AP.

A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.

Police on Monday praised the quick actions of 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, an armed shopper who killed 20-year-old Jonathan Sapirman after Sapirman killed three people and wounded two others at a mall in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.

“Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen,” police Chief Jim Ison said Monday, repeatedly calling Dicken a “good Samaritan” and his response “heroic.”

It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people.

It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.

In a quarter of the shootings, the attacker stopped by leaving the area, similar to what happened during the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed.

“There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings.

And on and on the commentary drones.

To begin with, definitions are important.  Self defense events happen every day in America, whether at home or out and about.  I write on firearms and 2A rights, so I bypass chances to pen something else on self defense events literally every day to focus more on the mechanical and materials engineering of firearms, ammunition performance, method of carry, training, and the things that interest me.  The author has subdivided his topic as best as he can in order to make his most convincing case.  He has neglected literally thousands of cases of interest.

But even then, is he correct?  Maybe not.

UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote in the Washington Post on April 20, 2015: “Have civilians with permitted concealed handguns stopped such mass shootings before?”  We provided Volokh with a list of such cases, which he used.

Below, we have collected news stories on more cases of permit holders stopping mass public shootings with their handguns (we separately collect cases where concealed handguns are used to stop other crimes).  There is no reason to believe that this list is comprehensive, given how little media coverage is devoted to these heroic acts.  In addition, we make no attempt here to list here the vast number of defensive gun uses in general that are reported daily in the US.

Permit holders stopped some mass public shootings that gained extensive news coverage, but only a few stories mentioned that it was a permit holder who stopped the attack. The stories frequently get other facts wrong.

The researchers list more than sixty times permit holders have stopped likely mass shootings in public.  I judge a few of them to be not applicable for various reasons, but that doesn’t negate the force of the copious data.

The author at AP did a lousy job of research, but then, that has become the standard for the legacy media.

To be sure, none of this has anything to do with God-given rights.  If a mass shooting can theoretically occur, and a carrier can theoretically stop it to prevent loss of life to himself or others, then it’s wise to carry and he or she certainly has the right to do so regardless of whether bogus research demonstrates that the result will be statistically insignificant.  What’s statistically insignificant to the writer is significant if you have a firearm trained on you as a potential victim.

This just all goes to show how absurd most reporting is.  Thus, unless the source is about some new firearm, some new ammunition or a ballistic test of older ammo designs for comparison, methods of maintenance, and the mechanical aspect of firearms, I’m not likely to link any legacy media source unless it’s to lampoon them or call out error.  And I won’t go behind a paywall even to do that.

That’s about all the legacy media is good for these days.  Some writer (and editor) actually thinks he’s earned his pay today for that tripe.