Reply #3: "Police stations"? Plural?

[Euromutt]

To my knowledge, there's one instance of an attempted mass shooting occurring in a police station, namely in Detroit last January. Note that I say "attempted" because while the gunman wounded four officers, the only person killed was himself when the officers present almost immediately returned fire. Thus, the prospective victims were able to cut the (presumably) intended massacre well short, due to the fact they were armed, and didn't have to wait 30, 45, even 90 minutes for somebody with guns to arrive and intervene.

So this isn't a frequent occurrence; it's not even an infrequent occurrence. It's a one-off and given how it played out, we can see exactly why almost nobody even tries to commit--let alone succeeds in committing--mass murder in a police station.

<...> let's not forget we have an equivalent of the Norway tragedy EVERY SINGLE DAY in the U.S., and that's largly due to gun availability (or partly due to it).

No we don't. Over the most recent five-year period for which FBI UCR data is available (2005-2009), we had an average of 39.9 homicides per day. Of those, 26.9 were committed with firearms. And that's in a country with a population 64 times that of Norway. Moreover, less than a percent of firearm homicide victims are random victims of mass shootings: people who wound up dead because they had the misfortune to be in a particular location when some loser decided to make people think he was important by killing a bunch of defenseless strangers.

And your proposal, your assertion to the contrary notwithstanding, is not a solution, and certainly not the solution. Hell, you yourself have to hand-wave away "all the objections for a moment" in making your case. But a "solution" which requires you to ignore the obstacles to practicability before you can make it work isn't really a solution, is it?

Essentially, you've set up a variation on the "if it saves just one life, it'll be worth it" mantra of the Brady Campaign et al. But as with that mantra, you're willfully overlooking other potential costs, namely the cost in lives, suffered mental and physical trauma, and property lost or destroyed because the victim was unable to effectively defend him- or herself due to having been denied a license by your medical board. You may have noticed that over the past 25 years, discretionary licensing has fallen somewhat out of fashion in this country; there's a reason for that, namely that "may issue" in practice means "may (and invariably will) discriminate."

And then there are some principles of the rule of law at stake. It's Political Science 101 that "authority" is the legitimate exercise of power, and that legitimacy comes from concomitant responsibility. When a government refuses to take responsibility for the protection of the individual citizen, and to accept liability for failing to do so (see Warren v. D.C., DeShaney v. Winnebago, Castle Rock, CO v. Gonzales), it ipso facto abdicates any authority to deprive the individual citizen of the means to protect himself. And given the current state of technology, the most effective means of protecting oneself against an imminent threat to life and limb is firearms.