The NRA is attacking James Shaw, Jr., the unarmed man who put his own life at risk by charging a mass shooter at a Tennessee Waffle House Sunday morning. Travis Reinking, the suspect believed to have shot and killed four people, and wounded at least four others, is in custody and has been charged.
NRA TV host Grant Stinchfield in the video below says Shaw failed to do his job as an American because he wasn’t armed. Stinchfield claims that if only Shaw had been a good guy with a gun instead of just a “good guy with guts,” the shooter would have been stopped “permanently.”
It’s not enough in the NRA’s world to be a hero. You have to be a hero with a gun.
“What amazes me is people have been tweeting at me, these folks on the left, somehow saying this proves that you don’t need a good guy with a gun because James — if anything, it proves to me that he had more guts, and he was braver without the gun,” Stinchfield said, as Media Matters reports.
“But clearly if someone was there with a gun, we wouldn’t be having a manhunt right now. It doesn’t take away from the fact that a gun could have been useful in this situation.”
The police, whose job it is to catch murder suspects, did.
“Anybody, whether it was Mr. Shaw, whether it was somebody else, if they had a gun, we wouldn’t be having a manhunt right now. OK? It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. Yes, a good guy with guts stopped a bad guy with a gun momentarily, but he didn’t stop him permanently. And this guy is still on the loose.”
Well, not any more.
Watch: