One of the countless such stories that occur across America on a regular basis:
Tim Patterson was cooking at The Big Yellow Mobile Kitchen as he did every day when he heard a scream coming from the parking lot of a nearby Goodwill store. He rushed toward the cries for help and didn’t hesitate to draw his Kimber 1911 .45 when he saw that a man had grabbed hold of a woman and had a knife to her throat. “Drop it or I’ll shoot you!” Patterson warned. The assailant immediately released the woman, dropped the knife, raised his arms and fled. The victim, a Goodwill employee who was carrying a bank deposit in her purse at the time of the attempted robbery, was not injured. (Coeur d’Alene Press, Coeur d’Alene, ID, 11/30/11. Via The Armed Citizen.)
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As in the story above, on many occasions when guns are used in self-defense or in defense of others, no shots even get fired. The possession of a gun by a law-abiding person is often enough to deter the perpetrator. Criminals, after all, are always looking for the helpless. (If they wanted to have a shootout they’d attack a police station.) These stories of people successfully defending themselves with firearms rarely make big news, but, if they get reported at all, instead appear as small items in regional newspapers. Some of them are collected at the Armed Citizen blog.
While the stories may be of no importance to the national media, you can bet that they are of crucial importance to the people involved. Life and death, you might say.
