Has the failed Uvalde police response debunked the 'good guy with a gun' narrative?

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UVALDE, Texas – That 376 armed and trained law enforcement officers took more than an hour to confront and kill the murderer of 19 children and two teachers provided an opening for advocates of gun restrictions to argue against the claim that more guns are the answer to stopping mass shootings.

However, moments after a committee of the Texas House of Representatives finished publicly explaining its report Sunday that pointed out failure after failure by officers at Robb Elementary School on May 24, an armed and far less trained civilian 1,258 miles away in Greenwood, Indiana, shot and killed a gunman who had killed people at a shopping mall and would probably have tried to kill more.

Elisjsha Dicken, the man who killed the shooter, was called heroic by Greenwood's police chief and mayor. The incident prompted political leaders and Second Amendment defenders to once more invoke the words of National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre in the days after the mass shooting that killed 26 at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School on Dec. 14, 2012: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

The competing narratives from the two incidents 54 days apart will probably do little to bridge the yawning divide that separates the most vocal proponents of gun rights and the activists who want more restrictions on who may own firearms and the type of firearms that are commercially available.

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Some on both sides of one of the most polarizing issues in politics acknowledge that the "good guy" argument is too complex and nuanced to be used as a rubber-stamp solution to gun violence.

"I think, frankly, both sides are inclined to use cliches or bumper stickers," said former Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, who as a Republican state senator in the mid-1990s was the driving force behind the first law that allowed Texans to publicly carry concealed handguns.

"There is something called a good guy with a gun," he said. "And, of course, there are problems associated with it. The problem we have is that there's a lot of good guys with guns who probably aren't very proficient in their use of a firearm."

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A well-trained, armed teacher inside Robb Elementary might have acted as Dicken did at the Indiana mall, Patterson said.

However, an FBI study in 2021 showed only about 25 incidents since 2014 in which civilians with a license to carry a gun stepped in and stopped a shooter.

The statistic is a sobering reminder that would-be victims cannot count on random strangers carrying guns to save them from tragedy, said Nicole Golden, the executive director of Texas Gun Sense, which lobbies for limits on firearm availability. 

"Our leaders at every level of government are responsible for our public safety," Golden said. "And an important element of that is ensuring that dangerous weapons do not end up in the hands of dangerous individuals."

Stephen Willeford, an NRA member who fired on a shooter who killed 26 people, including a pregnant woman, at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017, said the inaction by law enforcement at Robb Elementary and the swift action by the Indiana man underscore the argument for armed civilians.

"Uvalde proves that you are your own first responder and that you need to be armed and you need to be ready because police don't necessarily come to save you," said Willeford, who advocates for gun rights. "We need to do away with gun-free zones all together.

"The guy in Indiana was in a gun-free zone," he added. "Because he ignored the rules, he was able to stop a mass shooter (who was) loaded for bear and ready to kill lots of people. This 22-year-old young man was able to take him out."

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Jaclyn Schildkraut, a criminal justice professor at State University of New York at Oswego, said she's skeptical that most civilians – even if they've taken firearm training – can be counted on to keep cool under such stress.

"There's a difference between shooting at a paper target that's not moving and completely stationary in front of you and is X number of yards away, and then actually (firing during) a tactical response," said Schildkraut, who co-wrote a study this year for Texas' ALERRT (Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training) center that examined the advisability of arming teachers.

Armed civilians who draw weapons can pose a danger to themselves, she added.

"If you're a police officer, you walk into a room and you see two people with a gun and you have a split second to make a decision of who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, before you drop one of them," Schildkraut said. "How do you know you're going to get that right?"

Patterson, who left public office in 2015, said the more likely scenario would be, as in the Indiana mall case, that an armed civilian limits the opportunity for further bloodshed.

"A citizen doesn't have to shoot the threat dead," Patterson said. "The mere presence of resistance, maybe even gunfire, immediately changes the dynamic. No. 1, the shooter has to pay attention to the person that's shooting at them now instead of killing other people."

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Some political figures will no doubt continue to use the "good guy" slogan, University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus said, but its salience among mainstream voters may have diminished.

"It's politically powerful to suggest that arming citizens can be an effective deterrence to mass shootings," he said. "But realistically, that notion just doesn't hold up. It's only just a political crutch."

John C. Moritz covers Texas government and politics for the Paste BN Network in Austin. Contact him at jmoritz@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @JohnnieMo.