Law Abiding Citizens Prevent or Reduce Deaths with Guns

You will never hear mass shootings have been prevented, or deaths have been reduced because law abiding citizens have legal weapons and use those weapons to end a shooting, or to stop it before it starts.  These examples are rare, because mass shootings are rare, and most mass shootings happen in “gun-free” zones.  But Eugene Volokh in his article “Armed civilians really do capture, kill, stop mass shooters” gives some examples of law abiding citizens stopping mass shootings:

•    In Pearl, Mississippi in 1997, 16-year-old Luke Woodham stabbed and bludgeoned to death his mother at home, then killed two students and injured seven at his high school. As he was leaving the school, he was stopped by Assistant Principal Joel Myrick, who had gone out to get a handgun from his car. I have seen sources that state that Woodham was on the way to Pearl Junior High School to continue shooting, though I couldn’t find any contemporaneous news articles that so state.

•    In Edinboro, Pennsylvania in 1996, 14-year-old Andrew Wurst shot and killed a teacher at a school dance, and shot and injured several other students. He had just left the dance hall, carrying his gun — possibly to attack more people, though the stories that I’ve seen are unclear — when he was confronted by the dance hall owner James Strand, who lived next door and kept a shotgun at home. It’s not clear whether Wurst was planning to kill others, would have gotten into a gun battle with the police, or would have otherwise killed more people had Strand not stopped him.

•    In Winnemucca, Nevada in 2008, Ernesto Villagomez killed two people and wounded two others in a bar filled with three hundred people. He was then shot and killed by a patron who was carrying a gun (and had a concealed carry license). It’s not clear whether Villagomez would have killed more people; the killings were apparently the result of a family feud, and I could see no information on whether Villagomez had more names on his list, nor could one tell whether he would have killed more people in trying to evade capture.

•    In Colorado Springs in 2007, Matthew Murray killed four people at a church. He was then shot several times by Jeanne Assam, a church member, volunteer security guard, and former police officer (she had been dismissed by a police department 10 years before, and to my knowledge hadn’t worked as a police officer since). Murray, knocked down and badly wounded, killed himself; it is again not clear whether he would have killed more people had he not been wounded, but my guess is that he would have.

In San Antonio, Texas this week, a man shoots one in a movie theater parking lot before an off duty police officer shot the gunman.   This story was reported Monday by the Associated Press. 

Although rare for the reasons explained previously, we do have examples of preventing mass shootings or reducing casualties when people are able to stop the gunmen with guns.