Suzanne Hupp, Larry Pratt, John Lott and a few others I’ll think of later had better make room on the podium. The gun-banning, victim-disarmament movement just suffered as massive a setback as any one individual has ever delivered.
Jeanne Assam just captured mainstream media attention with her courageous, armed termination of a terrorist event. While the slaughter of 20 or more would have garnered a bit more broadcast time, even the anti-gun media cannot ignore the heroine of the moment without losing their audience altogether. None of us scribblers, activists or pontificators could have done it better. She demonstrated to the widest possible audience that an ordinary person with a handgun, skill and courage can stop terrorists before their slaughters can be completed.
Now of course ordinary people aren’t that courageous and WONDER if they could stop a killer. However, they KNOW that without the tool, they and those around them are helpless victims. Jeanne has shown them all that, even in church, the tool is a good thing to have around.
I’ll admit right up front that I am sick in my stomach when I think of the two that he did kill. That is so rotten as to defy my limited writing skills. The only consolation is how much worse it would have been without Jeanne Assam.
Nobody could have done it better – or worse from the victim-disarmer standpoint. We gun guys know better than to take a handgun to a gun fight. Rifles have many times the energy and far greater accuracy. She ignored the odds, walking right into a rifle-on-pistol gunfight with the inferior tool.
Even the least practiced IDPA shooter knows to use cover, concealment and stealth, but Jeanne came out from behind cover, walked towards the terrorist AND ANNOUNCED HER PRESENCE! Which would you rather hear on network TV: “… he snuck up on the shooter…” or “she approached him repeating put the gun down … and EXCHANGED GUNFIRE”? As with most truly heroic acts I’ve heard about, she wasn’t thinking about personal risk, but doing the right thing as she saw it.
Obviously being female is perfect. Everyone can now see that self-defense and defense of community doesn’t have to be a guy thing. Even a mom can take an active role in preventing her children from being slaughtered. It is also harder for anti-gun media to paint a woman as a partial aggressor, which they would sorely love to do.
Religious or not, you have to acknowledge that her crediting “God” with guiding her is far better than some shooter saying he was “in the zone”. A very high percentage of the population connects very dearly with the concept of divine guidance. With even modest skills and a handgun, they can readily imagine their Lord guiding their hands and using them as His tool… as long as they do their part and have the tool with them at the right time.
Anti-gun media is, of course, making a bit of her police experience and calling her a “security guard”. They have to try the “don’t try this at home, kiddies” line. But the truth is sneaking out from under the blankets. She wasn’t a current LEO. She wasn’t a paid or licensed security guard. We can wonder how much her police training and experience brought into the equation, but this story is about an armed, every-day individual with a permitted handgun who single-handedly stopped a well-armed vicious killer. No police, military or security professional could have proven this point.
Her police experience has given them the one wart, and they are going to pick on it in hopes it will bleed. “She lied to internal investigators”. Many of us know in some circumstances we might have too. Others accept her human-ness. Meanwhile the media that readily canonizes lying sports figures, US presidents, politicians and just about anywhere else, will try to use this to what? Are they really going to try to make her bad for saving dozens of lives? Phew! That’s a lot of gall. I hope they get the audience they deserve.
Jeanne wasn’t a shooter. She didn’t practice regularly nor is she a part of the shooting community. Through her everyone can see that special expertise and extensive training are not necessary to prevent violent crime. Of course practice and training are great ideas, but here again do you want to hear the talking heads repeating ad-infinitum phrases like “he was chanting front-sight, front-sight” or “it was just like a Mozambique drill” or “double-tap to center-of-mass”? The non-shooting public is a bit squeamish about the targets we use for our practice along with the whole concept of practicing to kill another person.
No, it is a whole lot better for all of us that she was just a normal, everyday, supremely courageous, armed female in the right place at the right time.