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Stephen Willeford's heroic actions last Sunday saved many lives at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. The killer, Devin Kelley, was shooting the wounded when Willeford showed up with a rifle. Willeford's quick actions forced Kelley to stop his attack, presumably saving the lives of the twenty wounded and possibly many more.
The press derided President Trump for saying that Willeford saved many lives with his gun, and that stricter gun control regulations would have only made things worse.
It is only too bad that someone with a concealed handgun permit wasn't already at the church. We may never have heard of the shooting — national news stories are virtually never done on permit holders stopping mass public shootings.
An article at Fox News this past week mentions four such cases. It talks about a 1997 shooting at a high school in Pearl, Mississippi; a 2007 church attack in Colorado Springs; and a Chicago Uber driver who in 2015 shot and wounded a man who opened fire on a crowd. The most recent case was a 2017 church shooting in Antioch, Tennessee. But those cases just skim the surface.
A 2014 FBI report claims that only once between 2000 and 2013 did a concealed handgun permit holder stop a public shooting (they claimed to look at all cases where guns were fired in public that weren't part of a gang fight or some other crime). This single case occurred in Winnemucca, Nevada in May 2008, when a customer with a permit fatally shot an attacker who had just killed two people. They didn't even include the 2007 church shooting in Colorado Springs, where a killer had already taken two lives at the church before being stopped by a permit holder.
Continue Reading: Good guys with guns saving lives
