Does shooting dead a dangerous killer make you a ‘good Samaritan’?

A mass shooting event in Indiana stretches the phrase to its absolute limits, writes Holly Baxter

Emergency personnel gather after a shooting at a mall in Greenwood, Indiana, on Sunday (Reuters)

It seems callous to say it, but it’s easy to get into the mindset of “another week, another shooting” when you report from the US. So it was that few of us in the New York bureau reacted with surprise when we heard that a man had entered an Indiana mall’s food court a few days ago with a semi-automatic weapon and opened fire.

What was, surprising, however, was what happened next. The shooter was “neutralised” – ie killed – by a passerby who had travelled to the mall with his girlfriend and a legally owned handgun. Here was the “good guy with a gun” that Republicans always talk about when school shootings happen. Elisjsha Dicken reportedly told his 19-year-old girlfriend to get down before taking aim at the shooter, who had fatally wounded three people within a minute. Police at the scene said that the shooter was killed in “under two minutes” initially, and then revised that estimate to a number of seconds. Dicken had no military or police training, despite having impressive aim from the opposite side of the food court, and said he’d been taught to shoot by his grandfather.

Every time a Parkland-type tragedy happens, NRA supporters love to float the idea that the solution is more guns, not fewer. They have suggested everything from keeping guns in locked boxes on teachers’ desks to arming children – everything except the one thing we know works from other countries, which is removing guns from the populace altogether. Most mass shootings could be stopped if every responsible citizen was armed, right-wingers claim. Yes, then more bad people might have access to firearms too, but they’d be less likely to use them if they knew everyone around them was packing heat. It’s essentially an argument about the merits of mutually assured destruction.