If you’re an armed citizen, shooter, hunter, etc., the more you know about guns and how they work, the better – obviously. It can make the difference between venison or macaroni in the larder during hunting season. It can determine survival or death when faced with a homicidal criminal. Heck, some of us have been able to earn a living from that sort of knowledge.

Every now and then, though, gun knowledge comes in handy in other ways.

A friend of mine, sadly no longer with us, did multiple careers as a cop, an educator, and a gun shop owner.  At one point, he signed up as a volunteer for the local suicide hotline.  The night came when he was on call, and the man on the other end of the phone told him he had a gun and was about to blow his own brains out.

As my late friend conversed with him, his mind racing to find the right persuasive answer, he bought time by asking, “What kind of gun do you have, anyway?” The man replied.  I’ve forgotten exactly what it was now, but my friend recognized it as a brand known to be a piece of junk.  He asked about the ammunition, and the suicidal man told him it was some old cartridges he’d found in the garage.

The light bulb went on. My friend explained to the man that he was a gun collector himself and knew a lot about them. He explained that old ammo might have weakened with age, and talked about cases he knew of where someone attempted suicide with that sort of cartridge and the bullet didn’t go in deep enough to kill, just enough to horribly cripple.  The outcome? He was able to talk the man out of it.

(Interestingly, the folks at the crisis hotline were horrified that he had taken that approach instead of following the usual script. Apparently, it was a case of “you didn’t save his life our way,” and he was let go from hotline duty.)

Then, there was the famous case of the teenage NRA member who stopped a mass murder at his high school. Young Jacob Ryker was wounded when a disaffected schoolmate who had just murdered his own parents went on a shooting rampage at the school in Springfield, OR in 1998. Taught early to shoot by his father, Ryker recognized when the killer’s gun went empty and jumped him, leading to successful disarm and restraint that stopped the killing.

I was recently re-reading “The Mad, the Bad, and the Innocent: The Criminal Mind on Trial” by forensic psychologist Barbara Kirwin. She tells of the time, in her role as a psychologist for the prosecution, she examined one Gustavo Nino, who was charged with murder in the shooting of his friend Ruben Gonzales and was pleading self-defense:

“I steered him into a conversation about guns,” she begins. “The murder weapon was a Colt Python .357 magnum. ‘I own a Colt Python three-fifty-seven,’ I told him, ‘and I love it, too.’ I began to rhapsodize about the gun – about the vented barrel, the striated grips, the feel of firing it.

“Gustavo joined in enthusiastically. ‘You know,’ he declared, a swagger in his voice, ‘I went to my house to get a gun to go after Gonzales. First I picked up an automag, but then I went back to get the three-fifty-seven – it was more accurate.’

‘I  sat back triumphant. Gustavo was busted. With those few words, he had revealed a motive of revenge and showed consideration, planning, and a full awareness of his acts.”

Trip up a clever murderer, stop a mass killer, talk a potential suicide victim into giving life another chance…I think that’s worthy use of firearms knowledge, don’t you?

Please share here any such incidents that come to mind.

19 COMMENTS

  1. Mas,

    The examples you give of firearms knowledge are in sharp contrast to the utter lack of knowledge displayed by most anti-gunners. We’ve all seen (and laughed at) their ridiculous stumbles. We’ve seen anti-gunners who believe that magazines can only be used once. That if you ban high-capacity magazines, the ones already owned by the public will soon be used up! We’ve seen them focus on a set of cosmetic features (flash-hiders. pistol grips, etc.) in the obvious belief that banning a list of these items will somehow make firearms “less dangerous”. We’ve seen them word-smith a bunch of phony, made-up terms (Assault Weapon, Saturday Night Special, Cop-Killer Bullets, etc.) that have no relevance to how firearms actually function.

    We’ve seen them, apparently, believe the stuff that Hollywood puts out without even realizing that Hollywood specializes in “Make Believe”. It would surprise a lot of them to know that a .44 magnum cannot actually pick a man up and fling him 20 feet through a plate glass window!

    Their ignorance of firearms is only matched by their ideological hatred of them.

    They say that the stock market is driven by the twin pillars of “Fear” and “Greed”. Well, the gun control movement is driven by the twin pillars of “Fear of Firearms (Hoplophobia)” and “Ignorance”. Underlying it all, of course, is the foundation of left-wing extremism.

