Cop, wounded in a gun battle and being beaten, saved by a citizen with a gun.

Emergency personal respond to the scene. NBC News/AP.

An armed civilian is being credited for saving the live of an Arizona cop who had been ambushed and shot. NBC News. The director of the Arizona Department of Safety thanked the man, who has not been identified. The Arizona State Trooper was responding to reports of shots fired when he found a rolled over vehicle. He then came under fire and was shot. The suspect approached the officer and began to smash his head into the concrete. The passing motorist retrieved his gun and shot the suspect, killing him, and then a 2nd good Samaritan called for assistance on the trooper's radio. A 2nd person, a woman believed to be involved in the roll over accident, was killed as well. No information has been released about the civilians in this case, other than the man who shot the suspect was traveling to California with his wife. 

My Comment:

Once again someone has proven the value of having armed citizens. Though the details in this case haven't been fully reveled, it's clear that this man saved the life of that cop. Not everyone would do something like this. A lot of people would just keep driving. More caring people might not have intervened but they probably would have called for help. It takes someone special to actually help someone in danger like this. 

I think that the defense of others aspect of gun ownership and carrying firearms has been downplayed. Most arguments for and against gun ownership and concealed carry are about self defense, not defending others from violence. But people have used guns to defend others. It's not just about self defense it's about helping others as well. 

I have to wonder what the suspect's problem was. We probably won't know for a while what was going on. Both the suspect and the woman were killed. I am wondering what the woman's role on this was I don't know if she was a fellow victim of the suspect or an accomplice. Either way, it's a tragedy that she died as well. My guess was that she was either in the car with the suspect, who was shooting randomly before they crashed, or the suspect was shooting at her car. Bad luck in either scenario for that woman... 

As for the suspect, who knows why he did what he did. He might have been mentally ill, or on some hard core drugs. I know some drugs, like PCP, can cause violent, irrational behavior, so it's a possibility. It could even have been a politically motivated attack. The police have been attacked quite often lately and there are many people out there that hate cops. There is a tiny chance that this could even have been an attempted terror attack, though one wonders why he didn't come up with a better plan. We won't be able to tell what happened for sure for some time. And with the suspect dead, we may never know what he was thinking. 

I think that things would have ended differently if this had happened in another state. Arizona has pretty open gun laws that allowed this man to have a gun in his car. If this incident had taken place in California or in any of the states with bad gun laws, it's pretty clear that at the very least the cop would have died. Perhaps more would have too, we still don't know what the suspect's goal was, if indeed he had one. 

I always think it is important to cover cases of defensive gun uses, both in the United States and throughout the world. Somehow I have never found the "nightmare scenario" that gun control supporters like to bring up. They always expect these kinds of incidents to end with a massive gun battle where everyone shoots everyone else because nobody has a functioning brain. In this case the cops didn't shoot the civilian who shot the suspect because the weren't idiots. During the Dallas attack, cops didn't shoot the protesters that were open carrying. And during many of the cases where a terror attack happened, cops did not mistake the defenders with the attacker. 

Indeed, I have covered multiple cases on this blog where gun owners have saved lives. In some cases the gun owner ended the situation entirely. In other cases gun owners have bought time for others to escape, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives. Either way lives have been saved by gun owners. Despite the hysteria from the anti-gun crowd, time and time again it has been shown that guns can save lives.