Pro-Gun Group Roleplays Charlie Hebdo Attack With An Armed Civilian, It Doesn’t Go Well

Some of us spent Monday morning rehashing the events of the Packers-Cowboys or Seahawks-Panthers game and brashly proclaiming what we would have done differently. A Texas pro-gun group, on the other hand, is saving what they cheerfully refer to as “Monday morning quarterbacking” for something very different: the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris.

The group, The Truth About Guns (TTAG), posted on Monday a request for 40 volunteers for a re-enactment of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo‘s offices, as Raw Story reports. But the re-enactment, of course, had a twist: in each replay, a single civilian lone wolf hero would be armed. TTAG naturally handled the planned re-enactment with all the sensitivity you would expect, referring to volunteers as “warm bodies” and posting a blood-spattered picture of the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack on their Facebook page:

the truth about guns charlie hebdo reenactment call for volunteers(via)

And just in case you still weren’t completely sure whether these guys were handling the shooting deaths of these 12 Parisians with the respect we generally afford the recently-deceased, TTAG member and shooting-massacre live-action roleplay afficionado Nick Leghorn had this to say about it to the local CBS news station:

“It’s interesting to see how people react under stress. It’s not what you’d expect people do.”

Yes! It’s so interesting to think about 12 people getting murdered! What a fascinating and totally not utterly horrifying thought experiment!

Now, for people who I assume also enjoy re-enacting the Civil War with an alternate ending, the way their paintball version of the Charlie Hebdo attacks played out must have come as a surprise. Spoiler alert: the armed civilian hero died every. single. time. And he or she never succeeded in taking out more than one of the attackers (in fact, in only 10 out of  the 12 times the attack was roleplayed, the armed civilian got killed without accomplishing anything at all – well, without accomplishing anything other than participating in a gross, victim-blamey mockery of the people who actually died a week ago.) The only way the armed civilian protagonist survived was by running away – which, by the way, you can also do without a Glock strapped to your thigh. Probably with less chafing, too.

Spoiler alert: if you thought the fact that making a head-on attack against an armed attacker was a guaranteed literal death sentence would deter these folks at all, you are going to be disappointed. Said group member Parks Matthew:

”If I’m in a movie theater and someone pulls a gun, what am I going to do? I know now I’m not gonna just fall on my kids and protect them, I need to advance on the threat[.]”

Maybe ‘need’ means something different in Texas, because based on the evidence you just collected, advancing on the threat sounds kind of like the last thing that will help either you or your kids. In fact, after their resounding re-enactment failure, the only solution TTAG could come up with? MORE GUNS. For a group that also advocates arming teachers, despite the odds that the ‘armed civilian’ will wind up dead, it makes me wonder if this is just a really horrifying method of union-busting. Either way, it sounds to me as if common sense has gotten caught in the crossfire.

Similar Posts