[Reason] One Armed Man at an Indiana Mall Offered Better Protection Than 376 Cops in Uvalde

deserves its own thread

One Armed Man at an Indiana Mall Offered Better Protection Than 376 Cops in Uvalde
Taking personal responsibility turns out to be a better idea than putting faith in the state.

https://reason.com/2022/07/20/one-a...ed-better-protection-than-376-cops-in-uvalde/

excerpt:

The same day Texas legislators released a devastating report on indecision and failure among hundreds of police officers during the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a single armed man ended an attack at Greenwood Park Mall in Greenwood, Indiana. It's impossible to avoid comparing the two incidents. Once again, taking responsibility for yourself and assisting others turns out to be a better idea than putting faith in the state.

"Greenwood leaders have used several titles to describe Elisjsha Dicken, the 22-year-old Indiana man who intervened in a mass shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall on Sunday night," write Ryan Martin, Tony Cook, and Dayeon Eom of the Indianapolis Star. "A hero. A good Samaritan, even. Gun-rights advocates have yet another: A good guy with a gun."

Assessments of the performance of 376 police officers at Robb Elementary School are less positive.

"At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety," according to the July 17 report from Texas legislators. "The first wave of responders to arrive included the chief of the school district police and the commander of the Uvalde Police Department SWAT team. Despite the immediate presence of local law enforcement leaders, there was an unacceptably long period of time before officers breached the classroom, neutralized the attacker, and began rescue efforts."

Dicken intervened within two minutes of the first shot by the 20-year-old murderer. Three innocent people still lost their lives, but the toll could have been much higher.

"The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began," Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison told reporters.

By contrast, police officers in Uvalde dithered for at least 73 minutes as 19 children and two teachers were murdered.

"The law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary on May 24 was an abject failure," commented Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steven McCraw.
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more at the link

 

thinking out loud here . . .

If we severely curtail or even ban firearms, aren't we simply exchanging--or worse, adding to--one group of potential firearm deaths for another?

This guy was able to legally carry his pistol on July 1 and as a result, quite a number of peoples' lives were saved. Had he not been able to do that, many more victims (in all likelihood) would have died. Their potential deaths have been prevented.

If we severely restrict firearm ownership (and the correlative ability to carry), then we end up with the deaths that occur in so-called "gun free zones" that result from determined murderers knowing they are unlikely to be confronted. Uvalde is an example of this outcome. The Indiana mall shooting probably would have been another.

Why is one group's lives more significant than the other? i.e., the victims of Uvalde versus the survivors of Indiana?

 

New York Times Inadvertently Makes The Case For More Concealed Carry
The evidence shows that an armed citizen is more likely to stop a mass shooting than any of the policies being advocated by Democrats.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/20/new-york-times-inadvertently-makes-the-case-for-more-concealed-carry/

excerpt:

After Eli Dickens stopped a mass shooter this weekend at an Indiana mall, left-leaning outlets began churning out pieces arguing that “good guys with guns” are rare. Now, I don’t know a single pro-gun advocate who claims constitutional carry is a panacea. The nihilistic mass-shooter problem is crying out for a holistic societal remedy. There is no one solution. But it’s clear from the very statistics offered in pieces like this one from the New York Times (which generously quotes me) that concealed carry saves lives.

***
2. The only reason Dicken was armed with a 9-millimeter at the Greenwood mall is that Indiana had recently passed a permitless carry law, which removed license requirements for handgun carriers (though gun buyers still go through the usual FBI background check, a fact omitted in many news stories.) One can assume that Dicken would not have brought any weapon with him had it been illegal to do so, but that the killer, Jonathan Douglas Sapirman, would have shown up with his 100 rounds, two ARs, and a pistol regardless of how forcefully the signs in the mall informed him that he was in a gun-free zone.

3. The New York Times refers to Dicken’s shooting as a “statistical unicorn.” But is it? “An examination of 433 active shooter attacks in the United States between 2000 and 2021,” writes the Times, “showed that only 22 ended with a bystander shooting an attacker, according to data from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.”

Only 22 of 433 incidents is 5 percent — which translates to a significant number of lives saved. Or, put it this way: The lives saved by bystanders taking down shooters are as, or more, effective than any Democrat-led policy effort on gun safety.
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more at the link

 

Relax!! the shooter has two arms everyone!

here's where grammar and punctuation come in handy. A "one-armed" man gets a hyphen in the compound adjective, whereas "one armed man" denotes a single, armed man.




glad to have cleared up that little bit of confusion.

 

you're old, Bob Rek . . . old and wise