Gun owners in America need more training, not more guns: professor

Plenty of Americans own guns, but not enough of them have high-quality weapons training, a professor wrote for Slate Saturday.

Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College, said in the article that not everyone can live up to the archetype of the "good guy with a gun" who foils a mass shooting, because they don't have the proper experience or training with weapons. This is the same Harper who said "Don't Look Up" was about more than climate change.

Harper pointed to several recent developments that show what happens when people without training are trigger happy.

"Over the last week, the country saw a series of grotesque shootings as a trio of trigger-happy gun owners—reacting out of panic, vitriol, racist paranoia, or a combination of the three—fired on innocents who simply got in the wrong car, showed up at the wrong doorstep, or pulled down the wrong driveway," Harper wrote Saturday. "On April 13, 84-year-old Andrew Lester shot in the head and nearly killed Ralph Yarl—a Black teen who was on a mission to pick up his siblings and walked up to Lester’s house in error. Two days later, on April 15, a 20-year-old woman named Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed in upstate New York after the car she was in pulled down the wrong driveway in search of a party. And on April 18, a pair of Texas cheerleaders were shot in a grocery store parking lot after they accidentally tried to get in a stranger’s vehicle."

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Harper said these horrific events clustered together can show us only one thing: "The average gun owner is bad at guns, and knowing when to use them."

Harper, a gun owner himself, added that the "good guy with a gun" trope is a myth because the average American is ill-prepared for such an event. That, he said, is because the "majority of states require no formal safety or marksman training to purchase a gun or even carry it concealed."

"The average gun owner is scarcely more prepared to engage in an impromptu firefight than any randomly selected dude from the phone book," Harper said in the piece.