What could have been a tragic shooting up of a party was halted by a good guy with a gun.
Two women got into a fight Sunday night at the party in West Palm Beach, Florida. The conflict spread to a melee among about 20 people, according to WPEC-TV.
A 22-year-old man allegedly retrieved a short-barreled shotgun from a car and made a threat to “shoot up the crowd.”
Despite pleas from people in the crowd, the would-be shooter refused to put down the weapon until struck by gunfire from a 32-year-old man possessing a concealed carry permit.
Reports of gunshots at the scene prompted the dispatching of police. A reported 911 call came from an individual who said he had shot the person threatening people at the party.
That man was pronounced dead at the scene and there are currently no charges pending. The individual who shot him was “trying to protect others,” WPBF reported police as saying.
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Besides a good guy with a gun being on the scene in West Palm Beach, there were other recent defensive shootings in Florida.
Earlier in the month, a Jacksonville man shot an intruder “acting like he was possessed” breaking into the man’s home. In July a Pensacola resident’s fired rifled caused home invaders to scatter, The Blaze reported.
Did the “good guy with a gun” stop a tragedy?
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Legitimate defensive use of firearms frequently occurs, but most people aren’t aware of the incidents.
For one thing, news media tend to downplay, mock or be critical of such discharges of weapons, regularly using the term “good guy with a gun myth.”
The FBI doesn’t help by underreporting instances where proper use of firearms averts a disaster, undercounting by a magnitude of more than three, as John Lott, who heads the Crime Prevention Research Center, wrote Wednesday in RealClearInvestigations.
Referring to the recent heroics and expert marksmanship of Elisjsha Dicken in shutting down the beginning of a mass shooting in Greenwood, Indiana, Lott said overwhelming news coverage of the incident claimed such things rarely happen.
While Dicken’s gun skills are indeed rare, Lott wrote that the FBI minimizes such efforts because “[t]he FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively engages in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated, public area.
“But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.”
FBI figures show an armed citizen only halted 11 of 252 active shooter situations from 2014 to 2021, according to RealClearInvestigations.
But, according to Lott, “An analysis by my organization identified a total of 281 active shooter incidents during that same period and found that 41 of them were stopped by an armed citizen.
“That is, the FBI reported that 4.4 percent of active shooter incidents were thwarted by armed citizens, while the CPRC found 14.6 percent.”
The discrepancies stemmed from the FBI misclassifying and overlooking situations, Lott said.
For instance, in the infamous 2019 shooting at the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, the killer was stopped by Jack Wilson. Because Wilson, not a security professional, was on security duty for the church, the FBI did not count him as a civilian responding to an active shooter situation, RealClearInvestigations reported.
Such variations by the FBI are important, Lott wrote, quoting Theo Wold, former acting assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice — “So much of our public understanding of this issue is malformed by this single agency [the FBI].
“When the Bureau gets it so systematically — and persistently — wrong, the cascading effect is incredibly deleterious,” Wold said. “The FBI exerts considerable influence over state and local law enforcement and policymakers at all levels of government.”
The FBI wrongly influencing public policy? No! How could that be?
Meanwhile, there are people who attended a party in West Palm Beach where things turned sour. Those people probably are unconcerned about Lott’s statements or FBI statistics or the issues of firearms and public policy.
No doubt those people are glad that as the situation worsened that night there was on the scene a good guy with a gun.
