James Shaw Jr. and his best friend had just sat down in a Waffle House outside Nashville early Sunday when a loud crashing sound rang out in the restaurant. At first, Mr. Shaw said Monday, he thought a dishwasher had knocked over some plates.
It quickly became clear what was happening. Bullets pierced the restaurant’s windows. A man collapsed onto the floor. Waiters ran.
Mr. Shaw and his friend raced to the hallway outside the restrooms, taking cover behind a swinging door. As the gunman entered the Waffle House to continue shooting, Mr. Shaw recounted on Monday, he looked for a moment to fight back.
“There is kind of no running from this,” Mr. Shaw, in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday, said when asked about what he was thinking. “I’m going to have to try to find some kind of flaw or a point in time where I could make it work for myself.”
During a sudden break in the firing, Mr. Shaw sprinted through the door as fast as he could, slamming into the gunman and knocking him to the ground. He grabbed the rifle and tossed it over the restaurant counter.
The gunman, Travis Reinking, 29, then ran away, the authorities said, but not before he had killed four people and injured at least four more
.. Mr. Shaw said he eventually found out that the pause in the gunman’s firing came when he was trying to reload the rifle. It was a brief enough break, Mr. Shaw said, for him to make a move.
After Mr. Shaw wrested the weapon away, he said, the gunman left on foot at a jogging pace. Officials said the gunman shed his green jacket shortly thereafter. It was found with two loaded magazines in the pockets.
Buying guns is harder in Canada than in the U.S. A new bill would tighten gun laws even more.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is heeding those calls, announcing this past week a proposed law that would require more detailed background checks for gun owners and force retailers to maintain records of gun sales for at least 20 years.
.. The minister’s claim of sharply higher gun crime has since been challenged by criminologists and statisticians, who argue that 2013 had the lowest homicide rate in almost 50 years and that the overall rate of firearm homicides in Canada is up but not dramatically so.
Firearms are already much harder to acquire legally in Canada than in the United States, and the frequency of gun-related violence is markedly lower. But there is a long tradition of hunting and firearm ownership, particularly in rural parts of the country.
The previous Conservative government successfully courted the pro-gun constituency and in 2012 dismantled the decade-old firearms registry for rifles and shotguns, which was criticized by opponents as a waste of money and an intrusion into the right to hunt and shoot. Mandatory registration of handguns and other weapons deemed restricted and prohibited remained in effect.
The Trudeau government’s proposal would force all firearms vendors to maintain records and inventories of transactions and keep those records for 20 years. The records would be accessible to police only if they first obtain a warrant.
.. Sheldon Clare, president of the National Firearms Association, the most outspoken of Canada’s gun-owner groups, called the move the start of a process of “civil disarmament” and a backdoor path to a new government registry system.
.. The legislation would also require the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which issues firearms licenses, to examine a person’s entire life for potential problems, including criminal convictions. The current requirement mandates a five-year background search.
The new law would tighten rules on transporting restricted weapons, making it necessary to obtain authorization each time owners wished to take their guns anywhere other than a shooting range or club.
.. there were 223 firearm-related homicides in Canada in 2016, 44 more than the previous year. In Toronto alone, there were 51 firearm-related deaths in 2016, almost double the 27 reported a year earlier. The United States, which has roughly 10 times the population of Canada, reported 11,004 firearm homicides in 2016.
.. She noted that the supply of restricted and prohibited firearms has more than doubled in Canada over the past decade and said she was concerned that a firearm like the AR-15 could still be sold as a restricted weapon.
Aurora Gunman’s Arsenal: Shotgun, Semiautomatic Rifle and, at the End, a Pistol
The three types of weapons used by the man accused of killing 12 people in a Colorado movie theater — a semiautomatic variation of the military’s M-16 rifle, a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun and at least one .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol — are among the most popular guns available in the multibillion-dollar American firearms market.
.. It appears, the police say, that James E. Holmes, the man accused in the Aurora shootings, used all three types of weapons inside the theater as well, first firing the shotgun, then using the semiautomatic rifle until its 100-round barrel magazine jammed, and finishing off with a pistol. (A second .40-caliber pistol was also found at the scene, though it was unclear whether it had been used in the theater.)
