Texas Gun Nuts Re-enact Charlie Hebdo Attacks With Paintball Rounds

Yeehaw! Ain’t this fun? A Texas gun rights group that calls itself “The Truth About Guns” re-enacted the Charlie Hebdo attacks with paintball rounds so that they could see if an ?armed civilian? would have been able to stop the?gunmen who killed 12 people in an attack at?the Paris satirical magazine’s office. Guess what? The pretend civilian ?died? in almost every scenario — the only scenario in which he survived was immediate flight from the scene.

From The Guardian:

Nick Leghorn, a member of the group, The Truth About Guns, downplayed the results of the unscientific experiment on psychology and safety during a terrorist attack, which took place last weekend.

Image via The Truth About Guns
Robert Farago, Publisher, TTAG
Image via The Truth About Guns

A former Homeland Security contractor for risk analysis, Leghorn said this to CBSCFW:

?It’s the one people are Monday morning quarterbacking at the moment. It’s interesting to see how people react under stress. It’s not what you’d expect people do.?

Yeah yeah. Fascinating!

The bizarre organization created a set in Plano, an affluent suburb just north of Dallas. The set?resembled the Chralie Hebdo office. From The Guardian:

With guns firing paintball pellets, two volunteers played the roles of Ch?rif and Sa?d Kouachi, the gunmen who claimed links to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. One volunteer, playing a civilian, was also armed with a paintball gun.

Over the course of several simulations, volunteers playing the armed civilian managed to hit a gunman in only two cases; no one ?took out? both shooters in any iteration of the exercise. Of the 12 volunteers who participated as civilians, only one survived ? by fleeing the scene at the sound of shots. The Kouachi brothers murdered 12 people on 7 January, including two armed policemen.

But hey, everyone was cool with the results, even though they….well….got slaughtered.

?I still got killed but did I better than I thought I would,? volunteer Parks Matthew told CBSDFW. ?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.?

These weird little simulations (which could not likely be handled the same way in real life) are something that The Truth About Guns does frequently. They’ve popularized the mass school shooting simulation, which is suposed to determine whether armed teachers could kill a shooter. Yeah, let us know how that works out.

Watch the video below.

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