The Tech Support Dilemma, why guns cannot stop mass shootings.

In tech support, there is a joke that goes something like this. When everything is going well, management asks what do we pay you for? When everything is broken, manage asks what do we pay you for?

If a tech problem is avoided, then often people see it as there being no tech problem at all. If a tech problem is mitigated and kept from being worse, people see it as being a tech problem that wasn’t avoided. It is a catch-22 where nothing one can do is ever good enough. The only way to make people happy is the find the exact moment when a tech problem becomes recognizable enough to be solved and then immediately solve it. Solve it too fast, it never existed, so what are you being paid for? Solve it too slow, a problem occurred, so what are you being paid for? In the end tech support never solves IT problems, so why don’t we just cut their budget? It sounds almost farcical until you’ve talked with those in tech support who have had their budget cut with similar reasons being given.

The notion of a good guy with a gun stopping mass shootings has a similar problem. Stop it too soon and it isn’t a mass shooting. Stop it too late and it was a mass shooting that wasn’t stopped. Those who support the idea of guns stopping mass shootings will focus on the possibility that a mass shooting would’ve occurred in the first case and on the possibility that the mass shooting would have been even worse in the second case.

That’s rarely good enough for someone who rejects the narrative. They’ll instead focus on the actuals. In the first case, there was no mass shooting, so it doesn’t show up as a mass shooting that was prevented. In the second case, the mass shooting occurred, so the mass shooting wasn’t prevented. The concept of a mass shooting that was prevented ends up being twisted into an idea that isn’t logically possible, which those who reject the good guy with a gun approach are far too often all too happy to use.

One common example is with media coverage. If the mass shooting is prevented, it isn’t major news and doesn’t get much coverage. If a mass shooting occurs and is stopped by someone with a gun, the focus is rarely on how much worse it could have been and instead on how bad it already was. This makes it quite easy for a person to begin thinking that guns never stop mass shootings.