  2. Early in my career, my partner and I responded to a call “man with a gun- shooting in the air”. As we rounded a corner onto the street of the address given, we spotted the man, a middle aged black male, standing under a street light, firing a revolver into the air. We stopped about 100 feet from his location, took positions using the car as cover, and demanded he “drop the gun”. He stopped his shooting, but refused to comply with dropping the gun. After numerous commands to drop the gun, and his refusal to do so, and seemingly confused, I realized, hell, I wouldn’t want to drop one of my guns onto the pavement either. I changed the command to ” bend over and place your gun on the ground” to which he immediately complied. Further investigation revealed that his children had given the gun to him as birthday present that morning, and after a day of celebrating and drinking, had decided to test it out. The gun was a cheap “Clerke .38” chrome plated revolver, popular with poor folks back in the those days. Junk to some, treasure to others.

  3. During the George Zimmerman trial a well known radio talk show host who felt that Zimmerman was looking for trouble, said on the air, that Zimmerman was carrying his Keltec 9mm fully load with the Safety Off. This host even had the nerve to say he knew about this pistol because he used to own one. Needless to say the Keltec’s have no manual safety and this talk show host was full of hot air.

  4. Back when I was 19 a friend of mine in need of having his Lithium tank pumped up was backed into a corner of a room with a bottle of whiskey and a Colt 1911. This made his roommates a bit nervous. I asked him about the pistol and told him I was looking for one just like it. I offered to buy it for $100 ( this was 1969) and he asked $150. We split the difference and after I paid him the $125. I took possession of my new pistol and his roommates took him to the hospital.

  5. I’ve said this before, but it needs to be repeated. Firearms are in the news, EVERY DAY. If there is a story about the police, the police use firearms, so firearms are part of the news. Same thing goes for the military, ours, or some military of a foreign nation. You would think journalists would want to know about a piece of machinery that is in the news EVERY DAY. But, most of them don’t know anything about guns, and don’t want to. How unprofessional!

  6. Yes, when firearms knowledge is used wisely, and for good intents and purposes, that is a worthy use.

    On the issue of hoplophobia, I would suggest 3 basic groups:

    Those who can think free of ignorance & myopic bias (or fear), and realize all of the above is remarkable only in it’s simple logic. Yes, knowledge is good.

    Those unable to stretch & examine their vision of reality, and more important, effectively test that reality. They are full of wishful thinking and ideals. They may talk of logic & common sense (and political correctness). Unfortunately, they hobble their attempts at logic to the exclusion of reality. Their bias, prejudice and short sighted nature leading to advanced rationalization fallacies creating cognitive false realities.

    For others, it is an information war fighting for control: Create or manipulate the reality of others for power, wealth, ego and other typical morivations. This is often if not always associated with misanthropic amorality. Many politicians, point-one percenters, academia and such fit this third category.

  7. The comments above show how important it is to know how firearms operate. However, the champion of ignorance has to be the nineteen year old Houston kid that played Russian Roulette with a semi automatic pistol. Evidently the whole concept was way over his head. He was the Year 2000 Darwin Award Runner-Up. You wonder what was going through his mind! A .45 ACP slug, I guess. Pitiful.

    http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2000-04.html

  8. Mas – I don’t compliment you enough on your choices of blog subject material. This ^^^ has to be one of THE best to date, Sir. I don’t know any stories that would add to the theme, but I can’t see any way an anti-gun person could make this anything but a huge plus.

    Dennis – I absolutely love your story! I know we all have been lectured to do exactly what LEO says – and I know why, even with a loaded gun, but doggone it, NOBODY wants to DROP their gun.

    Paul – re: your second group of hoplophobes, the supreme irony is those are exactly the people who think their liberal self frees them to ever expand their minds, blahblahblah: “oh, did I say EVERYthing? I meant except for guns.”

  10. Many years ago I was invited by a friend, along his young brother-in-law, to hunt rabbits with .22 rim-fire rifles. At that time my friend was in the Marine Corps; I’d been shooting with him previously and knew he was a squared-away hunter. But being a then-young dude myself I “assumed” the in-law was also a competent and safe shooter, though I had had no such previous encounters with him. All three of us hadn’t been out in the field for more than a half an hour when a jackrabbit blew out of some scrub behind us. The brother-in-law, who was about five feet ahead of me, abruptly pivoted and shot no more than six inches over my head, barely missing me and coming nowhere close to the bunny. Shaken as I was by the very close call, it was an excellent learning experience about verifying the firearms skills of an unknown shooter before risking any actual exposure to him or her.

