A fatal confrontation Sunday morning at a convenience store south of Seattle involving a legally armed citizen who stopped an attack by a man armed with a hatchet underscores the value and necessity of concealed carry, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today. “A store clerk is alive today because an armed citizen
intervened immediately,” CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb stated. “While we don’t yet know all the details, what we do know is that a vicious attack was stopped by a man who was in the right place at the right time.”
Noting that the Evergreen State has continued to set new records in the number of concealed pistol licenses, Gottlieb said this is reflective of a national trend. Across the country, more and more people are buying firearms and obtaining carry permits and licenses.
“We checked with the Department of Licensing earlier this month and found that more than 525,000 Washington citizens are licensed to carry,” he said. “Police and sheriff’s deputies can’t be everywhere all the time, and the public is becoming more cognizant of that. People are taking responsibility for their own safety, and that certainly applies to what happened Sunday morning in Burien.”
Gottlieb co-authored America Fights Back: Armed Self-defense in a Violent Age. He has been watching the interest in self-defense rising especially since the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino late last year.
“What Sunday’s incident shows is that it isn’t just terrorists people have to worry about, but attacks like this,” he said. “We may never know why the man who was killed launched his brutal attack, but we do know that he was literally stopped in his tracks by a good guy with a gun.
“It’s interesting that the gun prohibition lobby always loses its collective voice after an armed citizen stops a violent crime,” Gottlieb observed. “They talk about restrictive gun laws being okay if it saves just one life. That’s a theory. Well, Sunday morning a citizen had a gun and saved maybe two lives, and that’s a fact.”
With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States. The Citizens Committee can be reached by phone at (425) 454-4911, on the Internet at www.ccrkba.org or by email to InformationRequest@ccrkba.org.