“I Just Acted”: The Facts Gun Control Advocates Seek to Evade

On Sunday afternoon, Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, walked out of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where he had just opened fire on parishioners during mass. Dressed in all black tactical wear and body armor, he strode across the parking lot.

That’s when he met Stephen Willeford, 55, a local plumber. Willeford lives near the church, and when he heard shooting, he grabbed his rifle and rushed over.

While Kelley was armed with a powerful AR-15 and was formerly a military member, Willeford engaged Kelley, getting into a shootout. One witness said that when he came face to face with Kelley, Willeford “didn’t hesitate; he shot in between Kelley’s body armor, hitting him in his side,” the Daily Mail reported.

Wounded, Kelley dropped his Ruger assault rifle and jumped into an SUV to flee.

But another local resident, Johnnie Langendorff, who works at a nearby auto parts store, had just pulled up the intersection nearest the church and saw the gunfight. After Kelley sped away, “The other gentleman [Willeford] said we needed to pursue [the shooter] because he shot up the church,” Langendorff told the San Antonio Express. “So that’s what I did. I just acted.”

Life is about achieving and maintaining values. Values refer to all kinds of things — your career, your children, your romantic partner, your house, your hobbies, your ideas and beliefs. But the most fundamental value is life. Without life, there are no values. So when confronted with a life-or-death situation, you act. Otherwise, your values all disappear.

It’s horrible that some people value life so little that they sadistically seek to end it, not only for themselves but for innocent others. The execution of children that went on in this church is more unspeakable than anything we have yet seen, and that is saying something.

But the bright spot in all this, if there is a bright spot, is that there are people able and willing to fight for life when it really counts. That’s what these men did, and that’s what others like them do, as well. And although it’s politically incorrect to praise the police these days, it’s also what law enforcement people have done, in virtually every single one of these instances where the killer does not make it out alive.

Guns are horrible instruments of execution. But they are also beautiful things — when in the right hands. There is good, and there is evil. Guns remind us of this fact. Some of us don’t want there to be a good and evil, but there is, just the same.

People blathering on about “we’ve got to have gun control” don’t even know what they’re talking about. Yet the issue is deeper than that. When you take away the ability of a good person to act against a violent and evil one when it counts, you’re assaulting the right to life in the most basic way possible. So long as there are evil people with weapons, we need to have good people with even better weapons. Nothing else will do.