Jefferson Co Sheriff’s Office: "We just don’t know the difference” between Good Guy(tm) & Murderer

[phantom power]

One of the several gaping holes in the "armed society" theory of public safety is that you can't actually tell if that guy with the gun is a Good Guy With A Gun(tm) or a mass shooting about to happen.

In gun insanity news, more details are emerging about the Colorado Springs shooting a few days back — specifically, what role Colorado’s public gun-fondling statute played in delaying police response to the mass shooting. A neighbor had called 911 to report an armed man on the street, but the dispatcher told the caller that “Colorado allows public handling of firearms.”

Shortly thereafter, the man opened fire, killing three people at random before the cops shot him dead. From the Denver Post:

Police agencies statewide say the statute poses a difficult question of how to react when citizens call — frequently — to report an armed person in public. Is it an emergency or not?

[snip]

“Is this person exercising their rights or about to start a very serious situation in which someone is going to be killed?” said Jacki Kelley, spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. “We just don’t know the difference.”

...

Flippancy aside, the law needs to be changed. But I have no doubt that our fellow citizens will once again weigh asshole gun nuts’ irresistible compulsion to fondle instruments of death in public places against the imperatives of public safety and common sense and find that the former supersedes the latter because shut up, that’s why.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/11/04/superheroes-gun-nuts-etc-open-thread/