According to the lying mass media it is. Why? Well because they use twisted logic. For instance, there is this “Catch 22” problem. If someone shoots a potential mass shooter before they begin, theoretically a mass shooting never took place. With that being the case one can’t definitively claim it was prevented. Or conversely, if a mass shooting is underway and is then stopped by an armed civilian, literately the mass shooting wasn’t prevented. Because they will claim, it already had happened. This “Catch 22” makes it technically impossible to stop a mass shooting.
It is simply mental gymnastics by the people who want to disarm the general population. Because if you stop a mass shooting as apparently happened with Eli Dicken, the armed shopper in Indiana, you would still have saved countless lives. Since the shooter in that situation was well equipped and his first victim was caught totally off guard and was also an armed civilian, who knows how many more people he would have killed. And who knows if that armed citizen had been more aware if the shooter would have even been able to kill anyone. No one really knows how many would have died because Eli responded effectively and saved us from reading a longer list of victims. Eli was carrying a pistol because it is NECESSARY for SECURITY. Do you remember where you read those two words?
What irked me about Eli’s circumstance is that the media tried to paint him as a bad guy because he violated a “rule” against being armed on the shopping mall property. Oh, my God! I’m sure that if the talking heads would have been in the crowd of endangered people they would have chastised Eli for being such a threat to the mall owners. Gun free zones are crime spree zones.
According to data collected by the Crime Prevention Research Center, there have been at least 69 mass shootings that have been stopped by armed civilians since 1990. Of course this totally contradicts the voice of the media who continually argue that mass shootings are caused by lack of gun control. Where in fact armed civilians stop mass shootings quite regularly, and one major way to dampen the amount of mass shootings is to allow people to carry guns wherever they happen to be. One of the other talking points parroted throughout the media is that if people are going to carry they should be licensed after tests that show they are proficient with a firearm. But think about it…if you are NOT reasonably trained with a firearm would you falsely believe you were safe carrying one? I’m sure that if you were to query the average person who carries a firearm for PROTECTION that they have made an effort to make themselves proficient enough to feel safe doing so. For it isn’t a firearm that protects you but rather you that are protecting yourself with a firearm. You wouldn’t be very well equipped if you didn’t know how to operate your tool. So “licensing” gun owners is just another monkey wrench they want to toss into the obvious meaning of SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED.
I have a friend who works at an establishment that deals with firearms while Cerakoting them. Recently reading about a gun store owner being killed in Springfield Missouri during a robbery, she and her husband have decided to make sure the business front doors are locked during working hours and they also have a camera with an integral door bell so that no one can sneak in on them unaware. He has strapped to his side, a semi automatic pistol but she didn’t feel confident enough to carry anything. Sure, she could have, but what if she had needed it for protection and couldn’t properly operate it? So she decided with my input and her husband’s to get a S&W five shot .38 Special revolver. Since a revolver doesn’t have a safety and this model can be fired either single action or double action, plus you can tell if it is loaded at a mere glance at the front of the cylinder, it was the best thing for her to obtain and carry with a minor amount of practice. And now she will be a “good guy with a gun”.
Before we get into the rest of this post, let’s take a quick look at an “opinion” piece by someone cursed with an inability to look at a situation with reason, LOGIC and common sense.
This was stated in Opinion: Good guy with a gun? Indiana and Uvalde tell us all we need to know
Opinion by Jill Filipovic, who by the way is a lawyer and author who really should know the difference and not be so willing to twist and distort facts. She is claiming that:
After more than 45,000 gun deaths in 2020 and more than 24,000 already this year, one legally armed bystander – a young man carrying a handgun in an Indiana mall – was able to use his weapon to kill a mass shooter. Conservatives are applauding this as a victory for their grand theory of public safety: A nation so awash in weapons that a “good guy with a gun” will be around to take out a bad guy with a gun. Or as the National Rifle Association put it: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” My interjections are emphasized, WHAT IF more people were armed and as I stated in my previous article were part of a local state militia and had been properly trained? How many of those 45,000 “gun deaths” were suicide? How many were self defense? How many were at the hands of “law” enforcement officers? She doesn’t care. They are “gun deaths” whatever that means! Understanding “shall not be infringed” must not be in her vocabulary because how can someone be illegally armed UNLESS they are using the gun to rob, rape or commit some other mayhem?
But on closer inspection, the math doesn’t quite work. REALLY??
