Initially, I had intended to post about both this and the continuing lies about BoyBlue's diary on Hardball, but between dinner and waiting for the video to come up, auroreden took care of the latter. So instead of that, I'd like to direct people's attention to this tidbit from this Ed Show interview with one of the people who helped subdue Loughner. Video, transcript, and my comments after the fold.
There are two portions of the clip that I would like to address. The first starts at about 1:40 and goes to about 2:30, and the second close to the end of the clip, from about 3:20 to 3:50.
And here's the transcript of the two sections. With the exception of substituting "Ed" and "Joe" where the transcript uses ">>", it's a direct copy, with errors from their transcript included.
Ed: joe, take a moment and tell us exactly,went down. what was the first thing you saw? did you get in the gunman's face when he was on the ground. tell us what happened.
Joe: as i came out of the door the -- i saw several individuals wrestling with him. and i came running. i was already at a full sprint and you know, there's no time to think about anything. i saw another individual holding the firearm. i kind of assumed he was the shooter. so i grabbed his wrist and you know told him to drop it and force him to drop the gun on the ground. when he did that, everybody says, no, no, it's this guy. it's this guy and i proceeded to help that man down. you know he's trying to square him but not very long at least it didn't seem like he was trying very hard though. i'm a big guy, though, 220 and i was holding him the down so he wasn't going anywhere.
Ed: did you ever think in drawing your firearm or you made the determination you didn't have to?
Joe: sir, when i came through the door, i had my hand on the bud of my pistol and i clicked the safety off, i was ready to kill him. but i didn't have to do that and i was very blessed that i didn't have to go to that place. luckily, they'd already it's gun solution so all i had to do was help. they hadn't grabbed him and he'd still been moving i would have shot him. i almost shot the man holding the gun.
Look again at the sections I bolded. This puts the lie to any claim that more armed people would have made this end any better. As it stands, Joe says, quite plainly, that he thought that the other person who had gotten the gun away from Loughner was the shooter, and almost shot him. If that sort of "friendly fire" incident had occurred, the confusion would have created even more casualties.
We're lucky that this was resolved without even more people being killed.
Update: I'd also like to point people attention to Arizona's H.B. 2001
The Tea Party Senate is off to a solid start. On day one, Sen. Jack Harper was moving H.B. 2001, legislation that would allow community college faculty members to carry concealed weapons on campus.
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And while he hasn't introduced it yet, Harper has talked about filing legislation to let students carry concealed weapons, too, and has talked up his chances of success. "A couple of 'country club Republicans' who were opposed," he said in December, "will not return."
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Harper wasn't available to talk today, although he did get into a tete-a-tete with Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik over who deserved the blame for the Tucson rampage. Staff with Pima Community College Campus Police's would only say that they, like the campus police of Arizona's state universities, opposed H.B. 2001.