<...Another issue is whether a person COULD shoot a person as a function of a rapid response. I think given time and provocation they could, but as a first reaction - I doubt it. I really believe most people couldn't.

And in that case, the bad guy would take the gun away, and have either a gun, or two.



Proper reaction in a crisis situation--knowing when to shoot or not shoot is a big part of this--is a function of training and familiarity with the weapon, both of which are absolutely essential for anyone who intends to own a weapon.

There are plenty of cases where someone has shot a bad guy who needed it. There are hundreds of times MORE cases where a bad guy has been deterred or stopped by the presence of a weapon without a fatal shot being fired. These latter cases don't show up in the fatal shooting statistics--which is why they are weighted toward innocent victims as much as they are--but account for most of the defensive uses of a weapon.

Maybe you might freeze up, and maybe the bad guy might take your gun away, but your overall chances are a hell of a lot better than facing him with no weapon at all. It's like those people who don't wear seat belts because they fear being trapped in a burning car. Could happen, but cases where the belts save your life are far more common.

(As an aside, and to vent, giving airline pilots guns is plain dumb. The pilots are strapped into a small area so tightly they don't have the room to maneuver they would need, and the bad guys would know there's a gun on board if they could just get into the cockpit. There, I've said it. Sorry that was irrelevant.)

Not irrelevant to this discussion at all. Again, maybe the bad guy could break into the cockpit and take the guns away from both the pilot and copilot, who apparently would be sleeping through all this. Much more likely is that the first hijacker through the busted door would get a faceful of fragmentation bullet. Aiming a gun at the door doesn't take a lot of maneuvering. Even more likely is that the fact of a gun in the cockpit might make a hijacker think twice about getting into the cockpit in the first place.

The objective is not to stop all possible hijackings, any more than concealed weapons laws stop all crime. The objective is to make the operation much harder for the hijackers.

I would like to think we could defer to the judgements of the pilots themselves on this. Most are ex-military, competent, and well-trained, and one would think they would know something about it.