In Case Six, another apparent jihadi ran rampant with a knife and stabbed eight people in a shopping mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota. One man in the crowd was uniquely ready to protect the others: Jason Falconer, a part-time police officer, CCW instructor and competitive shooter. He drew his gun and opened fire, ending the attack and killing the knife-wielder.
Gun prohibitionists still mention the July 2012 massacre that took place in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. They do not like to mention that the theater in question was a “gun-free zone,” which I’ve come to define as a hunting preserve for psychopathic murderers. What the prohibitionists don’t want the public to know is that three months earlier, almost to the day, in that same Colorado city, a vicious killer showed up at a church and began firing into the crowd of attendees. His initial gunfire tragically murdered the mother of the church’s pastor. However, before the gunman could claim any more victims, he was shot and killed in his tracks by a parishioner who had legally been carrying a concealed handgun. The hero who stopped the carnage was an off-duty law enforcement officer named Antonio Milow, but it is doubtful if any of those whose lives he saved that day in Case Seven would have cared if he had been carrying his handgun with a card labeled “Concealed Carry Permit” instead of “Police Officer.”
Prohibitionists maintain that citizens shooting at mad-dog killers will compound the danger instead of reducing it, on the theory that they will fill their surroundings with wild shots. This simply does not happen. As of this writing, I am unaware of a single case in which a citizen shooting at the perpetrator of a mass shooting has struck an innocent victim instead. Sometimes, no shots need to be fired at all. Case Eight took place in December of 2012, when another would-be mass murderer opened fire at a Clackamas, Oregon, shopping mall, but a 22-year-old armed citizen named Nick Meli drew his licensed, concealed Glock 22. Before he could get a clear shot without bystanders in the way, the killer saw him and broke off his attack. The gunman ran down an employees-only corridor and committed suicide.
A six-shot Colt Python revolver in .357 Magnum turned out to have enough firepower for 60-ish Vic Stacy to bring a murder spree to a screeching halt in Case Nine. In late July of 2012, Stacy was in the same RV park in the town of Early, Texas, where a madman murdered a couple residing there and then ambushed the first responding police officer. Using the cover of a large tree, the criminal by that point had armed himself with a .30-30 rifle. That gave him a deadly advantage over the cop, who only had his patrol car for cover and was unable to shoot through the tree with his .223. From an angle on the side, some 60 yards away, Stacy shot down the murderer with his revolver. Sprawled away from the tree and now in the officer’s line of fire, the gunman continued to offer hostility and was finally killed by the policeman, who credited armed citizen Stacy with saving his life and stopping the gunman from murdering any more innocent people.
In 1993, a squad of terrorists armed with assault rifles and grenades attacked a church in Cape Town, South Africa. Their initial volleys of full-auto fire and grenade blasts killed and wounded many, until an ordinary church-goer named Charl van Wyk drew his concealed revolver and returned fire. It was enough to break the assault, and the terrorists fled with no further carnage. In this Case Ten, the hero’s ability to fire five shots had been enough to stop the mass murder.
There are many more cases like this. Google, for example, the famous December 2007 church shooting in Colorado Springs where the massacre was ended when courageous ex-cop Jeanne Assam, by that time a law-abiding private citizen with a concealed-carry permit, charged the AR-15-armed gunman and fired her 9mm Beretta 92. Her bullets put him down and ended the horror. Consider it Case Eleven.
In the wake of the atrocity that took place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, where a jihadi pledging loyalty to ISIS murdered 49 people and injured many more until he was finally slain by Orlando SWAT, realists all over the country pointed out that if Pulse had not been a gun-free zone, and if at least a few of the patrons had been carrying concealed handguns, they might have been able to stop the mass murderer and vastly reduce the toll of the dead and injured.
Anti-gun politicians and spokespeople didn’t like that idea at all. In the September 2016 edition of America’s 1st Freedom, Professor John Lott wrote, “While Donald Trump has called to end gun-free zones, Hillary Clinton, speaking in the aftermath of the Orlando, Florida, atrocity, dismissed the idea as ‘reckless’ and as evidence that her opponent is ‘temperamentally unfit’ to be president. Other Democrats have chimed in. President Obama, in his prepared remarks after the shootings at Pulse, announced, ‘The notion that the answer to this tragedy would be to make sure that more people in a nightclub are similarly armed to the killer defies common sense.’ Bill Clinton asserted that if someone had a permitted concealed handgun at the Pulse nightclub, ‘it is likely that more people would have been killed.’”
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Thankfully, Professor Lott offered the truth: “But there are dozens of cases, most in the last five years, in which concealed handgun permit holders stopped mass public shootings. Last year, these cases occurred in such places as a busy sidewalk in Chicago; a volunteer fire department having a children’s day in South Carolina; a barbershop in Philadelphia; a store in Conyers, Georgia; and a street in Winton, Ohio. In not one of these cases did a permit holder accidentally shoot an innocent bystander. Nor did the police accidentally shoot these heroes upon arriving at the scene.” Let’s call these incidents cases one through five. Scroll through the gallery above to learn about six more cases where an armed citizen stopped a mass murderer.
You will find still more documented cases like these in my friend Chris Bird’s excellent new book “Surviving A Mass Killer Rampage,” which is available from amazon.com. I highly recommend it.
This article was originally published in ‘Combat Handguns’ February 2017. To subscribe, visit outdoorgroupstore.com.
