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Editor’s note: This is part five 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.
Single Mom Defends Family
On New Year’s Eve of 2011, a young widowed mother called 911 to report a home invasion in Blanchard, a small city in Grady County, Oklahoma. Two minutes before the police arrived, the men made it into the house, and Sarah McKinley shot one of them in the neck with a 12-gauge shotgun.
Mrs. McKinley, 18, lost her husband just days earlier to cancer. She was home alone with her three-month-old child at the time of the break-in. Dustin Louis Stewart and Justin Shane Martin tried to force their way in through the front door, but Mrs. McKinley barricaded it. Eventually, Martin pushed through, wielding a knife, and was shot. Stewart ran, but later turned himself in, according to The Oklahoman.
He told the police that they were high on pills and that they thought there were painkillers in the house. Oklahoma allows prosecutors to seek murder convictions should an accomplice die during the commission of a felony, so Stewart was charged with first-degree murder for his part in causing Martin’s death. Sarah McKinley, who was just defending herself and her child, was not charged.
Seconds and Minutes
There’s a saying about relying on emergency services: “When seconds count, the police are minutes away.” Records released after the shooting show that the police arrived 14 minutes after Sarah McKinley made her 911 call – two minutes after Justin Martin broke through the barricade, knife in hand, and was shot. Had the young mother and widow not been armed, there’s a good chance she and her child would have died that night.
While the rest of this series focuses on public shootings rather than home invasions, it’s important to address the issue of police response time. Grady County Sheriff Art Kell told The Oklahoman in 2012 that the average response time inside the Blanchard city limits is 4.8 minutes, and 15 to 25 minutes for the County. That’s a long time to hide out in your home waiting for someone to save you. Even the 4.8 minutes would seem an eternity when someone is trying to kill you.
As for those who prefer to wait for the police, just know that, according to the Supreme Court, they have no obligation to protect you. Having said that, one thing that seems to be left out of the conversation is that the good guy with a gun often is a cop – but the police can’t be everywhere at all times.
