Let’s learn about the Indiana hero who stopped a mass shooting with his gun

I like to write about how law-abiding Americans use their legal firearms to prevent crimes. The best crime preventing is done when you don’t even fire your weapon, but sometimes you have to go all the way. That’s what happened recently at a mall in Indiana. I thought it might be good to talk about the Good Samaritan hero who used his legal firearm to stop a horrific crime.

Here’s the story from WTHR local news:

At 5:57:03 p.m., Elisjsha Dicken, an armed bystander, fired on the shooter from 40 yards away, according to police. Within 15 seconds from when the shooting began, Dicken fired 10 rounds hitting the shooter as the shooter tried to retreat into the bathroom but collapsed and died.

An autopsy found the shooter was shot eight times and none were self-inflicted.

Dicken had no police training or military background, according to police. He was carrying under the new “Constitutional Carry” law and did not have a permit. Police said Dicken learned to shoot from his grandfather and that he had no military or police training.

“His actions were nothing short of heroic. He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun. Was very proficient in that, was tactically sound and as he moved to close in on the suspect, he was also motioning for people to exit behind him,” Ison said about Dicken’s actions. “Many people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen that took action very quickly within the first two minutes of this shooting.”

What’s interesting about this to me is that it’s usually young, unmarried women who don’t like the idea of men owning firearms, and vote against gun rights. But honestly, this is the kind of young man they should be interested in dating and marrying. He was armed, he had practiced enough to be accurate, and he protected his loved ones from evil. When you take away the guns from the good guys, you can’t expect to find men who can protect you from threats. You can’t expect to call the police and have them show up in time to save you – look at what happened in Uvalde, TX.

Defensive gun usages

Amy Swearer, a writer at Daily Signal, puts out a list of heroic gun usage to prevent crimes, and I link to them occasionally. The last one I linked to was from May 2022. She hasn’t done one for July yet, but here is the one for June.

Here’s one of 12 defensive gun usages she lists in that article:

May 30, Fredericksburg, Virginia: A woman was making a bank deposit when she saw a man get into the driver’s seat of her nearby car, police said. The woman confronted the man, who got physical with her. She drew a gun and pointed it at him, prompting him to walk away as she called 911. Police arrested the man a short time later and charged him with carjacking.

This is the best kind of defensive gun usage – no shots fired, but crime prevented.

The peer-reviewed research

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

The Lott book was published by the University of Chicago Press (now in its 3rd edition)
The Malcolm book was published by Harvard University Press

The book by economist John Lott, linked above, 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. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.

We have an election this year. If you like this article, why not use it to persuade your undecided friends to support gun rights for law-abiding Americans? The life you save may be your own.

One thought on “Let’s learn about the Indiana hero who stopped a mass shooting with his gun”

Think of criminals as predators, predators naturally will go for easier prey since there’s less risk of injury,death and minimum energy lost. Rarely will predators go for healthy prey since healthy prey is more likely to defend themselves.

So when state governors have strict gun laws in their states, predators will be encouraged to attack prey that used to be healthy but not healthy now since they was either dehorned,declawed or defang.

Now crimes won’t drop down to zero, but states that allow conceal and carry make criminals think twice about before robbing someone because in the back of their mind they know there’s a good chance the potential viticm will have a gun to even the odds out.

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