If he was all over the place the odds of him running across someone with a gun would be even greater. Yet nothing. Here in Dallas, we can hardly go a day without someone shooting at someone on LBJ. As much testosterone that flows through Midland/Odessa I would be shocked if one in five cars didn't have a driver or passenger who was armed. Yet crickets. The same thing at Walmart where no one in the parking lot showed a gun. Someone had to be armed--yet again silence. And yes I know, talk and actions are two different things but the question remains is do we need everyone armed or just those with the skill and fearlessness to charge an armed and active shooter.

And back in the day when I was doing deposits, I carried a gun too and would have had no qualms in using it. But I carried it to defend my money not because I thought someone was going to go all Rambo on me or others. That's not exactly why people are supposed to be carrying guns today...

Hold on one second, let's back up and take a closer look at this SPREE shooting.

The incident began when Texas Department of Public Safety officers attempted to make a traffic stop. The suspect, who was driving a gold car, pointed a rifle toward the rear window of his car and fired several shots toward the DPS patrol officers. One of them was wounded. So, the first people to encounter this maniac were men with guns--yeah, cops who immediately broadcast shots fired, officer down, resulting in an immediate response by local and state police. The chase was on.

The shooter hauled ass after he shot at the DPS officers. He was on the run. High speed shit. He flees west to Odessa to East Loop 338 to 42nd Street, then goes west on 42nd Street. Near Willis and Young Middle School, he kills a young postal worker (who was unarmed) and hijacks her van. He heads back east on 42nd Street, firing out the window of his fast moving vehicle at cops along the way, wounding two, and at people and cars in a shopping mall. He manages to hit lots of people, killing some and wounding others.

Let's think about this for a minute, reason it out, apply some basic logic. Several things immediately come to mind.

1) Had anyone in the path of this rampaging maniac, either on foot or in a vehicle, had a firearm, how quickly would they have been able to respond to stop him? By the time anyone could have sortied a gun, the shooter, in his fast moving mail van, would have been out of range.

2) No doubt that folks along the route and in the mall parking lot, seeing and hearing gun fire coming from the van, seeing people getting hit, were scrambling for cover and would have gotten on their cell phones and called 911. Cops responding from all directions would have gotten updates from the dispatchers. The cops on the chase were obviously putting a lot of pressure on the shooter, he had to keep moving.

3) Lots of good guys and gals with guns in fast police cars were closing in on this Sonovbitch, they cornered him in the Cinergy theater in Odessa, had a little shoot out and killed him.

A bad guy with a gun shooting from a fast vehicle with police on his ass and more closing in isn't what you'd call a citizen self-defense scenario.

Such scenarios do present themselves from time to time: again in Texas, a man convicted of domestic violence in a military court martial--a conviction that prohibited him from purchasing or possessing firearms, a conviction that military authorities never uploaded to the FBI NICS database--entered a church in Sutherland Springs, TX and opened fire. He killed 26 and wounded 20 others.

When he exited the church, a citizen, former NRA firearms instructor Stephen Willeford, got a gun (a semi-auto AR15), and confronted him, shot him twice, once in the leg and once in the upper left torso. The bad guy dropped his rifle and returned fire with a handgun as he got in his vehicle and sped away, the NRA instructor put one more round through the back window of his car.

Willeford then hooked up with a guy in a pickup and they gave chase. They pursued the bad guy at high speed for about five to seven minutes, driving at speeds up to 95 miles per hour. During the chase, the driver, Johnnie Langendorff, called 911 and reported their location to the operator as they assumed that the police were on their way to the church.

Due to serious gunshot wounds, the bad guy lost control of his vehicle, crashed into a road sign, careened across a ditch and stopped around 30 feet out into a field.

Langendorff stopped his pickup on the highway and Willeford exited with gun in hand. They saw no movement in the bad guy's car, so Willeford simply kept a bead on the car until the cops arrived a few minutes later.

When the cops checked, the bad guy, Devin Patrick Kelley, was dead.

Crickets, Pete? Crickets my ass. Your obsession with semi-auto firearms is pathological, it has seriously hindered any ability you may have had to apply reason, logic and common sense to tragedies like this. In your mind, they are all the same and they all demand your irrational solution--get rid of semi-autos and these things won't happen.