By Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
There are two items in this issue of TheGunMag that are meaningfully connected.
They are the report by Dave Workman on Page 17 about the Good Samaritans whose intercession terminated an armed attack at a Walmart store in Tumwater, WA: Jesse Zamora and David George. Both armed men had stepped in to confront the active shooter, but George was able to act first. Both men demonstrated the importance of defensive gun uses (DGUs) by legally armed citizens.
The other article by Dr. Robert B. Young, MD on Pages 24 and 25 discusses the truth about the number of times American citizens rely on firearms each year defensively. Dr. Young follows up on the 1990s study by Prof. Gary Kleck and his associate Marc Gertz, PhD that put a number on the importance of DGUs in American society. Their study results showed that guns are used defensively in America about 2.4 million times a year. That figure was largely ignored by politicians, the media and other scholars who claimed there was no supportive evidence. As Dr. Young points out, the Centers for Disease Control had conducted similar studies with similar results but had not published their data.
The linkage is simple. Many of those defensive gun uses are by Good Samaritans who use guns to save other people’s lives.
But before providing more examples to add to Workman’s article, I’d like tolook at the term Good Samaritan as referred to first in the New Testament parables.
The Samaritans of Jesus’ day were of mixed race and strict monotheists. Because of their imperfect adherence to Judaism and their partly pagan ancestry, the Samaritans were despised by ordinary Jews. Rather than contaminate themselves by passing through Samaritan territory, Jews who were traveling from Judea to Galilee or vice versa would cross over the river Jordan, bypass Samaria by going through Transjordan, and cross over the river again as they neared their destination. The Samaritans also harbored antipathy toward the Jews.
That the Samaritans were separated from and looked down upon by the Jews makes them important in the New Testament. Jesus indicated a new attitude must be taken toward the Samaritans when he passed through their towns instead of crossing the Jordan to avoid them, when he spoke with a Samaritan woman, contrary to Jewish custom, and when he said a time would come when worshiping in Jerusalem or on Mount Gerazim would not be important. When asked whom to regard as our neighbor, Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan precisely because Samaritans were despised.
The apostles recognized that in the Church Samaritans must be accepted as equal to Jews.
Today a few Samaritans survive, not having lost their identity through intermarriage. According to Wikipedia, there are about 300 active practitioners of the Samaritan religion today.
In more up-to-date use of the term Good Samaritan we are generally referring to a stranger who risks his life—with or without guns—to protect people he or she did not know before their paths crossed. The Good Samaritans are honored as civic heroes.
Sometimes these heroic latter day Samaritans act without the aid of guns, like James Shaw Jr., who ended a deadly shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House before more lives were lost. He wrestled the gun away from the mass killer.
“I just want to be put out there like a regular person,” he said later in eschewing the hero label. Maybe then, if people find themselves in dangerous situations, they’ll find “that same thing within them that they can project out,” he said.
However heroic Shaw’s action may be deemed, more often than not, guns are the principle tools of modern Good Samaritans and used more frequently than most imagine or even suspect. In the last few months, there have been many examples. And more often than not, these Samaritans stop mass murders.
When an assailant opened fire in an Oklahoma City restaurant, he was shot and killed by an armed citizen at the scene.
Four people were injured in the shooting at Louie’s Grill & Bar, including a young girl. However, only the suspect died, after he was confronted by a civilian with a handgun.
And it isn’t always average citizens who are saved by the actions of armed citizens.
A Good Samaritan with a concealed carry permit shot a man who was attacking a Lee County, FL, deputy on an I-75 off-ramp not long ago.
When two people attacked a woman in a Shawnee, KS, Wal-Mart parking lot near Kansas City recently, two Good Samaritans came to her aid.
When it was over, one attacker was dead and one Good Samaritan was taken to a nearby hospital, but later recovered. The woman victim also recovered after hospitalization.
In this real life drama, the woman was struck in the back of the head in the initial attack. When she screamed, one Good Samaritan came to her aid, and one of the attackers shot him multiple times.
Then, a second Good Samaritan shot and killed one of the attackers, and the second attacker ran but was later arrested by a K-9 police team.
There are many such Good Samaritan stories to be found in local news reports but they seldom get major media attention, and when they do, little attention is paid to the fact that the Good Samaritan was armed.
One exception to the lack of media interest is the report about Stephen Willeford and Johnnie Langendorff, his driver. Willeford pursued the suspect and ended the horrific mass murder at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX, last November. Willeford was the Good Samaritan who shot the gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, using what the anti-gunners like to call an assault weapon, while Langendorff was the Good Samaritan drove the truck while chasing Kelley.
There are a lot of modern day Good Samaritans taking action to protect strangers, just as the one in the Gospel parable, only nowadays, they involve defensive uses of guns. You might have to search for them on the Internet.
