(Photo: WIBW)
Concealed carry permit holders help maintain public safety every day in this country, but you wouldn’t know it from reading the anti-gun media. This article from the Washington Post, for example, asserts that guns should not be permitted in schools or churches because every year there are 34 unjustifiable “gun deaths” for every justifiable “gun death.”
There are myriad problems with these and other data sets, but they all contain one crucial, fundamental flaw: they don’t account for incidents in which a gun is never fired. Many times guns aren’t used to kill anyone—they’re simply used to make criminals run away or give up.
That’s precisely what happened Saturday afternoon in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Topeka, Kansas.
Witnesses told WIBW News Now that a concealed carry permit holder ended a potentially deadly fight between two men by showing his firearm and forcing the fighters to drop their weapons. The gun owner stopped the fight’s escalation without firing a shot, and authorities were able to transport one of the perpetrators to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
The fight started inside a Topeka Wal-Mart around 4 p.m. Witnesses say that one of the men exited the store to retrieve a bat from his car. He was stabbed by the other man in the process but was able to turn around and strike the man with his bat.
At that point a third individual—an older man who was not involved in the original fight—presented his firearm and told the men to stop fighting. They complied, and police were able to take one man into custody and transport the stabbing victim to the hospital.
WIBW reports that authorities have released the concealed carry permit holder after questioning.
This incident won’t appear in the Washington Post’s statistics, but it exemplifies one of the most important arguments in favor of deregulating the carrying of concealed weapons. In incidents like this one, a good guy (or gal) with a gun doesn’t need to kill anyone. He or she simply provides a deterrent to violence and puts a stop to the situation until the authorities arrive.
This logic applies to home defense as well. Local news stations do a good job covering home defense shootings, but they often neglect the cases in which no shots are fired. Considering the number of home defense shootings that are covered every week, how many incidents take place in which the mere presence of a gun is enough to deter a would-be attacker?
There are no reliable statistics that keep track of such events, but it is reasonable to assume that law-abiding citizens use guns every day, all across the country, to defend their homes and their loved ones without firing a shot.
When I was a boy my Dad told me his story about armed self defense. His took place during the Korean War, he had to use his issued 1911 to stop a man. Like Americans learned in WWI & WWII, a man with a .45 and the will to use it is no small obstical. My Dad killed a man with one shot to the middle of the man’s chest. He grew up on the farm and had many experiences hunting deer, bear, and killing livestock for the dinner table. He described the grizzly wound in the man’s chest like nothing he had seen before. Stopping two angry men from tearing each other from tearing each other limb for limb in front of children and the general public isn’t just a good thing, as civilized people it’s an obligation. Thanks for sharing your input.
Good point made here. It is surely true that a great many more problems are resolved without firing a shot than otherwise. I may be an unusual circumstance, but I’ve seen this many times in my life. Growing up out in the sticks, you had to be able to take care of your own, as the average police response time where I grew up was around 20 minutes. As a kid, I watched my father send would be thieves running by either brandishing his weapon or simply telling the crook that he had a gun. He taught me this, along with the fact that if the threat alone was inefficient, you must be willing to shoot. As I got older, I fended off more than my fair share of the same type (although only a handful of bad guys, I imagine that is still probably above average). I wish
The two fighters had to believe that the CCW WOULD have fired on them or they would not have backed down. And in truth, that is what MOST who go to the trouble of getting the license will do.
The referenced Washington Post rag article pushes the anti gun agenda again. To be clear there is no correlation between unjustified and justified gun deaths: one does not rely on the other to be what it is and each rise or decline does not change the other. If the numbrs were reversed the Post would decry it as out of control firearms during vigilante justice depriving suspects of their Rights.
If the WOPO says it, don’t believe it. They are the same as the NYT or the LA Times or many other funny papers. They lie.