.. Many other details about the rampage also remain unclear, like whether the gunman used soft-point or full-metal-jacket ammunition, or whether any of the firearms had been modified with scopes or night-vision devices.
.. the M-16, the signature weapon of the Vietnam War
.. If anything, the experts said, a shotgun in that situation might have been the most lethal, since every shell can spray a half-dozen or more pellets, each capable of killing or maiming a person. Twelve-gauge shotguns often fire five shells, and sometimes more
.. “Shotguns are a very good antipersonnel weapon at close range,” said John C. Cerar, the former commander of the firearms and tactics section for the New York Police Department.
.. AR-15, marketing more than a dozen models that range in price from about $700 to $2,000.
.. it is easy to handle and can be modified in numerous ways. Some soldiers call it “a Barbie doll for men” because it has a wide range of accessories and replacement parts, including different styles of barrels, stocks, magazines and scopes.
.. The M&P15 also comes in a variety of models that fire different sizes of ammunition, from .22-caliber to .30-caliber rounds.
The rifle used in Aurora fired .223-caliber ammunition, law enforcement officials said.
.. Those rounds — similar to the ammunition used in American M-16 and M-4 rifles — are smaller than the rounds fired by Afghan insurgents wielding Kalashnikov rifles, but pack far more power than .22-caliber rounds, even though they are only a hair’s-width larger in circumference.
.. Law enforcement officials said the 12-gauge shotgun used by Mr. Holmes was a Remington 870. The gun, which can be purchased for around $400, requires the user to pump a handle underneath the barrel to chamber new cartridges after each shot.
.. The handgun was a Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, the officials said. The weapon is similar to the 9-millimeter handgun made famous in gangster films and rap music. The 9-millimeter has also been adopted by many police forces that had used .38-caliber revolvers and felt that they were being outgunned by criminals.
.. The .40-caliber Glock, versions of which sell for about $400, has become increasingly popular partly because its larger round makes it potentially more deadly than a 9-millimeter
.. Yet it has less recoil and is thus easier to handle than a .45-caliber handgun.
.. The pistols typically come with magazines capable of holding 13 to 17 cartridges.
.. Pistols are less accurate than rifles at longer distances and are widely considered harder to use because they cannot be braced against the shoulder. But in close quarters, they are plenty lethal.
No Country for Young Men With AR-15s
The pro-gun vision is linked, of course, to practical concerns — support for gun ownership is higher in rural areas where the police are far away. But it’s essentially a moral-political picture in which the fullness of citizenship includes the capacity to protect and defend, to step in when the state fails and resist when it imposes illegitimately.
.. I can imagine many situations and political dispensations in which a morally responsible citizen should own a weapon; I have encountered many communities where “gun culture” seems healthy and responsible rather than a bloodthirsty cult. And the claim, often urged on anti-abortion writers like myself, that guns and abortion should both be opposed on “life” grounds seems like a category error, since every abortion kills but guns sit harmless in millions of households and many deter violence or turn back evil men.
.. However: A fetishization of guns and violence is also a real American cultural phenomenon, perhaps especially among alienated, isolated young men. And for them and for others (including the N.R.A. these days), the guns-and-citizenship ideal can curdle into a crude myself-alone libertarianism for an age of polarization and mistrust.
.. For instance, instead of debating gun regulations that would apply to every gun owner, we could consider limits that are imposed on youth and removed with age. After all, the fullness of adult citizenship is not bestowed at once: Driving precedes voting precedes drinking, and the right to stand for certain offices is granted only in your thirties.
.. Perhaps the self-arming of citizens could be similarly staggered. Let 18-year-olds own hunting rifles. Make revolvers available at 21. Semiautomatic pistols, at 25. And semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 could be sold to 30-year-olds but no one younger.
.. But it is more specifically targeted to the plague of school shootings, whose perpetrators are almost always young men.
.. And it offers a kind of moral bridge between the civic vision of Second Amendment advocates and the insights of their critics — by treating bearing arms as a right but also a responsibility, the full exercise of which might only come with maturity and age.