CLAY: I thought this one was fascinating because I bet the vast majority of you have not heard anything about this story. Let me give you some details.
Greenwood Park Mall is outside of Indianapolis. I know we’ve got a lot of listeners in the Indianapolis area. We appreciate all of you. “A 22-year-old Indiana man being called a hero…” — I’m reading directly from OutKick ’cause you’re probably not seeing this story very many places — “A gunman opened fire in the mall’s food court, killed three people, one woman, two men, injured two others, would have continued to fire, had a ton of ammunition with him, until a Good Samaritan pulled out his own concealed weapon and killed this mass shooter. Yes, a good guy with a gun killed a bad guy with a gun.”
I’m gonna read a couple of quotes here. “The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully caring a firearm in that food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began.” That is Greenwood police chief Jim Eisen. Greenwood mayor Mark Myers joined the police chief, also commanding the actions of the good guy with the gun. “We do know that someone we are calling a Good Samaritan was able to shoot the assailant and stop further bloodshed. This person saved lived tonight,” the mayor said, “I am grateful for his quick action and heroism.”
So if you out there are listening right now and you say, wait, I didn’t know there was a mass shooting in Greenwood, Indiana, I didn’t have any clue that this mall shooter existed and that he was stopped by a good guy with a gun.
I would submit to you, Buck — and you’re partly in this camp, right? We were talking off air before the show and you were saying, wait, this happened? It’s the story almost completely vanished as soon as they found out a good guy with a gun ended it.
BUCK: Right. Isn’t this a moment where the media could tell a story to elevate a brave citizen, an armed citizen? I know there are people who were hit in this attack, and that’s a tragedy. But it would have been far worse.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — if a good guy with a gun had not stepped up here and ended the threat.
And there are other instances like this, and some of them are captured on video. I’m sure our audience will remember back in 2019, December of 2019 there was a packed church of over 200 people who had gathered down in Texas and a shooter came into the church, crazy person, gonna shoot as many people in the church as possible. A fellow named Jack Wilson who is a volunteer member of the church’s security team who was also a concealed carry instructor and just a long term — he’s a gun guy. You know, there are gun guys. There are the guys who are very — and gals who have devoted a lot of their lives to understanding, using firearms. He pulled — he drew and pulled one shot off and hit the guy in the head and ended the threat right away. Saved dozens of lives in that instance.
Now, this is fascinating from the perspective of policy because we just went through with the Democrats the, “We need to expand background checks. We need to end the gun show loophole for private sales.” And they talk about all this. And their theory is always, eventually, if it saves just one life, or that’s behind all of this. Good guys and can we just say good guy, slash, gal, right?
Good person with gun has clearly demonstrated in many, many mass shootings over the years to have saved perhaps dozens, maybe hundreds of lives when you add — and those are the ones where there’s actually an exchange of gunfire.
Sometimes a good guy with a gun only has to draw and old the person there until law enforcement arrived. There are other instances where there hasn’t been — you know, they’ve essentially averted a mass shooting or what could have been a mass shooting before it even occurred. But this clearly has saved lives.
Why is it that the expansion of funding for red flag laws which have never been proven to save a life or something that Democrats get so excited about? And yet this law-abiding gun owner saving lives here, they bury it, Clay.
To your point, I was doing my reading today, I didn’t even see this story because it was not something that any — a mass shooting in a mall, that should be a head — a major story. Oh, it doesn’t fit the narrative. And ultimately they tell you they want to save more people and the left and libs say that their opposition to firearms is about saving lives, but it’s actually ideological.
They don’t want you to have guns. It’s really not about stopping the next mass shooting because they don’t even look at what stops mass shootings.
CLAY: I had to tell our crew at OutKick — and I still manage a lot of the editorial decisions that are made at OutKick on a daily basis, hey, let’s get on this. Most of the people at OutKick didn’t know about this story.
And you just think about — some people could say, well, the good guy with the gun — usually there’s not a good guy with a gun. Okay, usually there aren’t mass shootings. Okay. So covering a mass shooting in the first place as, Buck, we have talked about, only about 1% of the murders that take place in this nation on a day-to-day basis are from mass shootings.
BUCK: And that’s including, by the way, just three or more people under the FBI data. If it’s four or more people in a situation that involves wanton, random violence, it’s even less than 1%.
