Virginia Self-Defense: Dog Attack Stopped By Armed Bystander :: 04/02/2018

When the left tries to count defensive gun uses, they love to look at the number of times an armed citizen kills a bad guy. There are a lot of reasons why using a statistic like this is, well, dumb. However, anti-gunners still love to use it, presenting it as some kind of proof that defensive uses of a firearm aren’t that common.

I wonder how they’d explain a case where a dog attack was stopped by an armed citizen, then.

A dog loose on a downtown Roanoke street attacked two people Thursday morning before a bystander shot it with a handgun.

Two people were taken to the hospital in ambulances for treatment, but names or conditions were not available. The dog was taken from the scene with two gunshot wounds to Angels of Assisi, where it was euthanized, Roanoke police Capt. Chester Smith said.

The dog’s owner, who lives in an apartment in the same area where the attack happened, said the dog got out when he opened the door, Smith said. The owner has not been charged at this time. The incident is still under investigation.

…

Paul Burek, who was servicing a copy machine at Curry Copy, had witnessed the whole event and had earlier retrieved his small handgun from his car.

“Somebody was screaming shoot it, and I thought, concealed carry, somebody around here’s gotta have a gun,” Burek said. “Fortunately I did.”

When the dog wandered back across the street, Burek shot it once. It kept moving, and Burek closed on it, shooting it again at close range and knocking it down.

“I thought once it got away from people, that was the time to shoot it,” Burek said.

It sounds like a good thing that Burek was there.

As we can see, attacks don’t necessarily come from criminals. They can come from animals, even man’s best friend. A dog is fully capable of killing a human being, and that means a dog attack is potentially very serious. Other means weren’t really practical. After all, as noted in the above article, one person had already hit it with a cane. They were rewarded with an attack from the dog.

The gun worked. It ended the threat and kept everyone safe.

Yet this defensive use of a firearm won’t show up in self-defense fatality statistics since those only count humans being shot and killed.

It shouldn’t matter, though. This was another case of an armed citizen defending lives. The proverbial good guy with a gun that ends countless threats every year. In this case, the threat was a four-legged one rather than a two-legged one. It was still a threat.

While I’m sure PETA will have something to say on this, what really matters is that an armed citizen stopped an attack, an attack that could and probably would have been much worse if some people had their way.

Luckily, the Second Amendment protects people’s right to keep and bear arms, and people are alive today because of it.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia.

https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2018/04/02/dog-attack-stopped-armed-bystander/