An Ohio man with a concealed carry permit was presented Monday with a Citizens Award of Valor for coming to the aid of police officer under attack last year.
Cpl. Michael Wheeler of Ohio’s Mount Vernon Police Department told Inside Edition that he owes his life to Dylan DeBoard, the man who saved him.
“Every time I see him, I let him know how much I appreciate what he did,” he said.
According to Wheeler, he was attacked last year by a homeless man who later admitted to being high on crystal meth. While he was attempting to subdue his attacker, the man knocked Wheeler to his back and straddled him. He ripped away his microphone and reached for his gun.
Wheeler said that in his 14-year career he’s “never been in that situation before.”
“I’ve always been able to take control of a situation,” he said.
According to Wheeler, all of a sudden, the man stopped struggling with him. He looked up to see a man with a gun.
“I didn’t know if he was pointing at me or [the attacker],” Wheeler said.
Then the man with the gun — DeBoard — announced that he was a concealed carry holder. Wheeler was then able to use his attacker’s hesitation to flip him over and handcuff him.
The officer said he is thankful for the opportunity to honor DeBoard for his actions. “I wish a lot more of society would do what he did,” he added. “There were people standing around, but they were just watching. I kept wondering why people didn’t do anything.”
I think the reason why the other bystanders were not doing anything is because they were not armed, they were not trained to use a firearm, and they did not have moral clarity. We have lost moral clarity because we surround ourselves with nonsense on television where celebrity is more important than heroic character.
First, let’s talk about the training factor. To get a concealed carry permit in Ohio, you have to complete a course on handgun safety, pass a written test and you also have to pass a marksmanship test. This is because the evaluators do not want you to bring disrepute on legal firearm ownership because you aren’t qualified to use the tool you are carrying responsibly. The safety and accuracy test is quite difficult, depending on the state – you might be asked to hit 4″ targets at 5, 10 and 15 yards, for example, with 20 out of 25 rounds fired. That’s not easy!
Previously, I blogged about a report that showed that concealed-carry permit holders commit crimes at a lower rate than police officers. This is because the people who get these permits are careful not to do anything to lose them. They want to be safe, but they are also there to watch out for others. It is very important that we recognize that there are some people in our society who make poor choices (e.g. – drug use), and that we need the ability to defend ourselves and others from them.
Another in my series of posts to help non-Americans understand why Americans are passionate about the Second Amendment to the Constitution and the right to bear arms.
A good samaritan saved a 7-11 clerk on Sunday by shooting a hatchet-wielding man who had attacked the store.
A 60-year-old man with a valid concealed carry license was drinking his morning coffee when a masked man, later identified as 43-year-old Steven Blacktongue, entered the convenience store and began attacking the clerk, Kuldeep Singh. The attacker slashed Singh across the stomach several times without saying a word. At that point the concealed carrier drew his firearm and shot Blacktongue, killing him.
Police said that the concealed carried did nothing wrong and ended up saving lives.
“This could have been disastrous. Had this [customer] not shot, who knows what would’ve happened,” King County Sergeant Cindi West told KIRO. “We might have a dead clerk right now and instead, we have a dead bad guy. We do not see any wrongdoing on the part of the customer.”
“In fact, he probably saved lives in this case.”
Singh said he feared for his life during the attack and is glad to be alive. A friend of his, who also works at the convenience store, told the news station that the concealed carrier was a “good guy” for intervening and stopping the attack. The concealed carrier was not expected to face any charges.
Here’s the news report from KIRO 7 News:
This happened in ultra-leftist King County, Washington, of all places. I’m surprised they even let law-abiding people who pass a background check carry firearms, there. But at least this story leaves no doubt about why concealed carry permits exist.
Merrick Garland and the Second Amendment
This might be a useful story to send to Obama’s latest Supreme Court nominee – a radically leftist who opposes the second amendment.
Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has a record of opposing gun rights as a federal judge, which includes a vote to undo a landmark gun rights ruling.
Garland was one of four judges who voted to rehear the case of Parker v. District of Columbia with a full ten-judge panel after a smaller panel struck down the District of Columbia’s total ban on handguns. Garland’s vote for this en banc hearing indicates that he may believe the decision to strike down the city’s gun ban was mistaken.
The other six judges on the appeals court voted not to rehear the case, and the Supreme Court went on to rule in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to bear arms in the case.
