In April of this year, Lulu Campbell dropped off her fifteen-year-old grandson at his home and was in her vehicle looking for her cell phone when two armed men approached (as reported in the Telegraph of Macon, Georgia). They demanded she open her door and hand over her money to them. She responded, “Baby, you’re going to kill me anyway, so I don’t have to open it!”
She was reaching for her .38 caliber revolver as one of the two men (allegedly one Brenton Lance Spencer) began firing on her. She had the incredible quickness and presence of mind to push back her seat in order to avoid his shot, and she felt his bullet whiz by her chest. She then fired back, hitting Spencer in his chest. (He survived and was later placed under arrest.)
The second gunman (allegedly one Dantre Horatio Shivers) was in front of her truck, and began firing at her. She ducked down and fired wildly back, persuading him to flee.
Lulu Campbell sustained no bullet wounds in this encounter, although her Toyota Tundra is riddled with them.
Campbell owns thirteen convenience stores in Georgia. She says she always carries a gun on her hip and one in her car. She is four feet and eleven inches tall.
Of the man she shot, Lulu says that she wants him to go to prison, but also says: “I pray for him to be alive, because it really hurts to lose a child.” Her own son, Wesley, passed away the previous month at the age of 35.
Despite her remarkable poise and coolness under fire, she credits God with saving her life. She says she donates much of her convenience-store profit to charities, including for cancer cures and Haiti relief. She speculates that this may be why God spared her.
Lulu Campbell has lived in the United States for forty years. She was born in the Philippines (where, she says, only men carry guns). Lulu Campbell, based on this story about her, is a true-blue American from head to toe and from inside out. It is people made of the very stuff that she is made of who have built America, and who, despite everything, somehow keep it going. May God continue to bless her.
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Perhaps you didn’t hear about this story at the time it happened. I certainly didn’t. I saw a reference to it in a monthly NRA magazine, and looked up the additional details today. It is one of many such stories of law-abiding citizens defending themselves successfully with firearms which are reported only in local newspapers and media, if at all. The vast majority of such stories don’t even involve gunshots, and so are hardly considered newsworthy even by the local press. Usually, when would-be perpetrators are made aware that they are dealing with an armed citizen, they flee (or surrender) without further trouble. (More such stories are collected at this blog.)
To make the national news, as we know, a gun generally has to be used in a mass shooting of random individuals.
This brief moment of perspective was brought to you in the name of … a brief moment of perspective.