OK, so you don’t want to admit that my position is reasonable and you’re unwilling to actually provide any evidence for yours. Instead, you engage in something that I was soundly criticized for early in the discussion: speculation. I’m going to speculate again: no one is going to call you out on this the way they called me out on it. Interesting?
I’m happy to address your specific argument. Yes, the guy looks like he knows how to handle himself. To determine whether that proves my argument wrong, we’d need a better statistical model than the one we have: in instances of armed robberies, how often does active resistance result in injury or death in the case where the resister knows what he is doing. Had you provided data on this, it might have been useful for determining whether my position is really reasonable or not.
Since you didn’t and all we have to go on is speculation, let me suggest that it seems likely that even when the active resister knows what he is doing, it’s unlikely that the odds of injury or death decrease below the baseline for armed robberies with no resistance at all. Sure, they are probably not as high as for instance where the active resister doesn’t know what they’re doing, but the paper I found suggests that it’s 4-5 times more likely for active resistance to result in injury or death than allowing the robbery to proceed as an extremely conservative low-ball estimate (the data themselves suggest 10-12 times, but the paper gives several arguments why this is probably an overstatement).
So the odds of injury or death with Mr. Mustache Super Navy Seal Commando guy are less than 4-5 times as likely as in the case of letting the robbery proceed. Let’s say his super commando training cuts that in half. Well it’s still 2-2.5 times more likely for death or injury to result, and I still think it’s not good to use his super commando training to increase the chance of death or injury to innocent bystanders.
Is it possible that his super commando training could reduce the likelihood of injury or death below the baseline for letting the robbery proceed? Sure! It’s absolutely possible. But in the absence of definitive data about such cases, it still seems to me very reasonable to think this is implausible. As I mentioned above, anything can happen in a physical altercation. A quick google shows me that I was wrong about a dropped gun potentially discharging – this is apparently very rare. But it’s only a matter of a few inches for Mr. Mustache Cowboy Commando to miss his mark and cause the gunman to inadvertently pull the trigger and spray someone’s brains across the Doritos display.
So yeah, your argument is the best anyone has given. But what do you think my response should be? “Oh my gosh, I was so wrong this whole time! My God, it’s obvious now – Mr. Mustache had no choice but to resist the gunman! There was really no chance of his intervention going wrong, and if he hadn’t then everyone in the store would surely be murdered – of this we can be absolutely sure!” Is that a reasonable position?
Or is it OK for me to say that no, when you try to wrestle a guy with a gun you increase the odds of an innocent bystander being hurt or killed and that therefore it is a bad idea?
Bearing in mind, here, that I’ve been the only one in this thread to concede that his opponents might actually have a point. Would you like to be the second person to be so open-minded? Can you concede that your argument does nothing to show that I am definitely or even probably wrong about this, but at most that I am possibly wrong?
