Quote:
One of the heroes who helped take down the Arizona assassin said Monday he was prepared to shoot the murderous maniac himself.
"I was ready to end his life," Joe Zamudio said. "I had my hand on the butt of my gun. If they hadn't grabbed him and he was still moving, I would have shot him."
Without hesitation?
"Damn right," said Zamudio. "This is my country, this is my town."
Let us set the complete record straight here. Perhaps had Mr Zamudio fired his gun you might have your only actual example of a CCW carrier stopping a mass murder, however, here is the full story as opposed to the snippet that was printed in Mr Murdoch's newspaper:
Armed hero nearly shot wrong man in Ariz. - Slate.com | NBC News
"I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready," he explained on Fox and Friends. "I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this." Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. "And that's who I at first thought was the shooter," Zamudio recalled. "I told him to 'Drop it, drop it!'"
But the man with the gun wasn't the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. "Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess," the interviewer pointed out.
Zamudio agreed:
"I was very lucky. Honestly, it was a matter of seconds. Two, maybe three seconds between when I came through the doorway and when I was laying on top of [the real shooter], holding him down. So, I mean, in that short amount of time I made a lot of really big decisions really fast. … I was really lucky."
In other words we have a brave man who ran to help and also had a gun. His ownership of the gun did not result in any benefit to the situation and very nearly resulted in the death of more innocents. Really lucky.