When you say "truly average", what exactly do you mean by that?
I thought I had covered this, but maybe not, primarily not a professional protector or firearms professional. Many of the shootings stopped by "citizens" are not stopped by your typical Mom, Pop, or Eli sorts. When a "good guy with a gun" intervenes, there seems to be a lot of off duty cops, retired cops, firearms instructors, gun range owner, armed security guards, etc. I see a lot of people get really excited by an "armed citizen" stopping a church shooting with a head shot across the room. Then it comes out that he was an armed security guard, head of the security team, firearms instructor, and a former LEO. This is EXACTLY the kind of person you would expect to rise to the occasion and deal with a threat swiftly and efficiently. I would not expect middle-aged, IT Bob, the computer guru from a start-up that happened to be having lunch at a cafe, divorced, father of 2, to hear gunshots from the accounting office next to the cafe, break out is Sig P365 and go charging in to save the 23 accounting staffers who are being slaughtered by some guy who ended up on the bad end of an IRS audit, and doing so swiftly, efficiently, and without hurting others.
Instead, you often hear about some armed guy who is at a mall shooting and runs down the shooter in the mall and after a gun battle, the shooter is down. The armed guy isn't just some man out on a date with his wife, but an off duty cop having a date with his wife.
Mark Wilson attempted to stop a shooter on the square in Tyler, Texas and is heralded as a hero for apparently wounding the shooter, but sadly, Wilson was killed. Was Mark Wilson an average guy? Nope. He was a gun range owner and firearms instructor, including defensive classes.
A father hears that his kids' and wife's school is being shot up while he was getting a haircut. He borrows a shotgun from his barber and drives directly to the school, gets in and gets several classes to safety, but he didn't encounter the shooter, but who was this hero? Just a dad? Nope. Off duty Border Patrol agent.
In the grand scheme of things, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of people who respond to these events who are not average citizens. They are as a described, current or former, on or off duty, professionals in protection and/or firearms.
How do you know that he's "average"?
So we have Eli Dicken. I know he isn't a cop, former/retired cop, military or former military and that he was newly carrying a gun under the brand new law and did not even have a permit to carry before that. Eli does not sound much like a guy who has necessarily even given a lot of thought to concealed carry until it was permitless.
https://theconservativetreehouse.co...en-trained-in-firearm-use-by-his-grandfather/
Dicken had no police training or military background, according to police. He was carrying under the new “Constitutional Carry” law and did not have a permit. Police said Dicken learned to shoot from his grandfather and that he had no military or police training.
So he grandfather taught him to shoot, but it doesn't sound like he grandfather is a protection professional either. We all learn to shoot, somewhere.
My point was that don't read about many folks that act decisively and effectively, with such superior shooting skills in a shooting crisis who are your Eli Dicken or Vic Stacy types who aren't the professionals.
