When a man walked into a Missouri Walmart carrying a rifle and dressed in body armor on Thursday, America could’ve seen its third high-profile mass shooting in just over a week. Luckily, an armed hero stopped the potential shooter in his tracks and reminded us how guns are often used for good.
Armed, off-duty firefighter stops man armed with 100 rounds of ammunition at south Springfield Walmart https://t.co/dC9M1rWClo (“His intent was to cause chaos …” what on earth??”)
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) August 9, 2019
An off-duty firefighter shopping in the store was carrying a firearm, and detained the suspect at gunpoint before panic turned into bloodshed. It’s a noble act of heroism that surely won’t get the coverage it deserves.
Too often, media wants to pretend these stories don’t exist, or at least cover them in far less detail than actual shootings.
The myriad examples of a “good guy with a gun” are regularly dismissed as a myth and brushed over in favor of coverage of successful shootings that better serve the gun control narrative. This media malpractice was on full display in the NBC News story reporting on this latest incident in Missouri, which named the armed suspect, but did not name the hero who stopped him.
If that’s not evidence of narrative-driven, biased journalism, I don’t know what is.
Here are the cold, hard facts liberals in the media don’t want you to know about gun ownership: A handful of high-profile tragedies aside, guns are, on balance, used far more for self-defense and other positive uses than for violent crime. A report from the Institute of Medicine found that:
The trend here is clear. Defensive gun use is hard to measure, but if it’s anywhere in the range that most surveys suggest, it far exceeds actual instances of violent gun crimes. This reminds us that while mass shootings are certainly tragic, guns are a net positive for society.
Even left-leaning analyses have shown that proposed gun control measures wouldn’t stop mass shootings. In the wake of this weekend’s two tragic shootings, gun control advocates are pushing policies such as so-called universal background checks (aka, a national government gun database and tracking system) even though a CNN fact-checker admitted it is “doubtful” this would have stopped either of the shooters.
But many proposed gun control policies, from raising the minimum legal purchase age to 21 to banning semi-automatic weapons, would severely limit the ability of law-abiding Americans to defend themselves. As both this most recent act of heroism and the overall data show, restricting self-defense in a naive effort to eliminate evil would be a tragic mistake.
