https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/national/wp/2018/07/13/feature/in-all-reality-there-were-three-shooters-oklahomans-kill-an-active-shooter-and-its-not-as-simple-as-it-sounds/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9206d70590d5So, the Washington Compost is at it again. There was another shooter on a rampage in Oklahoma, and two men nearby grabbed their guns and stopped him dead (literally). WaPo's response?
“In all reality, there were three shooters,” Benton said.
No, there was one shooter and two rescuers. If they were police officers, would they still say there were three shooters?
But police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations.
Or can help stop them, as happened here.
“We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.”
Except there were no "vigilantes" here, just two guys trying to do the right thing and protect others, while putting themselves in harms way.
The real kicker in the article?
Both men did what they believed was right, but that meant they had killed a man they did not know.
Who cares if they knew him or not? Would that have made any lick of difference? He was shooting unarmed people and threatened their lives when they engaged him. That's all they needed to know. He's dead, they're not. That's the best result they could have hoped for. Of course, they couldn't even stop there and had to get some digs in at the NRA.
The NRA has brandished the “good guy with a gun” argument after several recent mass shootings. Wayne LaPierre, the group’s chief executive, invoked the phrase after the 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school. He repeated it after the rampage in which 17 people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February, even though an armed school resource officer was present and did not enter the school or engage the gunman during that attack.
No, not "even though", because of the fact. That resource officer wasn't just a good guy with a gun, he was charged with the responsibility of keeping those kids safe, and he failed miserably in his duties! They keep harping on that as if it changes the argument, when in fact it only serves to strengthen our side.
The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled.
And I bet the FBI completely ignored the data from the CDC that shows between 500k and 3mil defensive uses of guns every year.
To their credit, they did at least mention some instances (such as the Sutherland Springs shooting) of times when shooters were stopped by a good guy with a gun, but then they felt it necessary to list some "negatives" (for balance? Hah!).
In 2014, husband-and-wife attackers killed two Las Vegas police officers before going into a nearby Walmart and firing a shot in the air. Joseph Wilcox, 31, a civilian with a handgun and a concealed-carry permit, pulled his weapon to confront the male shooter, but the man’s wife shot Wilcox in the chest, killing him.
A tragedy for sure, but that doesn't alter the argument of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy.
When Prince George’s County police detective Jacai Colson responded to a 2016 attack on a police station in his street clothes, another officer mistook him for a threat and shot him.
“The shot that struck and killed Detective Colson was deliberately aimed at him by another police officer,” the police chief said.
So, in this case it's not even involving civilians, it's two police officers with one in plainclothes, and the shooter at fault was a police officer. Still not changing the argument any.
“How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’ ”
If the guy is aiming his gun at you, I'd wager that's the bad guy. Duh!
And then he gives yet another example why we shouldn't rely on just the police (except that's not what he intended, I'm sure).
But he also has seen how quickly things can go wrong. In August 2013, Oklahoma City police officers responding to the sound of gunshots opened fire on a man shooting at a car before realizing he was the owner of a liquor store who had been robbed.
Gotta love this line from the article.
Nazario and Whittle had no idea who Tilghman was when they killed him. Tilghman did not kill anyone, and any sentence he might have faced had he been apprehended certainly would have been less than death.
Aww, poor wittle shooter trying to kill innocent civilians! He never
actually killed anyone, so he didn't really deserve to die!
DISGUSTING!
