Woman Claims Gun Laws Prevented Her From Protecting Slain Husband :: 12/13/2019

We on the pro-gun side of the Second Amendment debate often argue that guns save lives. Anti-gunners, however, argue they don’t. They love to present a lot of stories of people who have lost loved ones to guns and so-called gun violence.

As humans are story-driven animals, those stories have an impact. If they didn’t, we’d have seen the anti-gunners abandon those tactics long ago.

However, we have some stories of our own. Recently on Fox News, a widow explained how gun laws are responsible for her husband’s murder.

Nikki Goeser, whose husband was shot and killed by her stalker at a restaurant, said on Wednesday that gun control laws prevented her from defending herself and her husband.

“This happened in a restaurant that was a gun-free zone. … I obeyed that law. Of course, the man who was stalking me did not have a permit to carry, brought a gun in illegally and shot my husband seven times. … I will probably wonder for the rest of my life if I could have prevented that. Of course, I will never know because I was denied a chance. I was stalked and defenseless,” Goeser told “Fox & Friends” Wednesday.

In April 2009, Nikki’s husband, Ben Goeser, was fatally shot in the middle of a busy restaurant by a man she said had been stalking her.

Goeser, now the executive director of the Crime Prevention Research Center, had a permit to carry a handgun. But at the time, Tennessee state law prevented her from carrying the gun inside the bar-restaurant where she and her husband ran a mobile karaoke business.

Her experience sounds very similar to that of Suzanna Gratia-Hupp, a survivor of the Luby’s Diner shooting in Killeen, Texas. Hupp also had a firearm but didn’t carry it into the diner because state law prohibited it. As a result of the law, both watched loved ones killed.

I can’t even imagine what that must be like.

However, Goeser correctly notes that she can’t definitively say that if she’d had her gun her husband would still be alive. That’s not a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination. What it would have done, though, is given her a chance, a chance she was denied because of the place being a gun-free zone.

She didn’t have the chance to protect her husband’s life with her firearm because she, instead, complied with state law.

There are a lot more stories like this than many people would like to believe. While anti-gunners can find plenty of people who lost their children to stray gunfire or other horrible occurrences, we can also find people who lost loved ones explicitly due to gun control laws. We need to tout these stories and “boost the signal” on them. People like Nikki Goeser need to be household names so that people will remember that, if nothing else, gun laws have consequences too.

Roughly 2.5 million people defend their lives with a firearm each year while something like 14,500 murders in the U.S.  How many of those gun deaths could have been reclassified as defensive gun uses were it not for draconian and arcane gun control legislation?

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/2019/12/12/woman-claims-gun-laws-prevented-protecting-husband/