Two Oklahoma Citizens Killed An Active Shooter, And It’s Not As Simple As It Sounds

Via The Captain’s Journal

According to The Washington Post.

Juan Carlos Nazario was sitting on a lakeside bench waiting to play soccer when he heard the staccato popping of gunshots outside Louie’s On the Lake, a popular waterfront grill and pub. He ran to his car to get his gun and moved toward the sounds.

Bryan Whittle was driving with his wife, heading off for a Memorial Day weekend getaway, when he saw a commotion outside Louie’s. He thought someone might be drowning, so instead of turning his truck onto the highway, he barreled into the parking lot to offer help. As he jumped out, what he learned stunned him: There was an active shooter just yards away, and wounded victims were holed up in the restaurant’s bathroom.

Whittle, too, grabbed his gun.

In a matter of seconds, the two armed citizens became self-appointed protectors, moving to take up positions around the shooter, drawing their weapons and shouting for him to drop his. Time stretched and warped. There was an exchange of gunfire. The gunman was hit several times and fell. As Nazario and Whittle converged over the man to restrain him, police arrived. Unsure who was who, officers handcuffed all of the men and put them on the ground as the shooter bled out into the grass and died.

“I was just doing what I was supposed to do,” recalled Nazario, a former police officer who said he now works as a security guard, always has his gun in the car and usually carries it with him.

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“I just reacted,” said Whittle, who has served for nearly 20 years in the Oklahoma Air National Guard and works for the Federal Aviation Administration. “There’s a guy with a gun. I’ve got a gun. Stop the threat.”

Though they were loaded into police cars and taken downtown for questioning, they were soon hailed as heroes. They were also called champions of Second Amendment rights, gun-carrying examples of why Oklahoma’s Republican governor should not have vetoed a bill two weeks earlier that would have eliminated the need for a permit and training to carry a gun in public.

Local police also praised Nazario and Whittle, saying their swift response ended what a police spokesman called “a very dangerous situation.”

But police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations. The first of 57 uniformed police officers arrived just a minute after the initial 911 calls and found a complex scene with multiple armed people and no clear sense of what had happened or who was responsible.

“We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.”

What?  We have police officers to be vigilantes, not other people?  Is that what’s being said here?

Probably not.  He probably means that we just cannot have ordinary people defending themselves – after all, that’s what the police are for.

Or not.  Yea, surely not.

Perhaps he meant that they didn’t want their officers having to think about the situation when they show up, and just shoot everybody who looks like they might have a firearm without observing proper rules for the use of force and thus have to worry about pedestrian things like backstop and proper target ID.

You can make up your own mind.  Maybe you’ll know what you’re talking about.  He sure as hell doesn’t.