Good guys?

I confess that I’ve tried to avoid much of the reportage about the major gun deaths last week. By “major”, I’m referring to the events in Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Minn., and Dallas; not the however-many other murders, suicides and deaths by misadventure in which firearms were involved during that period.

And by “avoided”, I mean I tried to limit my consumption to one time around for each substantial development, instead of getting it over and over again from different outlets.

But this report, via the New York Times, got my attention. Because, as I understand it, when the shooting started last Thursday night in Dallas, the police were initially trying to sort out who was actually firing from among the score or so of idiots at the march who were carrying assault rifles.

No, I swear I am not making this up. Twenty or 30 Texans showed up at the protest march with AR-15s slung over their shoulders and, according to Dallas police chief David O. Brown, “They were wearing gas masks. They were wearing bulletproof vests and camo fatigues, for effect, for whatever reason.” Because it’s legal to do this in Texas.

But—and this is the part that just…well, I don’t know what it does, but here: when the shooting started, these Kevlar-clad, gas-masked warriors-in-their-own-minds...they ran. They hightailed it into the crowd, and the cops had to work out on the fly who was actually killing people and who was just figuratively engaged in willie waving .

I don’t have a take on whether having to sort out the genuine trigger-squeezing rifleman from the poseurs delayed locating the shooter, or whether one or more of the deaths can be chalked up to this confusion. But I would like to know, in light of the NRA’s standard argument that the solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns, why they’re not explaining what the actual fuck happened here.

Because their poster boys for good guys with assault rifles (and Kevlar, cammies and gas masks) did not stand and shoot back when the bad guy opened up, they ran. 

They ran. 

They ran.

So tell me again, NRA: how is this good-guys-with-guns thing supposed to work?