Jill continues with her emotion driven post with “Even with a “good guy” present, the Indiana mall shooter was still able to kill three people, injure two and traumatize many others. That’s not a victory against gun violence; it’s a horrific scenario by any measure. And even the “good guy” with the gun wasn’t exactly following the rules – the mall doesn’t allow weapons on its property and he brought one in anyway”. Again, here we see the “Catch 22” argument being used. Are we glad that Eli WASN’T following the “rules”? Apparently Jill would have preferred he did, otherwise, why would she have even mentioned that?
She continues, “The horrifying school shooting in Uvalde, Texas and the nightmarish failures of armed law enforcement agents to stop it should also put the “good guy with a gun” theory permanently to rest. As a shooter murdered children and teachers in their classrooms for 77 minutes, nearly 400 trained “good guys” with guns gathered outside and did… nothing. Trained law enforcement officers armed to the teeth – people paid by taxpayers to be “good guys with guns” – failed at taking out a mass shooter. We simply cannot rely on more guns to solve our gun violence epidemic.” I’m glad she qualified the 400 trained good guys with those quote marks. Sorry Jill, I’m not listing them as good guys in my book. They were LOUSY police in the mind of anyone with an ounce of sense! Hardly what you can properly call “good guys” in that situation. “Good guys do good things and standing around for 77 minutes while some maniac is killing children is not what you would call a good thing. And thank God the “theory” you speak of is still in the conversation and hasn’t been put to rest. Hopefully it never will. For some reason any discussion of possible drugs Ramos may have been prescribed is nowhere to be found. Strange…
Anyhow if you want to waste a few minutes of your time looking into the mind of a CNN contributor that is devoid of reason, logic and common sense which equals a lack of critical thinking, and bases all of her life experiences on EMOTION, go here.
Jill needs some education. I’d suggest she read the excellent well researched and documented book by John R. Lott entitled More Guns, Less Crime. She needs some understanding about crime and gun control laws. As Gary Kleck, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University has stated “John Lott has done the most extensive, thorough, and sophisticated study we have on the effects of loosening gun control laws. Regardless of whether one agrees with his conclusions, his work is mandatory reading for anyone who is open minded and serious about the gun control issue. Especially fascinating is his account of the often unscrupulous reactions to his research by gun control advocates, academic critics and the news media.” Or this observation by Steve Shavell, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School, “The book will, or should cause, those who almost reflexively support the limitation of guns in the name of reducing crime to rethink their positions.” Hey Jill, maybe you should read this book. Except for the issue of you having an apparently closed mind on the subject!
If you want a great study to read check it out here.
Now let’s take a look at just a few shootings that were stopped either in progress, or before they became a major news headline.
From an Los Angeles Times post back in 1992.
PERSPECTIVE ON GUN CONTROL : A Massacre We Didn’t Hear About : Firearms in the hands of private citizens should play an important role in protection of the public safety. By J. NEIL SCHULMAN
Late at night on Tuesday, Dec. 17, (1992) two men armed with recently stolen pistols herded 20 customers and employees of a Shoney’s restaurant in Anniston, Alabama, into the walk-in refrigerator and locked it. Continuing to hold the manager at gunpoint, the men began robbing the restaurant.
Then one of the robbers found a customer who had hidden under a table and pulled a gun on him. The customer, Thomas Glenn Terry, legally armed with a .45 semi-automatic pistol, fired five shots into that robber’s chest and abdomen, killing him instantly.
The other robber, who was holding the manager at gunpoint, opened fire on Terry and grazed him. Terry returned fire, hitting the second robber several times and wounding him critically.
The robbery attempt was over. The Shoney’s customers and employees were freed. No one else was hurt.
Because Terry was armed, and used his gun to stop two armed robbers who had taken a restaurant full of people hostage, there was no drawn-out crisis, no massacre, no victims’ families for Dan Rather to interview. Consequently, the story didn’t receive much coverage.
Among those who rely on national news media for their view of the country, the bloody image of Luby’s cafeteria is available to lend the unchallenged impression that guns in private hands serve only to kill innocent people. The picture of 20 hostages walking out of Shoney’s refrigerator unharmed, because a private citizen was armed that night, is not.
As we celebrate the bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, (1992) it’s worth noting that the Framers wrote the Second Amendment so the people’s defense would be in our own hands, and we wouldn’t have to rely on a “standing army” or “select militia” for our security. Though no police departments existed in America then, there’s no historical doubt that the Framers had considered centralized public defense, and considered it not merely ineffective, but itself dangerous to public safety. Vigilante-type police attacks, such as the Rodney King beating, lend credence.
