A masked man shoots at a McDonald's,, gets neutralized by a dad with a gun

A masked man, not the Lone Ranger, opened fire in an Alabama McDonald's restaurant on Saturday night. But he didn't expect to discover the hard way, that another man with a gun wasn't having any of it.

The good guy with a gun was praised as a hero.

WBRC-TV reported that an armed man wearing a mask entered the Birmingham McDonald's when a worker opened the door for a dad and his sons who were leaving the restaurant. The masked man opened fire and the dad pulled out his own handgun and began putting holes in the bad guy.

Three people were shot: the bad guy, the dad, and one of his sons. The gunman and his spark of divinity left this earth and headed south. The dad and son suffered non-life threatening injuries.

It isn't known if the bad guy was trying to rob the store or was targeting a specific employee, but the one thing that remains clear is that the father probably saved numerous lives. He will not be charged, according to authorities.

Markus Washington, a McDonald's employee, told WBRC-TV that he was "feeling grateful." He added, "Wrapping my head around it all, I was just wishing someone would come wake me up from this nightmare. He's my hero. Because I can only imagine how it would've went if he wasn't armed. We might not be here having this interview."

While it's hard to measure the number of lives saved by a "good guy with a gun," Paul Hsieh, co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) writing at Forbes, said that a study ordered by the openly pro-gun control Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found "defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence."

Hsieh also highlights, "Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008."

Another study found that well over one million instances of defensive gun uses annually:

Another study estimates there are 1,029,615 DGUs per year "for self-protection or for the protection of property at home, work, or elsewhere" excluding "military service, police work, or work as a security guard," (within the range of the National Academies' paper), yielding an estimate of 162,000 cases per year where someone "almost certainly would have been killed" if they "had not used a gun for protection."

Hsieh nots that "It's relatively easy to measure the number of lives lost due to criminal gun violence. It's harder to measure the number of lives saved by legal defensive gun use. Murders that didn't happen don't show up on crime statistics."

Had the worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, in Pittsburgh, had guns, lives would have likely been saved.


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