The shooting of an Ohio murder suspect by an armed homeowner in Fayette County, Georgia, has ignited a bristling critique of the typical silence from the gun prohibition lobby in the aftermath of such incidents, with the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms declaring, “The gun ban lobby doesn’t want the public to know this, which should raise questions about what else they are hiding.”
It is a long overdue discussion, as CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb observed in a prepared statement, “After all, the gun prohibition lobby likes to justify every one of their extremist schemes by saying ‘if it saves just one life, it’s worth it.’ That logic runs both ways. If armed self-defense or intervention saves just one life, isn’t that also worthwhile? We’ll wait for an answer.”
He’s not likely to get one, judging from past experience.
Numerous high-profile incidents in which armed private citizens took action have been met with deafening silence from the gun control crowd.
Many of these incidents were discussed in a 2019 book co-authored by Gottlieb titled Good Guys with Guns. The paperback received generally favorable reviews when it was published, although anti-gunners apparently didn’t care for it.
The CCRKBA critique stems from the Georgia incident involving a man identified as Michael James Brooks, II, who was being sought in connection with the brutal stabbing death of 77-year-old Emily Foster on Sept. 9. Brooks was also wanted in connection with the carjacking of a red Ford pickup, and authorities can probably link him to that crime, since Fox News is reporting the truck was found “outside the burglarized home in Georgia.”
A Fox News affiliate in Atlanta noted that the homeowner shot Brooks twice before sheriff’s deputies arrived. He was taken to a local hospital and will then face arrest.
“Gun prohibitionists tend to favor leniency toward criminal suspects,” CCRKBA’s Gottlieb observed, “which only encourages more violent behavior when criminals figure out the legal system isn’t going to hold them accountable. Anti-gunners are quick to demand more gun controls to penalize law-abiding citizens every time some criminal misuses a firearm, rather than placing the blame solely on the perpetrator.
“When Elisjsha Dicken heroically killed a would-be mass shooter at a shopping mall in Indiana last year,” he recalled, “the gun ban crowd was totally silent. Likewise, when armed citizens stopped a Texas church shooting in 2019, we heard nothing from anti-gunners. This scenario is repeated every time a private citizen acts legally and decisively in a life-threatening situation.”
It is a point for which there is plenty of supporting evidence.
- Writing earlier this year at The Daily Signal, Amy Swearer and Pierce Sandlin with the Heritage Foundation reported on a shooting in Las Vegas involving an armed private citizen that was allegedly “swept under the rug.”
- In El Paso back in February, CNN reported that an armed citizen “used his legally licensed gun to shoot and wound a suspect in a mall shooting.” The armed Samaritan was identified as 32-year-old Emanual Duran.
- In July 2022, an armed citizen fatally shot a would-be robber at a St. Charles, Mo., convenience store. The suspect came at the armed man with a knife and was shot repeatedly. According to KSDK News, “His courageous effort ended in a deadly shooting, which possibly saved more lives than the one lost.”
Writing last year in Reason, Jacob Sullum looked at what he considered “the largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted” and said the survey “suggests that they use firearms in self-defense about 1.7 million times a year.”
Yet, an article in The Trace, a Michael Bloomberg-backed publication with a pro-gun-control slant, referred to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which says “firearms were used defensively in 166,900 nonfatal violent crimes between 2014 and 2018, which works out to an average of 33,380 per year. Over the same period, defensive gun use was reported in 183,300 property crimes, or an average of 36,660 per year…Taken together, that’s 70,040 instances of defensive gun use per year.”
Why such a disparity? Presumably, it depends upon whose data is being used and how.
In many defensive gun uses, a shot is never fired. When shots are fired, such as at the Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, in 2019, the incident unfolds fast, and the armed citizen turns out to be a fairly humble person who does not care to be identified as a “hero.” In this case, the incident was live-streamed to a lot of people who watched aghast as the shotgun-wielding killer murdered two parishioners before turning and heading toward the front of the room, when 71-year-old Jack Wilson took him down with a single shot to the head.
While the media appears to pay more attention these days to defensive gun use, especially in cases where clearly a properly-placed bullet stops massive carnage, the gun prohibition lobby—as Gottlieb and CCRKBA point out—develops a sudden case of lockjaw. It appears anti-gunners aren’t simply trying to avoid the truth, and they’ll do their best to suppress it.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
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