This is why I support concealed carry laws.

[gridlore]

8 Grocery Employees Stabbed in Tennessee

A knife-wielding grocery store employee attacked eight co-workers Friday, seriously injuring five before a witness pulled a gun and stopped him, police said.

Elartrice Ingram, 21, was charged with nine counts of attempted first-degree murder, police said. The attack apparently stemmed from a work dispute, investigators said.

Five victims, one in critical condition, were admitted to the Regional Medical Center, the main trauma hospital for the Memphis area. Three others were less badly hurt and treated at another hospital.

Ingram, chasing one victim into the store's parking lot, was subdued by Chris Cope, manager of a financial services office in the same small shopping center, Memphis Police Sgt. Vince Higgins said.

Cope said he grabbed a 9mm semiautomatic pistol from his pickup truck when he saw the attacker chasing the victim "like something in a serial killer movie."

"When he turned around and saw my pistol, he threw the knife away, put his hands up and got on the ground," Cope told The Associated Press. "He saw my gun and that was pretty much it."

Police arrived within minutes and took the Ingram into custody.

One citizen with a gun. No shots fired. And how many lives saved?

Comments

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

The United States was founded by people who understood that the greatest threat to liberty is rarely an outside invading army, but the tyranny of one's own leaders. Elected or raised to power by birth the natural tendacy of those in power is to increase power. When military power is entirely in the state's hands, oppresion becomes easy.

How many massacres? A few. How many times have firearms saved an abused wife or stopped a crime? Far more often.

If you look at the stats, states with liberal Concealed Carry laws have lower violent crime rates; even in dense urban areas.

And frankly, I'm not worried about Joe Bloggs. I'm worried about the gang-banger who could really care less about the laws and carries a gun.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

As a young liberal, I was much in favor of gun control. I also believed that most people were basically good and rational, and violence was something that could be eventually eliminated, to the improvement of society and the species. In retrospect, I find this perspective charmingly naive.

I have never handled a gun or learned how to. Frankly, the notion scares me, because I don't want that responsibility; I do not want to hold the power of death in my hand. I'm very grateful to all those in uniform (of one sort or another) who do bear arms so that I don't have to; noncombatant-by-choice is a remarkably privileged status, both historically and in the world today.

The argument that guns in private hands help protect us from the government is a bit specious, however; at the time that the Second Amendment was penned, the weapons available to the government and private citizens were essentially the same. (Heck, we didn't even HAVE a standing army back then.) Nowadays, well... I don't see a lot of people with Apache gunships in their backyards. A notional armed rebellion these days would have to rely as much upon unconventional, improvised weapons (IEDs, etc) as store-bought firearms. Gulf Wars 1 and 2 have demonstrated that you can't outfight the US Army on level ground, but you can hurt the willingness of the State to keep fighting.

On the personal scale, guns are excellent equalizers between the large and the small. Again, as a man, I'm grateful that I don't have to seriously consider carrying such a weapon for my own safety.