Although it was a tragedy, the Dallas sniper shooting of 5 police officers was a reality-based experiment on the theory that a good guy with a gun beats a bad guy with a gun.  Not only did the bad guy with a gun kill five armed good guys, but the bad guy was killed with a robot using explosives (one of the first times that law enforcement used a drone/robot for purposes of catching someone in a domestic crime).

What’s more, the prevalence of guns, rather than making people safer, actually made things HARDER:

It is legal in Texas to openly carry rifles and has been for decades. People with rifles have been spotted at recent public protests across the state.

[Dallas Mayor] Rawlings said Dallas police Chief David Brown told him that people running through the shooting scene with rifles and body armor required officers to track them down and bring them to the police department. Whether that was time that could have been spent trying to find and stop the shooter is something police will have to comment on, Rawlings said.

He said Friday that about 20 people in “ammo gear and protective equipment and rifles slung over their shoulder” participated in the Black Lives Matter rally downtown on Thursday night.

“When the shooting started, at different angles, they started running,” he said. “We started catching.”

Then police interviewed them.

Rawlings said open carry brings confusion to a shooting scene.

“What I would do is look for the people with guns,” he said.

Max Geron, a Dallas police major, talked about the confusion during the shooting in a post on a law enforcement website.

“There was also the challenge of sorting out witnesses from potential suspects,” Geron said. “Texas is an open carry state, and there were a number of armed demonstrators taking part. There was confusion on the radio about the description of the suspects and whether or not one or more was in custody.”

Now listen to the stupidity of the counter argument:

But C.J. Grisham, president of Open Carry Texas, said police should be able to separate the good guys from the bad guys in such a scenario because “the bad guys are the ones shooting.”

“If you can’t identify a threat, you shouldn’t be wearing a uniform,” he said.

Grisham said some in law enforcement look at law-abiding gun owners as a threat.

“It’s not that difficult to tell the difference between a bad actor and a good actor,” he said. “The good guys are going to obey commands, the bad guys are not.”

Wait, wait.  Shots rings out.  And as you turn, you see a guy across the street RUNNING with a RIFLE.  He can’t hear your commands to stop.  And you didn’t actually see whether he fired those shots.

Apparently, CJ Grisham thinks that real life is like a movie, where the camera is on the shooter as he shoots.

It’s scary that these people are allowed to have opinions.