Yet, it’s fashionable to relegate constitutional protections to the dustbin of history. Judges sworn to defend the Constitution ignore its clear provisions, as do legislators. Virtually every major organ of society–both political parties, the media, the American Bar Assn., the ACLU–urges them to do so.
Today’s “consensus reality” asserts that private firearms play no effective role in the civic defense, and that firearms must be restricted to reduce crime. The media repeat these assertions as a catechism, and treat those who challenge them as heretics.
Yet, we have before us an experiment showing us alternative outcomes. In one case, we have a restaurant full of unarmed people who relied on the police to save them. The result was 23 innocent lives lost, and an equivalent number wounded. In the second case, we have one armed citizen on the scene and not one innocent life lost.
How can the choice our society needs to make be any clearer?
It’s time to rid ourselves of the misbegotten idea that public safety can be achieved by unilateral disarmament of the honest citizen, and realize that the price of public safety is, like liberty, eternal vigilance. We can tire ourselves in futile debates on how to keep guns out of the wrong hands. Or we can decide that innocent lives deserve better than to be cut short, if only we, as a society, will take upon ourselves the civic responsibility of defending our fellow citizens, as Thomas Glenn Terry did in Alabama. END OF EXCERPT from Los Angeles Times Article
That was one case. If you read the article you will see the first part describes a total massacre where the restaurant patrons at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas were sitting ducks. One of the survivors, Suzanna Gratia Hupp became a Republican state representative, who represented from 1997 to 2007 District 54 in central Texas, which encompasses Bell, Burnet, and Lampasas counties. After surviving the 1991 shooting at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, Suzanna became a leading advocate of an individual’s right to carry a concealed weapon. She had left her revolver in her car due to the “law” and because she followed the law she had to watch as the killer executed her father and then her mother. An excellent but rather sad response to that incident is here.
This happened recently in May of 2022…A US woman has fatally shot a man who opened fire on a crowd of people with a semi-automatic rifle in Charleston, West Virginia. Dennis Butler, a 37-year-old with an extensive criminal history, was killed after he targeted a group of around forty people attending a birthday party.
Let’s go back farther in time to October 1997 for this one– The Pearl High School shooting in Mississippi, which killed two and injured seven, was stopped by the assistant principal who retrieved a pistol he kept in his truck to subdue the shooter.
Or this list which ends in 2017. There have been MANY MORE since. Most of these were relegated to a page inside of a newspaper or given local coverage as lives were SAVED not lost and with the main stream media good news is no news at all.
April 1998– A middle school student took his father’s handgun and went to his middle school dance. He shot and killed one teacher and wounded three others. The owner of the dance hall grabbed his shotgun after hearing the shots and confronted and disarmed the shooter outside. It’s debatable whether or not this prevented any more deaths, as the student had stopped shooting, but he was still armed and capable of shooting more people.
July 1999– After a man rented a semi-automatic rifle at a gun club, he held three employees hostage and threatened to kill them. One had a concealed handgun and shot the gunman. While he only directly threatened three people (not technically a mass shooting), his suicide note detailed his desire to take many other lives, so that employees response likely prevented that.
January 2002– A distressed student facing suspension entered the campus of Appalachian School of Law and killed three people, including the dean, and injured three others. He was stopped and wrestled to the ground by three students who were trained police officers. One of which ran to his car to get his service pistol before confronting the attacker.
February 2007– A man with a shotgun and backpack full of ammunition opened fire at Trolley Square in Salt Lake City, killing five and wounding four. The shooter was quickly and soundly stopped by the Salt Lake City SWAT team, but not before an off-duty police officer with a gun had cornered him and engaged in a gun battle, preventing untold deaths to others.
December 2007– After killing two at one Colorado church, a gunman drove to the New Life Church in Colorado Springs and began shooting members leaving a Sunday service. As the gunman entered the church, a woman stepped out from a doorway, confronted the gunman and then fired ten shots from sixty three feet away, hitting the attacker once in the wrist and twice in a leg. He died in the hallway, barely forty feet from where he entered. She understood the words necessary and security, didn’t she?
May 2008– A man entered a crowded bar near Reno, Nevada and fatally shot two brothers, as well as injuring others. When stopping to reload, another patron with a concealed weapons permit shot and killed him.
