Hi,
on another board we’re having a discussion about gun control etc. It has come up that a possible plus to having guns in the hands of the public is that they could take out the guys who loose it and go on a rampage at work, in a McDonalds etc.
Has this ever happened in the US? I’m not talking about burglars or muggers I’m talking about people like this
Umm… board wars are frowned upon, you know. You were given two examples there, one with cites.
It’s not a board war.
We were unable to think of an example off the top of our heads on the other board, so we thought we’d open up the question to a wider audience.
There’s no dogs nor even a fight in this one. 
A board war would be where the participants of a separate board began trolling this one. Since 90% of us are already members here, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
As to the OP, if the person was taken out by an armed member of the public before they committed the massacre, then you’d never know if they were going to be a mass murderer, surely?
I’m asking a question to a wider audience. I didn’t even give a link to the other thread.
The cite I was given was to the the Dalton Bros in 1887 and a robbery of a gunshop.
Any better examples from a recent event (within the last 50 years say)
That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for BF thanks a lot.
Although it was an off duty cop who pulled the gun it’s still closer that anything I’ve seen so far.
Except that he was subdued by being tackled, not by being shot (although one of the people who subdued him had a gun and pointed it at him).
Ah but the gun in question led to him being subdued
However as I said it wasn’t a member of the public it was a trained cop who pulled the gun and acted.
Everyone, I’m not looking to debate this BTW I’m just looking for instances.
The tower shooter at the University of Texas (?) was killed by an armed civilian.
Bolding mine.
I’m not a member anymore, but while I was, I know of at least one NRA magazine that ran a monthly column called “The Armed Citizen” that contained accounts of, you guessed it, armed citizens using firearms to protect themselves or others from crime. The current column is here.
The problem with a question like this is: if you stop them early enough, how do you know whether the event was just planned as a single homicide, or if it was a murderous rampage nipped in the bud?
Cheers for that. I’ll have a look at that site.
I know this is not exactly what the OP asked but this is an example of a civilian using his weapon to save an officer’s life.
Several years back…
On some divided roads in Texas they have road side rest areas or tables on each side of the road. A Texas DPS trooper had stopped to check out a guy at a rest area, they got in a scuffle, the guy got the jump on the trooper and took the troopers gun away from him. It was during deer hunting season, so happen a deer hunter was stopped at the rest area across the road, he saw it all happen and that the guy had the trooper on the ground was holding a gun on him. The deer hunter used his gun with a scope, fired, killing the guy that was holding the gun on the trooper. The hunter saved the troopers life for the guy was getting ready to shoot the trooper for he was already wanted by the law. The hunter asked that his name not be put in the news and it wasn’t, nor was any charges filed against the hunter. I am familiar with this area.
Later the mother of the thug living in California filed a law suit on the hunter but a judge threw it out.
Our news media usually puts stories of citizens using their weapons for defense on the back pages, if it is even mention.
The guys on that other site must not be very good at googling, because I googled “defensive gun use”, and hit about a hundred different accounts, such as this one.
I’m pretty sure one of the school shootings was stopped by a civilian armed with a gun. Can’t find a cite now, but I remember it because a number of pro-gun commentators were pissed off that almost no mainstream media reported it.
Getting very many great cites for this kind of thing will be difficult, because the presence of a gun in the hands of a “good guy” commonly diffuses a situation before shots any are even fired. Such incidents don’t make news, and aren’t citable.
I think the OP was specifically looking for “rampage” situations, not foiled robberies, muggings, etc. And preferably examples involving ordinary citizens, not police (or off-duty police). That makes looking for examples a bit more difficult.
That sounds more along the right lines.
Point, although “commonly” is part of the issue we’re attempting to ascertain.
From here:
http://www.mayhem.net/Crime/murder1.html
Howard Unruh killed 13 in 1949.
So that didn’t stop the rampage, but it was an armed civilian response.
Carl Brown killed 8.
So this is one that was stopped by an armed (and vehicled) civilian response.
Completely unrelated but I found this one interesting:
"Yang Mingxin (9) An axe-wielding farmer in northwestern China hacked nine people to death in a dispute over 10 geese. Yang Mingxin, 39, from Chenggu county in northwestern Shaanxi province killed nine fellow villagers and injured three others in a fit of rage on June 23. The oldest victim was aged 71 while the youngest was a four-month-old baby girl.
The problem started when Yang had refused to sell 10 stolen geese for fellow villager Guo Baoning. Unable to find his intended victim Guo, Yang attempted suicide by hanging himself and drinking insecticide after the massacre but was rushed to hospital and saved."
I could cite Kim du Toit’s weblog, but that was ignored in The Other Place.