CLAY: I flagged this, Tom Bevan at Real Clear Politics put it out, and it’s certainly true. On July 4th seven people killed in a horrific mass shooting in Highland Park outside of Chicago. It was national newsfor days. This past weekend, seven more people killed, 18 wounded in Chicago. It won’t even get a wire story in most national newspapers because murders in Chicago are so common. The only time they get covered is when it is a mass shooting.
The reason why I bring that up is mass shootings are outlier events. So even if a good guy with a gun is an outlier event, still a pretty big story for a 22-year-old to stop what might have been otherwise 10, 15, 20 people from getting shot and/or murdered inside of a mall. Seems like kind of a heroic thing. Maybe we should be praising this guy, telling his story.
BUCK: And lawful conceal carry owners — the data on this is very clear — are not only more law-abiding than the general public, lawful concealed carry holders are more law-abiding than law enforcement, per capita. So this notion of, oh, we give more people — we give more law-abiding citizens the right to conceal carry. It’s gonna be like the wild west.
No, it just means that people can enjoy their Second Amendment rights do so responsibly and there will be times like this where they stop — this would have been a horrific mass shooting.
And also, Clay, comes when we’re finding out even more —
CLAY: Yeah. The Uvalde thing —
BUCK: — about the Uvalde. The people who say you should only trained law enforcement should ever be able to show up. Look. Just like every profession, right, there are good doctors and bad doctors. I keep telling people, go into the doctor, not enough. You gotta find a good doctor because there are plenty of bad doctors who don’t care. T
here’s good law enforcement — and fortunately for us in this country the vast majority of our law enforcement are very good people — but there’s also cops who mess up or cops who are bad guys. That also happens.
You shouldn’t be reliant entirely on law enforcement. And I can’t help but notice that at the same time that they’re trying to disarm citizens we’re finding out after this mass shooting in Uvalde, this was horrific. I mean, they sat there for over an hour — there’s all this video of them in the hallway. They didn’t do a damn thing. Here’s Texas State representative Dustin Burroughs saying that they just should have done more.
BUCK: Clay, there were hundreds of officers on the scene.
CLAY: Yep.
BUCK: It seemed they were more focused on creating a cordon to prevent people, including a cop who was like, “I’m going in, I’m going in, my wife is in there.”
They tackled him and disarmed him so they could sit in the hallway and do nothing. They had ballistic shields, long guns, bullet resistant vests, you know, Kevlar, they did nothing. Nothing for over an hour.
CLAY: They got eight or nine calls at least to 911 from inside of the classroom. And we talked about this. This is one that we nailed, our callers nailed, we opened up phone lines to allow all of you to weigh in.
And ultimately before they went in, Buck, 376 police officers were present at that school standing outside of a classroom while kids and teachers were being held hostage by a madman.
If you go watch this video, which was released from inside of the school. You can see the school shooter come in, the door was unlocked, which is something that still has not been explained well.
Kid walks right in, kid, 22-year-old, whoever he was, walks right down the hallway within two or three minutes, police come rushing in after him, they go somewhat close to the classroom, he fires a couple of shots, they run back, nobody then approaches the door for over an hour and 20 minutes. There are police bunched in gobs of them in the hallway. Nobody goes in.
So the point on this that ties in with the shooting in the mall is sometimes police make poor decisions. And one of the big issues there, Buck, appears to be no one in ever took control of the scene. And as all of these police kept arriving, the command and authority was messed up.
But the first flaw, the essence of this flaw — and I know every single police officer who watched those videos felt sick to their stomach — the number one rule in mass shootings since Columbine has been when you are the first officer on the scene, you go after the shooter until you can’t go anymore. And if that shooter shoots you, the next man follows you in, next man in after that, and part of that is you take the focus away from the innocent kids and the teachers.
If you are a police officer and you didn’t go in there, frankly, you don’t deserve to be a police officer because that’s the number one reason most of them become police officers is to protect the innocent.
BUCK: If children being murdered by an armed psychopath right within your hearing, right within a few yards of where you’re standing does not make you want to come up with a plan on the spot to immediately engage the threat in a gun battle — and, yes, that means taking fire, that means you might actually die in the line of your job.
I worked in a job where people die in the line of the job. It happens. We got stars on the wall because of it. If you’re not willing to do that, you should not be carrying a badge and a gun.
CLAY: Amen.