re: #253 Dark_Falcon

No, for the most part they didn’t. Loughner had magazine failures that allowed him to be pulled down and subdued, while Holmes’ rifle suffered a jam he could clear.

Of the three ‘big’ recent mass shooters, only Adam Lanza actually knew his weapon, as only he was able to clear a jam and resume killing. Most of these scum don’t practice clearing jams and thus they are effectively disarmed if their weapon suffers a jam.

Loughner’s mistake is that he hadn’t taken time to train himself to fast change a magazine, something made harder when dealing with an extended mag. A trained shooter would have been comfortable with changing magazines without looking at the gun. And Holmes did exactly what you’re taught to do in the military when your primary weapon jams and you don’t have time to fix the jam: Switch over to a secondary weapon, which in his case happened to be a shotgun.

If anything, comparing the former two incidents to Lanza show that training people with how to handle guns just makes them more lethal if they should decide to turn those guns on others.