The fact that our Second Amendment right to bear arms is protected, or better stated “shall not be infringed,” is one that irks our friends on the left, perhaps more so than any other Constitutional right. Their attitude tends to be, “Damn you and your rights, we’ll do all the infringing we want.” They typically crank up their volume on such assertions after a tragic school shooting and do their best to ignore episodes that show the benefit of private gun ownership.
After two brutal incidents in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, in May, gun rights opponents were pushing hard on their narrative. Assault weapons are unnecessary, they told us. No one needs high-capacity magazines, they said. The notion of a good guy with a gun being an effective method of halting a bad guy with a gun was a myth, they assured us.
Then July rolled around, and instances of heroic, gun-toting Americans shutting down demonic, violent criminals have become impossible to ignore.
According to Fox-2 in St. Louis:
“The St. Charles Police Department says a 26-year-old man from St. Louis City on a violent crime spree was shot and killed by another man who was witnessing an armed robbery in progress at the QuikTrip located at 2260 First Capitol Drive.
Police say the crime spree began around 3 a.m. Saturday morning with an armed robbery at Mobile On The Run located at 1401 S. Fifth Street. The suspect held a knife to the 43-year-old female clerk’s throat while she opened the cash register. The suspect then pushed her to the floor, stole the money from the register, and then dragged her to the back of the store asking where the safe was.”
That was on Saturday, and yup, that 26-year-old robber was definitely a bad guy, and that Second Amendment embracing citizen was definitely a hero; a good guy.
But that was just a one-off, they claimed. That situation doesn’t happen often, they shouted. But there’s a problem with their argument. It does happen, and it happens a lot. And in fact, it happened the very next day when another hero with a gunshot stepped forward in Indiana on Sunday. According to CNN:
“The gunman who killed three people and injured two others at a mall in Greenwood, Indiana, Sunday evening was armed with two rifles, a Glock pistol and more than 100 rounds of ammunition, police said.
The 20-year-old man, identified as Douglas Sapirman, used only an AR 15-style rifle in the shooting, firing off 24 rounds before he was shot and killed by a bystander. Police initially said Sapirman was shot less than two minutes after the attack began, but revised that to 15 seconds on Tuesday, according to Greenwood Police Chief James Ison.”
Another heroic “bystander.” Another good guy with a gun overcoming a bad guy with a gun, and this time after only 15 seconds of firing. And consider that both confrontations happened on back-to-back days and within only a couple hundred miles of each other.
There is much that ails our society. Mental illness abounds, with demented young men deciding that murdering school children provides them with some type of vindication. A disintegration of collective morality accelerates, with armed thugs determining that holding up a gas station for whatever twisted motivation suits them is acceptable behavior.
There are steps our governments – federal, state, and local – can take to reduce or eliminate the gun violence plaguing our communities, but seizing the weapons of law-abiding, protection-minded citizens should not be one of them. While our elitist, intellectual superiors at outlets such as The New York Times claim that such “good guy with a gun” occurrences are “statistical unicorns,” the rest of us know better. Or maybe unicorns are a just lot more common than we’d thought.
By Jess Lawson
Jess Lawson is a regular contributor to The Blue State Conservative and a passionate, conservative millennial who loves America.
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This story syndicated with permission from The Blue State Conservative