Bitter has been watching coverage of this possibly foiled mass shooting from her old neck of the woods. Once the local news mentioned the shooter was confronted by an armed citizen, the Facebook Live feed was cut. I’m not kidding I heard that and shouted out to Bitter, “Kill the story! Kill the story! Priority one! The rubes must not know!” Not a minute later, Facebook cut the feed.
It’s looking like a domestic. So possibly the armed intervention wouldn’t have mattered. The local news is covering the armed intervener, but I can promise you this will not make any national news.
It’ll be memory holed for sure.
Domestic dispute where even the families who decided to come out to the scene to check out the bodies started fist fights with each other, shooting stopped by concealed carry holder, and may have used less than 10 rounds based on the report I saw. Obviously, many event like this get much wrong in the first few hours, but most of what I’ve seen has multiple sources at this point.
The crap that will likely to be wrong is stuff like the reporter going on about how everyone in Duncan knows one another and it’s a tiny tight-knit town. No, it’s not. It’s more than 23,000 people who largely don’t know each other.
That said, when the news first hit that it was 3 dead total and 1 of those was the shooter, I said, “It’s Duncan. It’s Walmart. Good chance that a concealed carrier intervened to keep it from getting any worse.”
FWIW, this is the way the incident is now being reported.
I hope I won’t be regarded as a traitor for saying that what is being reported, is exactly what I would have guessed yesterday had happened: A love triangle went bad and ended in a murder-suicide, during which a bystander drew a gun but was not a factor in the incident one way or the other.
It may not serve our hoped-for narrative, but it is the scenario that makes the most sense and has the highest probability of occurring.
I just thought I’d append that I wonder if the bystander who was armed is regretting involving himself, today.
If I were a victim’s (or even the perp’s) family I’d be demanding that the bystander’s gun be held as evidence, at least until the police and medical examiner had certified that it had not played a role in any of the deceaseds’ deaths.
Has anyone heard anything regarding that issue?
The police could reasonably determine, on-scene, whether the bystander’s gun may have played a role. Does it look and smell like it has been fired recently? Is it a different caliber than the killer’s gun, and are the victims’ wounds all the same size? Is the bystander’s magazine full or is it missing a round or two?
If the victims all sustained .45-caliber wounds and the bystander carried a 9mm (or vice versa), or if the bystander’s gun was freshly cleaned and lubed, or his magazine(s) were all full, the logical conclusion is that he and his gun were not involved. No medical examiner certification required.
(To be clear, if any or all of those are not the case, that doesn’t necessarily mean the bystander WAS involved, only that he MAY HAVE been. It only means the on-scene evidence is inconclusive.)
But to answer your question, no, I haven’t heard anything regarding that angle.
You are presuming the police are both competent and trustworthy to make on-the-spot determinations, as opposed to collecting evidence to subsequently be used by prosecutors whose job it is to make such judgments. If I were a cop I would not want to make any such judgments, as simple as they may seem.
I’ll confess I’m just being argumentative about my point. There is certainly no guarantee that public forensics will be any more trustworthy, but at least they are the entities delegated to make such judgments. Lack of trust in both the police and their forensic laboratory is what got OJ acquitted of murder.
Last, if I were a civilian anticipating the possibility of later civil action, I would not trust any public entity any more than I was forced to.
I don’t see why you would be a traitor for trying to understand what happened. We aren’t anti-gun people, after all — we like to get to the bottom of things.
As for the involvement of the third person, if I were to come across such a situation, I can no longer say that I’d merely be a good witness of the event: we have too many examples of mass shootings in the news to discount such a possibility. Having said that, I’m not even sure if I’d stick around to be a good witness — at this point, I’d suggest leaving, if it can be done safely, and calling the police.
While I appreciate bystanders stopping shootings (when possible), I don’t like it when anti-gunners expect every possible shooting incident to be stopped by an armed civilian, and use all the times when it’s not stopped as a reason to ban guns. The purpose of carrying a gun isn’t to make it possible to stop every event when it occurs — it’s to give innocent people a fighting chance when flight isn’t a possibility.
ABC World News did have it on and did mention the CC person.
I just thought of adding that I wonder if the spectator who was armed regrets being involved today.
If I were the family of a victim, I would be demanding that the spectator’s weapon be held as evidence, at least until the police and the coroner certify that he has not played a role in any of the deaths of the deceased. Anyone heard anything about this subject?