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Editor’s note: This is part three of a six-part series.
Since the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the left has once again taken up its two-pronged attack on the Second Amendment: pushing additional gun control legislation in Congress and flooding the news and internet with anti-gun articles – many of which are merely clever works of fiction.
To combat the falsity – such as the myriad articles “debunking” the “good guy with a gun myth” – Liberty Nation will highlight six real stories this week focusing on incidents that would have gone horrifyingly differently had some good guy with a gun not intervened. The claim that private gun ownership doesn’t help stop crime is demonstrably false – and here’s the proof.
Trouble in the Club
Around 3:30 a.m. one June morning in 2016, 32-year-old Jody Ray Thompson fired several shots into a crowd outside a nightclub in Lyman, South Carolina. WISTV 10 out of Columbia, SC reported that Thompson had been in an argument with another patron earlier in the club. After firing into the crowd, someone returned fire. Spartanburg County Lt. Kevin Bobo said that the bullets “struck three victims, and almost struck a fourth victim, who in self-defense, pulled his own weapon, striking Thompson in the leg.”
Thompson was charged with four counts of attempted murder, possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and unlawful carrying of a weapon.
A Not-So-Mass Shooting
This nightclub shooter wounded three people and was injured himself by the return fire, but no one died. How many more would have been shot had the fourth intended victim not been a conceal carry licensee?
The school in Florida had a single armed officer, but he might as well have stayed home that day for all the good his refusal to intervene did the students and faculty. Given free reign to shoot unarmed targets to his heart’s desire, that troubled young man took 17 lives. The shooter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando killed 49. Had there been a good guy with a gun present, could either story have ended more like this one?
There’s certainly no guarantee that an armed patron or two at the Orlando club would have changed the outcome – nor is there any guarantee that the officer at the school wouldn’t have been shot and killed first, changing nothing aside from adding one more to the body count. But had anyone at either scene been armed and willing to stand up for the defenseless, the victims would have at least had a chance.
