National Review Online
Wednesday, July 20, 2022
When covering mass shootings, we prefer not to name
the culprits. For the heroes, the opposite rule ought to obtain. Elisjsha
Dicken, the 22-year-old Hoosier who halted a mall shooting on Sunday evening,
is one of those heroes.
The problem of public mass shootings is extremely
complicated, and, while it may be tempting or convenient to pretend otherwise,
it is highly unlikely that a single solution can bring the scourge under
control. To acknowledge this, however, is not to suggest that there is nothing
that can help at the margins, and, clearly, the existence of lawful concealed
carriers can help at the margins. Just 15 seconds elapsed between the beginning
of the shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall and Elisjsha Dicken’s intervening.
Had Dicken not been there, the three innocent people who were killed would have
been joined by many others.
In 2012, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey
Goldberg noted that “anti-gun activists believe the expansion
of concealed-carry permits represents a serious threat to public order,” before
proposing that, if anything, the “reverse” might actually be true. At the very
least, Goldberg concluded, “If someone is shooting at you, it is better to
shoot back than to cower and pray.” Certainly, this was the case in Indiana,
where Elisjsha Dicken’s heroism represented a one-stop rebuttal to a whole host
of the most popular anti-concealed-carry talking points. Figures such as Senator
Chris Murphy of Connecticut are fond of insisting that the idea of the “good
guy with a gun” is a “myth” or “a gun industry fiction.” But Elisjsha Dicken is
not a myth. Activists who hope to prohibit modern sporting rifles are fond of
contending that those weapons are far too powerful to be countered by civilians
carrying handguns. But, by taking on a killer who had an AR-15 with just his
9mm Glock, Elisjsha Dicken proved them wrong. Critics of America’s “gun
culture” are fond of proposing that only the police or the soldiery have the
training and temperament to stay calm and effective during a crisis. But, in
the space of a few terrifying seconds, Elisjsha Dicken managed to realize what
was happening, to instruct his girlfriend to stay low, to hit the shooter from
a distance of 120 feet, and then to move further toward the danger to ensure
that the threat had been neutralized and to gesture the shooter’s would-be
victims to safety. Describing the incident, the local chief of police described Dicken as “responsible,” “very proficient,”
and “very tactically sound.”
In a telling
statement, the Brady Campaign not only ignored Dicken’s heroism completely,
but implied that Indiana’s concealed-carry laws had been to blame for the
attack that he brought to a close. “A gunman shot and killed 3 people and
injured 2 others at a mall in Greenwood, Indiana,” the group wrote. “This
tragedy comes after Indiana repealed its requirement for a permit to carry a
handgun in public, which went into effect July 1.” In isolation, these
sentences are accurate. Their implication is not. Indiana’s decision to repeal
“its requirement for a permit to carry a handgun in public” had no effect on
the “gunman” who “shot and killed 3 people and injured 2 others,” because that
gunman used a rifle to carry out his spree. But it did affect
the hero, Elisjsha Dicken, who did not have a carry permit and who was thus
able to carry his gun lawfully only because Indiana had
rendered its permits superfluous. (Nothing in Indiana’s new system allows those
who were previously ineligible to obtain a carry permit to carry a firearm.)
Thank goodness that he was, for it made all the
difference. “Many more people would have died last night,” Greenwood police
recorded at a press conference on Monday, “if not for a responsible armed
citizen that took action very quickly within the first two minutes of the
shooting.” A community — and a nation — owes Elisjsha Dicken its thanks.
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