So, he’s a radical on gun control, well outside the mainstream.
As usual, we end all second amendment posts with an examination of the peer-reviewed literature on gun ownership and rates of violent crime. This evidence is not generally understood by people on the left, who tend to be guided more by emotions and peer approval than evidence when forming their views on controversial issues.
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.
Here is a paper by Dr. Malcolm that summarizes one of the key points of her book.
Excerpt:
Tracing the history of gun control in the United Kingdom since the late 19th century, this article details how the government has arrogated to itself a monopoly on the right to use force. The consequence has been a tremendous increase in violent crime, and harsh punishment for crime victims who dare to fight back. The article is based on the author’s most recent book, Guns and Violence: The English Experience (Harvard University Press, 2002). Joyce Malcom is professor of history at Bentley College, in Waltham, Massachusetts. She is also author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (Harvard University Press, 1994).
Upon the passage of The Firearms Act (No. 2) in 1997, British Deputy Home Secretary Alun Michael boasted: “Britain now has some of the toughest gun laws in the world.” The Act was second handgun control measure passed that year, imposed a near-complete ban on private ownership of handguns, capping nearly eighty years of increasing firearms restrictions. Driven by an intense public campaign in the wake of the shooting of schoolchildren in Dunblane, Scotland, Parliament had been so zealous to outlaw all privately owned handguns that it rejected proposals to exempt Britain’s Olympic target-shooting team and handicapped target-shooters from the ban.
And the result of the 1997 gun ban:
The result of the ban has been costly. Thousands of weapons were confiscated at great financial cost to the public. Hundreds of thousands of police hours were devoted to the task. But in the six years since the 1997 handgun ban, crimes with the very weapons banned have more than doubled, and firearm crime has increased markedly. In 2002, for the fourth consecutive year, gun crime in England and Wales rose—by 35 percent for all firearms, and by a whopping 46 percent for the banned handguns. Nearly 10,000 firearms offences were committed.
[…]According to Scotland Yard, in the four years from 1991 to 1995 crimes against the person in England‟s inner cities increased by 91 percent. In the four years from 1997 to 2001 the rate of violent crime more than doubled. The UK murder rate for 2002 was the highest for a century.
I think that peer-reviewed studies – from Harvard University, no less – should be useful to those of us who believe in the right of self-defense for law-abiding people. 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, but both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.
This story is from the Washington Free Beacon, and it’s a good reminder why we should let law-abiding citizens own legally-purchased firearms.
Excerpt:
A 71-year-old woman was able to fight off a man who tried to steal her car on Sunday.
Janet Willis told a reporter a man entered her store around 5 a.m. and demanded she give him the keys to her car. “He said, ‘I want your car,’ I said, ‘so do I,’” she told the Morgan County Citizen.
Instead of handing over her keys Willis pressed a panic button under her counter. Unfortunately the assailant saw her press the button and became agitated. He then threatened to kill her.
When the man became distracted by a customer Willis was able to grab her 9mm handgun. “When he turned around I said ‘I’ll blow your guts all over this store,’” she told the paper. “Then I led him out.”
She kept her gun pointed at the attempted robber as he ran out and got into a car he had apparently stolen at another point. That car had a flat tire and the sparks created by driving on the rim caused the stolen car to be set ablaze. Shortly thereafter the suspect, 21-year-old Prince William Dennis, was arrested by police.
“I admire her for doing what she did to thwart the robbery,” Captain Chris Bish of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office said of Willis. “I’m grateful for the outcome.”
Willis said this was not the first time she had defended herself with a firearm. Three decades ago a man had threatened her life but she was armed with her Colt .45. “I asked him, do you want this (the pistol) or do you want the door,” she said to the publication. “He chose the door.”
Indeed.
And notice that no shots were fired, in either of the cases she talked about. Guns are not owned by bloodthirsty people who are anxious to shoot other people. Guns are owned by normal law-abiding people who don’t want to be robbed, raped or murdered by criminals. It’s especially important for women and the elderly to own guns, because it equalizes the differences in physical strength between men and women, or younger people and the elderly. We have an entire political party that champions leniency for criminals. They want to let them out early, not punish them, let them do whatever they want. Law-abiding citizens have to have some way to defend themselves from the compassion of the pro-criminal party’s policies.
Learn about the issue
To find the about guns and self-defense, look in the academic literature. Here are two books I really like for that.
WINTERY KNIGHT 