20/20's Anti-Self-Defense Propaganda:
The Stupidest "Experiment" in Human History?
Or: Diane Sawyer's Own Kobayashi Maru

Wow.

Just wow.

Have you seen this incredible nonsense? (Youtube: part 1; part 2. Watch it if you can, but it's so nauseatingly moronic you may not be able to make it all the way through.)

Diane Sawyer on 20/20 carefully constructs a piece of pure anti-self-defense, anti-firearm propaganda. No one who is even vaguely objective about this issue could possibly believe that this constitutes anything like a decent experiment to test...well...what the hypothesis is, exactly is never made clear. But apparently the conclusion is supposed to be something like:

Guns in the hands of criminals are so effective--yet in the hands of victims they are so ineffective--that even if you are cornered by a gun-wielding maniac, you are better off being unarmed than armed.

Here's how the "experiment" was set up:

A student with virtually no firearms training was put into a room full of experimental confederates. He was armed with a Glock firing paint ball cartridges, and not aware that there would be a mock attack. He was outfitted with bulky, unfamiliar equipment--a helmet, gloves, and a long white t-shirt. Without warning, a police firearms instructor pretending to be an attacker burst into the room. He fires two shots at the instructor, and then shoots the student/subject, who was always seated front row center.

Now, as you can clearly see, this is a Kobayashi Maru scenario. It's set up so that there is no way for the student to win. What's actually surprising is that the students did as well as they did--at least one of them shooting the attacker in the groin.

This "experiment," of course, shows us exactly nothing...except that the people who produced this segment are either extraordinarily stupid or extraordinarily biased.

Perhaps my favorite part comes when 20/20 adds a second attacker, concealed among the students, who also leaps up and shoots the subject. And then we have the super-duper Kobayashi Maru.

I mean, hell, why not just arm everybody in the room and have them all draw on the subject at once? Or send in the 82nd Airborne? I can hear it now, Diane Sawyer, in pious tones: even the armed students was not able to defend herself against these crack troops...and the follow-up airstrikes would have taken her out anyway...

There's a fallacy at work here that I've seen committed by many academic liberals when the topic of firearms arises. Goes like this:

Oh, yeah? Well suppose someone breaks into your house and comes into your bedroom and puts a gun to your head? What good does it do to have a gun of your own then?

Now, imagine someone--someone with a Ph.D. no less--making the following argument:

Oh, yeah? Well suppose that a fire starts in your house and the flames engulf the entire thing and you wake up just as you are engulfed by impenetrable walls of fire? What good does it do to have a fire extinguisher then?

But, believe it or not, it was one of my colleagues who first told me about the "experiment"...and he cited it as evidence against allowing CCW on campus. That is, he thought it was a good experiment. But no one seriously thinks that firearms--or fire extinguishers--make you invincible. They cannot miraculously save you from the worst possible situations. All they can do is skew the odds in your favor. Which is all you can ask of anything, from vaccines to seat belts. No one would accept such arguments unless they were biased on the subject to the point of blindness.

What would a real experiment look like here?

Something like this:

(1) The student/subject would get a bit of real training, and have familiar equipment.

(2) The "attacker" would not have extraordinary training--and would certainly not be a police firearms instructor.

(3) The attacker would not know that there was an armed subject in the room.

(4) The attacker would not know where the armed subject was seated (this, of course, follows from (3))

In some cases the attacker would go from classroom to classroom--then, of course, students after the first classroom would know he was coming and have the advantage. These simulations would be run twenty or thirty times, and we'd compare the number of innocent victims in two different kinds of scenarios:

(A) Those in which there was at least one armed student/subject.

(B) Those in which there were no armed student/subjects.

Of course we already know what the outcome would be without running the experiments--there will be fewer innocent casualties in A-type scenarios. Because you are better able to defend yourself against an armed attacker if you yourself are armed. And everyone not blinded by bias realizes this. If guns worked as Sawyer and 20/20 seem to believe, we'd be better off not arming our troops. After all, they're more likely to shoot each other than the bad guys.

I'd be nauseated by this blatant propaganda even if I were on the other side of this issue. And, heck, as a matter of fact, I don't even have a fixed position on the issue of CCW on campus. Though it's hard to resist the urge to allow this 20/20 drivel to push me farther to the pro-CCW side of the debate.