‘In all reality, there were three shooters.’ Oklahomans kill an active shooter

WaPo via MSN ^ | 7/13/18 | Frances Selllers, et al

[T-Bird45]

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.

[lepton]

Yeah, a bad incident happened recently where a guy was breaking up a fight, and had dropped his pistol, then when the police showed up he insisted on picking it up. It ended in awful tragedy.

[nuke_road_warrior]

I love a happy ending.

[Elsie]

... as the shooter bled out into the grass and died.

Right there the system was saved a BUNCH of money.

[School of Rational Thought]

Police spokesperson worried about hypotheticals, but in the meantime people are being shot. One deals with the immediacy of stopping the active threat.

[T-Bird45]

Excellent point about being in the moment rather than running a series of “what ifs” in your head.

[Campion]

Did you miss this toxic swill?

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.”

Note for the idiots at the WaPo: A "vigilante" is someone who hunts a criminal down without the legal authority to do so, and frequently also metes out punishment apart from the law. An armed citizen responding with deadly force to an active shooter is not a "vigilante".