  11. In the 1970’s I was selected to be on a Grand Jury looking into the possible indictment of a man for murder. They were arguing in a bar, the victim left, the shooter followed and, from a distance of about 30 feet, pegged a shot at the other fellow. Hit him directly in the heart (by amazing chance). Perp was claiming that the gun “just went off while [I] was waving it around.”
    I asked the Detective testifying on the stand if the gun (an old, cheap chrome-plated .32 break-top revolver) was single-action & double action or Double-action only. The Detective knew immediately what I was asking and tried it, reporting that it was DAO. Silence from the rest of the jury. When we got to the jury room I was immediately bombarded with questions about “what was that double-action stuff.” When I carefully explained how SA and DAO works everyone realized (as I had) that there was no way the gun could have just “gone off” from waving it around. It had to have been a deliberate, full trigger pull to make it fire. On the basis of just that info we all voted to indict.
    If I had not been there and not been “firearms familiar” that guy might have gotten off.

  12. @ Captain Bob:

    The situation you listed is very interesting and is an excellent illustration of the practical use of firearms knowledge.

    However, I am curious. Your Grand Jury returned a True Bill on the accused. Do you know the final disposition of the case? Did it go to trial? Did he plead guilty (perhaps for a reduced sentence)? Was he ultimately found guilty by a jury? Or (in the end) did he get a really good attorney and “beat the rap”?

  13. Dennis, looking for an elixir for immortality, they found an antidote instead, eh?

  14. Captain Bob’s comment rattled my brain enough that I recalled a murder case in our area.
    A man went into a bar and was told that they were closed for a private party. The man became belligerent and started a fight and was thrown out. He came back with a gun and killed 2 people neither of which were involved in throwing him out, not that it matters.
    My wife sat on the jury and during deliberations questions arose about the gun that was used and my wife was able to fill in the other jurors. I think it had to do with magazine capacity.

  15. @ Dave (The Liberal, non-uncle one):

    The thesis in your statement (above) is incorrect. There is no evidence to indicate that the development of gunpowder or firearms have had a significant effect on either human population growth or average life-spans. In fact, the opposite can be argued.

    As noted in this reference:

    http://www.britannica.com/topic/modernization

    Human populations have underwent two periods of rapid growth. The first occurred when humans shifted from a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle to farming and agriculture. However, population growth eventually stabilized and was limited by food supply and disease. The second growth period was initiated by modern industrialization brought about by increased scientific knowledge and the development of modern manufacturing methods based upon the interchangeability of parts. See this link:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts

    As you can see, firearm technology actually led the way to industrialization.

    Not only have human populations grown rapidly since the introduction of firearms and gunpowder but average lifespans have increased as well.

    I realize that you were simply trying to be humorous with your (somewhat off-the-cuff) comment. However, it is an example of typical left-wing thinking whereby an environmental factor (in this case, development of gunpowder and firearms) is blamed for a supposed problem. Worse, in this case, the “supposed” problem is actually imaginary.

    It is this kind of thinking that directly leads to the ideas of the modern “Gun Control” movement and serves as (yet another) illustration as to why they are wrong.

  17. TN_Man: Sorry but I did not follow up on the case so I don’t know the disposition. I have always, however,wonder this myself and many times wish that I had. I think at the time, being a young lad in his 20’s, I may have subconsciously not wanted to know, especially if it resulted in capital punishment (doubtful as it certainly wasn’t a planned killing) but I was as ignorant of the justice system as I was “firearms familiar” at that time.

  18. Mas i’m getting a little old to remember the experience in detail. But I have enjoyed your blogs. I’ve spent 45 years of my life wearing a badge
    I’m retired but I still live the life thru my kids who are both in law enforcement.
    Thank you for your years of service. Thank you for the good example you have made for younger LEOs. Keep up the good work.
    Craigmont

  19. A story my grandmother (cop’s widow and Washington, DC MPD admin. herself) told me often: Eddie was a retired cop working at a convenience store. Kid comes in and points a revolver at him. Eddie had the presence of mind to see the chamber to either side of the barrel was empty and the hammer wasn’t cocked. He knew then, Colt or S&W, the hammer wasn’t going to land on a loaded chamber. He simply reached out and took it out of the kid’s hand and held on to him ’til the cops arrived.
    Seems the local “rent-a-gun” hood never let first timers have more than one round.

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