The shooting this week in a Lyman, South Carolina, nightclub will not receive the international publicity that the recent horrific Orlando nightclub murders have merited. This is understandable, considering the death toll in Orlando was 49, while no one was killed in the South Carolina shooting.
But perhaps there should be greater media attention to what occurred in South Carolina, because a wider knowledge of that event might prevent a future Orlando-like massacre.
According to deputies of the Spartanburg County sheriff’s department, 32-year-old Jody Ray Thompson pulled a gun just outside the Playoffz nightclub and fired several shots toward a crowd.
Lt. Kevin Bobo explained what happened. “His rounds struck three victims, and almost struck a fourth victim, who in self-defense, pulled his own weapon and fired, striking Thompson in the leg.” The man who shot Thompson held a valid permit to carry a concealed weapon. As such, he will face no charges.
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“Thompson was still on the scene when deputies arrived, but the initial scene was chaotic,” Bobo said. “It wasn’t until victims and witnesses were interviewed, and video from the scene was reviewed that Thompson was identified as the suspect.”
Thompson was charged with four counts of attempted murder, possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and unlawful carrying of a weapon.
It was yet another example of how a good man with a gun stopped a bad man with a gun. While deputies with the sheriff’s department did arrive at the scene and take control of the situation, had the man with the concealed carry permit not been present, or had he not had his gun with him and shot at the attacker immediately, the situation could have turned out far differently.
As the saying goes, “Often when law enforcement officers are needed in seconds, they are only minutes away.”
While President Barack Obama, along with Democrats acting like children sitting in on the floor of the House of Representatives (making the U.S. look like some kind of banana republic), and his allies in the liberal media chose to focus on the need for more gun control laws after the Orlando massacre, others have expressed the opposite viewpoint.
One person doing so was the father of a victim in the Orlando nightclub shootings. In a letter to the Detroit News, Mark Bando blamed gun control for disarming people such as a his son Christopher, who was killed by the terrorist shooter.
“The killer was armed and his helpless victims were not,” said the father, adding, “Yet the anti-gun politicians still want to disarm the populace, enabling these scenarios. It is likely such attacks will continue, until the victims start shooting back. That’s the lesson I take from this, for what it’s worth. When the shooting started Saturday night, I’ll bet there wasn’t a person in the club who wouldn’t have traded everything he owned in the world for a loaded gun.”
Bando had served in the Detroit police department for 25 years, and there is little doubt that he has much experience that helped form his support for the right to keep and bear arms.
Another example of a good man with a gun preventing additional murders is what happened two years ago in Moore, Oklahoma at Vaughn Foods. Alton Nolen, an employee of the food processing company, attacked two female co-workers with a knife, killing one, Colleen Hufford, whom he eventually beheaded. He attempted to do the same to Traci Johnson, but was confronted by the company’s chief operating officer, Mark Vaughn, with a gun.
Vaughn shot Nolen, ending the attacks. But had Vaughn not had a gun on the premises, it is uncertain how many others would have been assaulted and possibly killed in Nolen’s rampage.
Gun control laws actually prevent citizens from protecting themselves and others in such violent circumstances. In an instance from 1991, Suzanna Gratia Hupp and her parents were having lunch at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas when a mass shooting took place in the cafeteria.
Hupp owned a firearm, but had left the gun in her locked car, fearing that she could have been arrested for violating the state’s draconian concealed weapon’s laws, in place at the time, which made such possession a felony. When George Hennard began shooting, Hupp reached for her purse to retrieve her gun, before realizing that she had left it in her car — “a hundred feet away.”
Unopposed, Hennard eventually shot 44 people inside the cafeteria, killing 24 of them, including Hupp’s mother and father.
This led Hupp to become an advocate of changing the Texas law, and she even to traveled to other states, arguing for the right of citizens to defend themselves. She expressed that she would have rather been found guilty of the then-felony of carrying a concealed weapon than to lose her parents in the murders at Luby’s.
Eventually elected to the Texas House of Representatives, she saw her work come to fruition when a bill allowing the carrying of concealed weapons passed the Texas Legislature and was signed by then-Governor George W. Bush. She has also written a book, From Luby’s to the Legislature: One Woman’s Fight Against Gun Control.
It is imperative that legislators across the country address the issue of firearms, but not in the way advocated by childish-acting Democrats sitting in on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead of passing laws that will only restrict the Second Amendment rights of Americans while doing nothing to stop these mass shootings, legislators need to examine ways in which more Americans can be armed in self-defense, so as to minimize Orlando-type attacks.
Many businesses fear lawsuits from any type of use of firearms on their property, so they place signs at the property’s entrance stating that guns are not allowed on the premises. These signs are a joke, however, as clearly no person intending to commit a violent crime with a gun would be deterred thereby. Only persons who are not a threat to anyone anyway are deterred by “No Guns’ signs.
Legislators must pass laws protecting business owners from civil liability in situations in which a person uses a firearm in defense of either himself or others. Such laws would make future incidents more like what happened in Spartanburg County rather than what took place at Pulse nightclub and at Luby’s.
