What if Kendrick Castillo was encouraged as a child to carry a handgun every day of his life? What if he was competent with that handgun, and he could shoot a human-sized target at 15 yards? How would this situation be different?
What if Kendrick Castillo carried a pocket knife every single day of his life, without thinking about it, like grabbing his phone or his wallet, he had a 4.5 inch weapon capable of ending the life of someone evil enough to fire into crowds of innocent people?
What if every single person in this situation was as brave as Kendrick Castillo? What if this is the positive side of "toxic masculinity?" The same energy that third-wave feminism tells us is evil, saves lives every single day. The self-sacrificing behavior of males in our society comes with the aggressiveness that males naturally exhibit. One cannot exist without the other.
With that information, is the answer to hate men for being men? While we are told to accept and love women for being women. Let's all be honest with ourselves, it's not attractive women throwing themselves into hails of bullets to save lives.
And is that fair? Is that just? While these same STEM institutions overwhelmingly encourage female candidates, and letting the highly skilled men that want to be in STEM fall to the wayside, in favor of these less qualified but "less equally represented" groups?
States like Colorado limit magazine sizes for law-abiding citizens, and access to rifles that these school shooters rarely actually use. In this case, and in Columbine, they opted to carry handguns, and we never hear politicians advocating the ban of those specific type of guns, unless they support banning all semi-automatic weapons, which at this point in time is 90% of the firearms on the streets already.
Even "libertarian" candidates like Andrew Yang support "assault weapon" bans, magazine capacity bans, and universal gun registration. The Nazi German Wehrmacht supported that "universal gun registration" policy in 1934, and later used the same registration list to hunt political dissidents and Jews. In case you forgot, they also burned six million Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals.
So what policy is better? America that has allowed more freedom than any other country, and still, the vast majority of gun deaths are suicides, people pulling the trigger on themselves. And they are overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly older white men. Or Nazi Germany, that believed so strongly in their genetic superiority that they lost the greatest war ever fought in human history based solely on arrogance and racial superiority. Hitler considered nuclear weapons a Jew science, and therefore, not deserving of attention. The scientists that won America WWII came from Germany long before the war started, because they knew what was happening and they got the fuck outta dodge before they could be rounded up. Many more Jews were not so lucky.
What's my ultimate point? Why bring up all of this seemingly superfluous shit?
There is a fundamental disconnect in our world between reality and what our feelings tell us. Data does not lie. Our first intuitions do. We have this inclination to "trust our gut", the problem is our gut feeling is usually based on lack of knowledge, not an intense understanding of a subject but rather a surface level glance. And the surface level glance on the gun issue is, "Guns kill people. Less guns mean less people killed."
Look at modern-day Venezuela. Gun confiscation started in 2012, and in 2019 the military is running over protestors with armored vehicles, same thing that happened in Communist China 40-50 years ago. There is a fundamental pattern to these tragedies, and the first step is stripping people of the right of self-defense.
There is no more fundamental human right in this world than the one to defend your life from tyrants and criminals. Anyone that tries to restrict that is one or the other. Because the tyrant and the criminal will always be armed, but the rest of us won't be, if the law of the land is to be a sheep.
And even when the law of the land is framed that way, people like Kendrick Castillo will still jump on the grenade, or run into a hail of bullets. Because that is human nature, just like protesting against your government while they run you over with an APC is human nature. And if that crowd had AR-15's, the windshields (even if they are military-grade "bulletproof") of those APCs wouldn't stand up to a crowd shooting at them. The tires would blow out, the glass would be penetrated, the evil men inside of those vehicles would die and the tyrants wouldn't have much power in that situation. But in reality, those people are helpless while they are run over in a country with no food, no medical assistance, no justice.
And in a state that should have freedom, instead Kendrick Castillo is dead. Instead of drawing a concealed firearm and saving lives, he gave his own instead. That is not justice. That is not "a fair shot" at life.
That's willful optimism killing a hero.