It was an act of courage and calmness worthy of a scene in the movies. But this was real life: A heavily armed man walked out of a bathroom at a shopping mall in Greenwood, Indiana, on Sunday night and started shooting — until he was killed by an armed bystander.
Mike Wright, manager of Luca Pizza di Roma in the mall’s food court, recalled taking cover when the shooting started and then coming out when he stopped to see the passerby behind a low-slung wall with a gun. targeting the assailant on whom he shot death.
“He was standing there about 25 or 30 feet away from the body with the gun pointed at him until law enforcement arrived,” Mr. Wright recalled Tuesday. “The Good Samaritan appeared poised and in control. He seemed very disciplined. Jim Ison, the local police chief, went further, saying his engagement with the gunman who killed three people was “nothing short of heroic.”
But along with the horror, drama and approval came boom and renewed controversy in a country united in revulsion at the continuing plague of gun violence but bitterly divided over loosening gun restrictions like Indiana’s law passed this year that allowed to a bystander, Elyssha Dicken, 22, for carrying her 9mm handgun in the first place.
Supporters of expanded gun rights were quick to praise Mr. Dicken’s actions. “We’ll say it again: The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” the National Rifle Association tweeted Monday morning.
But Mr. Dicken’s act, while heroic, was also a statistical unicorn. A study of 433 active shooter attacks in the United States between 2000 and 2021 found that only 22 ended with a bystander shooting the assailant, according to data from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. In 10 of those cases, the armed bystander was an off-duty security guard or law enforcement officer. In other clashes, civilians trying to intervene and stop an attacker were themselves shot dead by police.
“It’s extremely rare, more the exception than the rule,” said Adam Skaggs, general counsel and policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, of scenarios like the one in Indiana. “The reality is that more people carrying guns means more conflicts escalating into deadly violence and more people being shot and killed.”
Police identified the shooter at Greenwood Park Mall as 20-year-old Jonathan Douglas Sapirman, but did not provide a motive. But Mr. Dicken’s intervention almost certainly saved lives: The police said Mr. Sapirman, who fired 24 rounds, came away with more than 100 rounds of ammunition, two rifles and a handgun. Mr. Dicken killed the gunman 15 seconds after the shooting began, Chief Ison said Tuesday, reversing an earlier statement.
The attack was bracketed by other mass violence that highlighted a Groundhog Day nightmare from which the United States can’t seem to wake up. Hours after the mall shooting, four people were shot, one fatally, at an unrelated vigil in a park nine miles north of Greenwood.
That same day, a Texas House special committee released a 77-page report criticizing the police response to a gunman’s May 24 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in which nearly 400 law enforcement officers waited to confront him as 19 children and two dead teachers.
Data from Texas State University shows that mass shootings in the United States are on the rise. At the same time, Indiana’s legislation is part of a concerted push by conservative state lawmakers to make it easier to carry guns. Indiana is one of 25 states that have passed so-called constitutional carry laws that allow people to carry concealed firearms without a permit.
Last month, the US Supreme Court struck down a New York law that placed strict restrictions on carrying guns outside the home.
In Indiana, the constitutional carry law has been opposed by the state police chief and a number of other law enforcement groups.
“What I would like to say about the new permit-less law is that if I’m an ordinary law-abiding citizen who’s 21 years of age, I can go into a gun store and buy a gun and go out and carry the firearm , wherever I go without any training or knowledge of how to use a gun safely and legally,” Mr. Skaggs said.
Chief Ison said the police found no indication that Mr. Dicken had a permit for the gun. But the chief said he was carrying it legally under the new law. In a brief interview, Mr. Dicken’s lawyer, Guy A. Relford, described his client as an “all-American boy from Indiana” and declined to provide specific information about him or the mall encounter.
Paul Helmke, a professor at Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs and former president and chief executive of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said Mr. Dicken’s actions meant the mall shooting “ended -better than I could have been.”
But he said active shooter situations are usually too chaotic — and too prone to unexpected tragedies — to rely on the intervention of armed bystanders, who can sometimes hinder an effective law enforcement response, making it difficult for police officers to tell the difference. between an assailant and a benevolent armed civilian.
“You have to make a split-second decision, and one of the problems with armed citizens is that when the police respond or when another bystander responds, they’re not always going to know who the right person is,” he said.
Such was the case in Arvada, Colorado, when in June 2021 a bystander named Johnny Hurley was shot and killed by a police officer after Mr. Hurley had used his gun to shoot another man who killed a police officer.
In November 2018, a Chicago security guard named Gemell Roberson held up a gunman outside the bar where he worked, pointing his gun at the man’s back. Mr. Roberson was shot and killed by a responding police officer.
That same month, a gunman named Emantic F. Bradford was shot and killed by a police officer at a mall in Alabama. A lawsuit filed by Mr. Bradford’s mother claims he pulled out the gun he was legally carrying as part of his “Good Samaritan” response to a chaotic scene at the mall after a shooting broke out.
In a discussion of the Indiana shooting on Fox News, Brandon Tatum, a conservative commentator and former police officer, echoed the NRA’s position that armed bystanders can make an important contribution to keeping the peace. “I think good gun owners, or at least legal gun owners, are the recipe for success against people who don’t want to follow the law,” Mr. Tatum said.
This week at The Federalist, a conservative website, editor-in-chief David Harsani noted a number of recent incidents in which gunmen were able to stop people with bad intentions from committing acts of violence. Among other things, Mr. Harsanyi argued that the data from the Texas State researchers was misleading.
“It is impossible, unless one is a mind reader, to quantify how often the presence of good guys with guns deters murder,” he wrote. “Probably shooters, whether they’re suicidal or not, prefer soft targets that allow them to make the most horrific impact, which is one of the reasons I just can’t understand why we don’t want to train (wanting) teachers to use firearms.” weapons. “
But Adam Winkler, a gun policy expert at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, noted that there are 400 million guns in the United States, and yet the nation has one of the worst records for gun deaths. “If more guns lead to less crime, America will be the safest country in the world,” he said.
Most states that require a permit to carry a gun do not require active shooter response training, he noted — and in the roughly two dozen states that have eliminated permit requirements, no training is required at all.
“If we really thought good guys with guns were the answer, then we would require the good guys to go through extensive training so that if they started a mass shooting, we could count on them to do it right,” he said.
But as states and the Supreme Court strike down gun control laws, he worries there isn’t much hope for other alternatives.
Even if relying on a good guy with a gun “isn’t a good strategy for reducing gun violence or protecting people from mass shootings,” he said, “it may be the only thing we have left.”
Susan S. Beachy contributed research.
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