Eleven Fewer Dead People
A deep dive on the Greenwood Park Mall shooting shows a clear path to even fewer dead people than that

On Sunday July 17, 2022, some dork with two rifles and a handgun attempted to shoot up the Greenwood Park Mall food court in Greenwood Indiana. In the span of only fifteen seconds he was shot eight times by private citizen Elisjsha Dicken, an 80% hit rate from forty yards with a double stack nine millimeter handgun, whereupon the dork decided to flee to the bathroom and do us all the favor of dying there. We have much to unpack about this instance, but five key points with mathematical backing show a clear path to saving hundreds of future lives, and further show why the media doesn’t want to save them. Let’s begin.

A Tom Brady Moment

Gun Free Zones Almost Killed Eleven People

This entire engagement transpired in a gun free zone. If Mr. Dicken had followed the rules on the sign, then 11.29 additional people (by averages) would be dead. The gun free zone sign did not deter the shooter, and eleven people in that food court owe their lives to the fact that Dicken also ignored the sign. This is indisputable.

Permit Carry Laws Almost Killed Eleven People

While the local Greenwood Police Department has been glowing over the efforts of Mr. Dicken, the Indiana effort to pass this law was opposed most publicly by law enforcement officials, such as Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter who testified against it. If Doug Carter had gotten his way 11.29 additional people would be dead. This is indisputable.

Uvalde Comparison

This cartoon from the Washington Post doesn’t even begin to describe the contrast between these two rampage shooting incidents. Not only did the Uvalde police response do nothing for almost an hour, they actively prevented multiple private citizens from responding on their own. They were very specifically acting as a security detail for a rampage shooter. They arrested parents to prevent them from entering the building. They even intercepted one police officer whose wife was dying in her classroom, disarmed him, and escorted him off scene. A more accurate version of this political cartoon would have 376 police officers surrounding the rampage shooter on a pile of bleeding yet not yet dead bodies, with their backs to him preventing citizens from saving the pile of injured people from dying. That is not an exaggeration.

The official inquiry into Uvalde is not complete as of the writing of this piece. It could be that the Uvalde failure was due to chicken shit cops. It could be due to the fact that all government of all kinds moves at the speed of molasses infused mud. It could be some secret tinfoil hat conspiracy. It could be something else, or some or all of the above. We don’t know. But what we do know is response time differences matter, and we know that 11.96 people are saved when the cops aren’t involved, 11.29 in this case.

I am not someone who lives in fear of rampage shootings. I understand the statistics, which show that these things are as rare as shark attacks, and I do not live in fear of sharks. But some people do live with this fear, because different people have different risk tolerances. It seems to me that some people who live with this fear have some significant overlap with ACAB (“all cops are bastards”) messaging. If you are a rational person within either or both of those groups, and compare Uvalde to Greenwood, you must conclude that absent a non-existent magic gun evaporation fairy the best alternative is ubiquitous citizen concealed carry. This is indisputable.

Mass Media Social Contagion

I will not claim that CNN’s stated goal is to glorify rampage shooters, but that’s the exact effect CNN’s behavior has in the mind of a potential rampage shooter. If CNN reversed its behavior and gave twenty five times more coverage to Dicken instead of Uvalde, then the psychological effects would dampen rampage shooters instead of inciting them. This very rampage shooter may have been spurred on by CNN’s behavior, and CNN gets 30% more rampage shootings to farm for clickbait money because of their behavior.

If the United States were to string together three consecutive incidents of rampage shooters getting plugged by private citizens within seconds, as happened in Greenwood Park Mall, and CNN were to give each of them the sorts of coverage they give to Uvalde, the rampage shooter dorks would be too scared to try it. They’d stay in their basement playing XBox instead of shooting people, and the second order effects of constitutional carry would exceed 11.96 saved per incident, because there would be fewer incidents. CNN not covering rampage shootings at all would reduce rampage shootings by one third. If they elevated coverage of failed rampage shootings stopped by citizens, they’d probably reduce them by an additional third.

But they don’t want to do that, because they’re hemorrhaging money. They need as many of these things to transpire as possible to make their bottom line. They are beholden to Moloch, trapped in a cycle that gets people killed, and the only way I can figure out of this cycle is to produce a lot more citizen shooters like Dicken.

The only way out is to shoot our way out and it’s CNN’s fault.