Armed citizens stopped a shooting at a New Orleans gun store and shooting range. Fox News. The shooting left two people wounded and three people dead, including the suspect. Police say the suspect shot and killed the first two victims and then was engaged and killed by multiple people. It is unclear if the people who stopped the shooter were employees of the gun store or customers.
Local sources say that the shootout began when a clerk confronted the gunman for having a loaded and unholstered pistol outside of the gun range, which is against the rules of most gun stores and ranges. The local source, WDSU, also claims that the two shooters that engaged the suspect were customers at the range and were the ones wounded by the attacker.
My Comment:
The way certain news agencies are framing this is pretty ridiculous. Most headlines have no mention that this shooter was put down by armed citizens and they are trying to paint this as a mass shooting instead of a prevented mass shooting. Indeed, that's all I heard about the case before I got home and could actually read an article. Fox News had it right, this was a case where Good Samaritans took down a criminal.
I also think that this was not a planned act. It seems like the shooter was a customer with a bad attitude who reacted poorly when confronted after he had his gun out of his holster while loaded. My guess is he was offended by that, got angry and then fired.
The employees were right to confront the shooter though, having your gun out, loaded and unholstered is against the rules at pretty much any gun range, gun store or even a place where they sell ammo. Doing so is essentially declaring that you are there to rob the place and will be interpreted as such. Even if that isn't what the suspect had planned it was how it was going to be interpreted and I can't fault the employees for calling him out on that.
It almost makes me wonder if this was some kind of suicide by combat attempt. Any reasonable person would think that an unholstered gun at a firing range outside of the actual range itself is a robbery attempt and by pulling his gun the suspect must have known he was in danger of being shot.
Unfortunately it seems that the employees that got shot weren't prepared as they should have been. I am guessing they were armed and they probably should have had their guns out the second they saw this guy and one of them should have been calling the cops. It's possible it happened to fast and I don't want to second guess the dead too much.
The good news is that the other people at this gun store were able to stop this guy. I don't know if he was a threat to anyone else in the store but since he had already killed two people I suspect he was. It's very possible he could have killed more people, either employees or customers or the cops when they came to arrest him. Thankfully they were able to put this person down and I hope they make a speedy recovery.
If there is a lesson to be learned here it's the following: Keep your gun cased when you go to the gun range until you are ready to use it. And always be aware of your surroundings, you never know what kind of idiot will show up. That's especially true when firearms are involved.
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