shoot him, then go about his robbery business without the threat from that person.

A couple of weeks ago a man with a concealed weapons permit, George R. Harrison, killed a mentally ill man who was waving a backpack and acting out. Mr. Harrison said he thought the man was going for a gun in his backpack, so he shot and killed him. There was no weapon. Police questioned Harrison but let him go. It’s hard to tell right now if any charges will be filed against him. The law says you have to feel you are in imminent danger, fear of your life or great bodily harm before you can shoot someone. Lots of police have gotten off on the charge of shooting a suspect because they thought there was a weapon.

Some communities with tight gun laws, like Washington D.C., are upset because of the Supreme Court decision. We’ve had mixed results with our gun laws in Utah. I don’t think they’ve been effect long enough to know whether they’re doing any real good or not. Maybe it’s just the absence of harm that is enough.

Maybe someday I’ll be in one of the high schools I service and someone will start shooting. Maybe someone with a carry permit will jump in and take out the shooter. But the shooting itself would be extremely rare—it has never happened in the 102-year history of my school district—but someone jumping in to save me would be even more rare.

I have two pistols. Don’t tell any bad guys, because I don’t have any bullets. I guess I could wave them at a robber who entered my house, but then he could shoot me for pulling a gun on him.