When covering mass shootings, we prefer not to name the culprits. For the heroes, the opposite rule ought to obtain. Elisjsha Dicken, the 22-year-old Hoosier who halted a mall shooting on Sunday evening, is one of those heroes.
The problem of public mass shootings is extremely complicated, and, while it may be tempting or convenient to pretend otherwise, it is highly unlikely that a single solution can bring the scourge under control. To acknowledge this, however, is not to suggest that there is nothing that can help at the margins, and, clearly, the existence of lawful concealed carriers can help at the margins. Just 15 seconds elapsed between the beginning of the shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall and Elisjsha Dicken’s intervening. Had Dicken not been there, the three innocent people who were killed would have been joined by many others.
In 2012, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg noted that “anti-gun activists believe the expansion of concealed-carry permits represents a serious threat to public order,” before proposing that, if anything, the “reverse” might actually be true. At the very least, Goldberg concluded, “If someone is shooting at you, it is better to shoot back than to cower and pray.” Certainly, this was the case in Indiana, where Elisjsha Dicken’s heroism represented a one-stop rebuttal to a whole host of the most popular anti-concealed-carry talking points. Figures such as Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut are fond of insisting that the idea of the “good guy with a gun” is a “myth” or “a gun industry fiction.” But Elisjsha Dicken is not a myth. Activists who hope to prohibit modern sporting rifles are fond of contending that those weapons are far too powerful to be countered by civilians carrying handguns. But, by taking on a killer who had an AR-15 with just his 9mm Glock, Elisjsha Dicken proved them wrong. Critics of America’s “gun culture” are fond of proposing that only the police or the soldiery have the training and temperament to stay calm and effective during a crisis. But, in the space of a few terrifying seconds, Elisjsha Dicken managed to realize what was happening, to instruct his girlfriend to stay low, to hit the shooter from a distance of 120 feet, and then to move further toward the danger to ensure that the threat had been neutralized and to gesture the shooter’s would-be victims to safety. Describing the incident, the local chief of police described Dicken as “responsible,” “very proficient,” and “very tactically sound.”
In a telling statement, the Brady Campaign not only ignored Dicken’s heroism completely, but implied that Indiana’s concealed-carry laws had been to blame for the attack that he brought to a close. “A gunman shot and killed 3 people and injured 2 others at a mall in Greenwood, Indiana,” the group wrote. “This tragedy comes after Indiana repealed its requirement for a permit to carry a handgun in public, which went into effect July 1.” In isolation, these sentences are accurate. Their implication is not. Indiana’s decision to repeal “its requirement for a permit to carry a handgun in public” had no effect on the “gunman” who “shot and killed 3 people and injured 2 others,” because that gunman used a rifle to carry out his spree. But it did affect the hero, Elisjsha Dicken, who did not have a carry permit and who was thus able to carry his gun lawfully only because Indiana had rendered its permits superfluous. (Nothing in Indiana’s new system allows those who were previously ineligible to obtain a carry permit to carry a firearm.)
Thank goodness that he was, for it made all the difference. “Many more people would have died last night,” Greenwood police recorded at a press conference on Monday, “if not for a responsible armed citizen that took action very quickly within the first two minutes of the shooting.” A community — and a nation — owes Elisjsha Dicken its thanks.