At Fox News: Concealed-permit gun holders save lives — Texas church attack just the latest example

Dec 30, 2019 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a piece up at Fox News about the concealed handgun permit holders who stopped the mass public shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ near Fort Worth. The piece starts this way:

The attack on the West Freeway Church of Christ reminds us of an important truth that too many still deny:

Concealed-permit gun holders save lives. And in today’s world, they and their weapons should be welcomed in churches and other houses of worship.

Within seconds of the shooter opening fire on the Texas congregation Sunday, he was shot dead by two parishioners with concealed handgun permits, one of them a former FBI agent. Four other parishioners had their concealed handguns drawn, ready to respond. The attacker killed two congregants before he was taken down, but the death toll could have been much higher.

“The citizens who were inside that church undoubtedly saved 242 other parishioners, and that might get swept aside,” said Jeoff Williams, a regional director with the Texas Department of Public Safety. “It was miraculous. The true heroes in all this are the people who were sitting in those pews today and responded, the immediate responders … it was truly heroic.”

“Today evil walked boldly among us,” Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn said at a press conference. “Let me remind you, good people raised up and stopped it before it got worse.”

Sunday’s shooting demonstrated yet again that there are simply too many targets for police to be able to protect everyone. It’s also not realistic to keep terrorists and criminals from getting weapons. The war on guns has been as much of a failure as the war on drugs. There is simply no backup plan when background checks fail to stop killers from buying weapons.

When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a law earlier this year making it easier for people to carry guns with them into places of worship, former Vice President Joe Biden criticized the action. “It is irrational, with all due respect to the governor of Texas, it is irrational what they’re doing on the same day you see a mass shooting … and we’re talking about loosening access to have guns,” Biden said.

It’s hardly irrational. Permit holders have stopped dozens of would-be mass public shootings in malls, churches, schools, universities and town centers. Gun control advocates raise the alarm that a permit holder will accidentally shoot a bystander or a police officer responding to reports of a mass shooting will accidentally harm a permit holder. This has never happened in a mass public shooting.

But there are many examples of permit holders saving lives by stopping church attacks:

In Antioch, Tenn., on Sept. 24, 2017, Emanuel Kidega Samson shot one person and injured seven others. But the attack could have been much worse. Samson was slightly injured when a 22-year-old usher, Robert Engle, tried to stop him, which gave Engle a chance to retrieve his permitted concealed handgun from his car. Engle went back into the church and held the attacker at gunpoint until police arrived. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

johnrlott

3 Comments

  1. Susanne Whirley

    It is our constituional right to own and bear arms. We must be able to protect ourselves and our families period! Continuous training is a key..we surely understand the use of a firearm should be the last resort, but when it is understood the seriousness of that decision to use deadly force, It is not taken lightly.

  2. Michael

    The now often used phrase, ” When seconds count, the Police, are only minutes away,” shows it’s truthfulness, in this case, and many others. The murderer was put down in five to six seconds, after the threat was detected, yet two lives were lost. However, I believe, many more lives were saved. You should carry always, and train as much as possible, as a law abiding citizen.

  3. Neil Schmidt

    Does Biden ever run out of foolish statements? No thought process seems to be behind his nonsensical utterances……even when lives have been saved. And this clown thinks he is good Presidential material? The man is living proof as to how far our once-great culture has fallen.

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