May 2009– During a birthday party two masked gunmen broke into an apartment in College Park, Georgia filled with eleven people. They separated the men from women, stole their wallets and cell phones, then proceeded to attempt to rape the women, mentioning they would kill them afterwards. One of the victims managed to grab his bag with a gun in it, then shot and chased off the attackers. The resident of the apartment said if not for the intervention, all the party goers would likely have been killed.
March 2012– A man kicked in and entered a side door in a Spartanburg, South Carolina church with a shotgun and pointed it at the pastor and congregation. Another church member, a concealed weapon holder, acted quickly to subdue the attacker. No one was injured.
April 2012– A man chased and shot at multiple church members in a church parking lot in Aurora, Colorado, killing one. An off-duty police officer happened to be there and shot the gunman, stopping the attack.
December 2012– A man with a stolen AR-15 rifle entered the Clackamas Mall in Oregon and began shooting, killing two and critically injuring a third. Another man with a concealed carry permit confronted the shooter but didn’t fire because he feared he might shoot innocent bystanders. However, he claims the shooter saw him and this likely stopped the shooting spree, as he then ran into a stairwell and the next bullet the gunman fired was to kill himself. It’s debatable whether this mass shooting was stopped by this action, but there is evidence to support it.
July 2014– A military service member with a concealed carry permit shot and injured a man who fired at and threatened a group of four people outside a party in Chicago.
July 2014– A psychiatric patient opened fire at a Pennsylvania hospital, killing one case worker. A doctor with a concealed weapons permit fired back and hit the shooter three times, allowing hospital personnel to tackle and subdue him. The police chief said “Without a doubt, I believe the doctor saved lives. Without that firearm, [the shooter] could have went out in the hallway and just walked down to the offices until he ran out of ammunition,”
January 2014– After being turned away from a Portland strip club, a man returned with a gun and shot and critically injured the bouncer and proceeded to enter the club. Another bouncer with a concealed carry permit shot the attacker. There were thirty people inside.
March 2015– Police say a man likely saved the lives of several people when he shot and killed a gunman inside a West Philadelphia barbershop. During an argument, the man pulled out a gun and began shooting customers and barbers, there were even kids inside. Another man who had a legal weapons permit heard the shots from outside, rushed in and killed the shooter, likely saving lives.
April 2015– An Uber Driver with a concealed carry permit shot and injured a man firing a pistol into a group of people on a Logan Square sidewalk in Chicago.
May 2015– In New Holland, South Carolina a man pulled into a crowded fire department parking lot filled with children and firefighters and began firing into the air and pointing the gun at people. Two firefighters with concealed carry permits confronted the shooter and got him to put down his weapon. While no one was injured, this most likely prevented a mass shooting.
July 2015– A Cincinnati man fired at four people, including a one year old boy. One of the victims had a concealed weapons permit and shot back, hitting the attacker in the leg. No one died.
June 2016– A man began shooting outside a bar in Lyman, South Carolina. He shot three people before a fourth with a concealed weapons permit fired back, preventing more bloodshed.
May 2017– A man entered a bar in Arlington, Texas yelling incoherently and began shooting, killing one. A customer with a concealed carry handgun engaged the shooter and prevented further injuries or deaths. There were more than a dozen customers in the bar, plus employees.
September 2017– A masked man entered a Nashville church and shot seven people, killing one. A church usher was able to run to his car, grab a handgun and confront the shooter, saving untold lives.
November 2017– An off-duty Kansas City police captain shot an armed man in a local Costco when he announced “I’m an off-duty U.S. Marshal, I’m here to kill people”. The off-duty cop told him to drop the gun and not to move. When the gunman aimed his pistol at the officer, he shot him. No other injuries were reported.
November 2017– A man started firing in a parking lot of a crowded auto repair shop in Rockledge, Florida killing one and paralyzing another. Two of the employees had concealed carry permits and fought back, shooting and injuring the attacker and preventing any more damage.
Are those few examples enough to convince Jill? I would hope so, but…
Before I end this post, I want to recommend this article from Dr. Naomi Wolf on Substack. Maybe you know someone who reminds you of the way Naomi USED to be! Jill needs to read this one from Naomi.
Rethinking the Second Amendment.
So the question to be asked? Is it a MYTH or is it TRUE? If we had our state militias back and millions of armed American were everywhere at any time, do you suppose that a good guy with a gun just may stop a bad buy with a gun? Let me know what you think…
