I often struggle to explain to my Canadian and British friends what the second amendment is, and why Americans insist on being able to legally own firearms. I normally make the argument from academic studies to show that banning guns leads to more violent crime, while concealed carry laws reduce violent crime. But sometimes, it’s nice to illustrate the statistics with a case study.

MSN.com reports on a story of an attempted mass-shooting that occurred on the weekend at a church:

A gunman has killed one person and critically injured another inside a packed Texas church during a livestreamed service before he was shot dead by an armed member of the congregation.

[…]Video of the livestream shows a person wearing a large coat, with the hood covering his head, standing up and walking over toward another man at the back of the room.

The shooter appears to say something to the man, prompting him to point in a direction at the back of the church.

In a matter of seconds, the shooter whips out what appears to be a shotgun and fires two rounds.

One of the shots hits a man who stood up in the back of the church and the other shot hits the man the victim had spoken too.

After the second shot was fired, the gunman attempted to flee the scene before he was shot by an armed member of the congregation.

[…]According to one member of the church, the victim had spoken to one of the deacons in the back of the church before he opened fire.

The member wrote on Facebook that another deacon ‘who is a concealed carry instruction, and retired law enforcement officer, shot the guy before he could fire a third time!’

That deacon has not been identified but according to CBS 11, he is actually a former FBI agent and part of the church’s security.

Here’s some video coverage from the far-left CBS News:

More about the man who took down the criminal.

Here is what Joe Biden, leading Democrat presidential candidate, has to offer the Christians in that church:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden attacked Texas Governor Greg Abbott earlier this year for signing a bill into law that allowed lawful gun owners to carry firearms in places of worship, repeatedly calling Abbott’s decision “irrational.”

[…]“Dealing with firearms, it is irrational, with all due respect to the governor of Texas, irrational what they are doing,” Biden told reporters on September 2. “On the very day you see a mass shooting … and we’re talking about loosening access to have guns, to be able to take them into places of worship, it’s just absolutely irrational. It’s totally irrational.”

[…]Biden continued, saying that any weapon that was capable of carrying “magazines that can hold multiple bullets” should be banned – which is nearly all firearms.

[…]Later asked if there could be any compromises with Republicans on the issue, Biden responded, “None. None on this. I think this is no compromise. This is one we have to just push, and push, and push, and push, and push.”

Biden has armed security everywhere he goes. He just doesn’t want you to have armed security.

Just picture in your mind what would have happened in that church if Joe Biden had prevented law-abiding church members from carrying weapons to defend themselves. That is the goal of every Democrat – they want to disarm law-abiding people, and leave them at the mercy of criminals who don’t obey gun laws.

I want to link to this column from famous black economist Thomas Sowell to help people understand how frequently law-abiding Americans use legally-owned firearms to prevent crimes.

He writes:

We all know that guns can cost lives because the media repeat this message endlessly, as if we could not figure it out for ourselves. But even someone who reads newspapers regularly and watches numerous television newscasts may never learn that guns also save lives — much less see any hard facts comparing how many lives are lost and how many are saved.

But that trade-off is the real issue — not the Second Amendment or the National Rifle Association, which so many in the media obsess about. If guns cost more lives than they save, we can always repeal the Second Amendment. But if guns save more lives than they cost, we need to know that, instead of spending time demonizing the National Rifle Association.

The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually pulling the trigger.

If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger — and if an idiot with a knife is coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.

Surveys of American gun owners have found that 4 to 6 percent reported using a gun in self-defense within the previous five years. That is not a very high percentage but, in a country with 300 million people, that works out to hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns per year.

Yet we almost never hear about these hundreds of thousands of defensive uses of guns from the media, which will report the killing of a dozen people endlessly around the clock. The murder of a dozen innocent people is unquestionably a human tragedy. But that is no excuse for reacting blindly by preventing hundreds of thousands of other people from defending themselves against meeting the same fate.

Although most defensive uses of guns do not involve actually shooting, nevertheless, the total number of criminals killed by armed private citizens runs into the thousands per year.

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic studies by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

• The Lott book is published by the University of Chicago Press
• The Malcolm book is published by Harvard University Press

The book by economist John Lott compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study found that after the UK banned guns, violent crime rates doubled in four years.