When a 20-year-old killer came out of a bathroom in an Indiana mall at about 6 p.m. on July 17 and began shooting at people, an armed citizen acted. The violent criminal managed to kill three people, and to wound two others, but his murder spree was stopped when 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, of Seymour, Ind., drew a handgun he was legally carrying and shot the murderer.
Greenwood Police Department Chief Jim Ison called Dicken a “good Samaritan with a gun.”
“The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop the shooter almost as soon as he began,” Ison said.
This tragedy occurred in the Greenwood Park Mall. Greenwood is a city of about 60,000 people, and lies just south of Indianapolis.
According to gun-control advocates, this isn’t supposed to happen. For example, after Jack Wilson killed a mass murderer with one shot to the head in a Texas church in 2019, anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City and the founder and primary funding source of the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, said, “It may be true, I wasn’t there, I don’t know the facts, that somebody in the congregation had their own gun and killed the person who murdered two other people. But it’s the job of law enforcement to, uh, have guns and to decide when to shoot . You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place.”
The people in the Greenwood Park Mall are probably happy a good guy with a gun was there to stop this murderer. The local police chief is as well.
Armed citizens often thwart crimes. According to the most-recent data—the 2021 National Firearms Survey, conducted under the supervision of Georgetown professor William English—armed citizens use their guns about 1.67 million annually to stop criminals, almost always without firing a shot.
Nevertheless, some on the anti-gun side of the equation are finding plenty of reasons to be critical; for example, a story by Emma Mayer in Newsweek said, “The good Samaritan who shot and killed the gunman who opened fire in the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana on Sunday afternoon reportedly broke the property's policy against weapons.”
In the story, Mayer detailed Simon Property Group’s no-weapons policy and concluded by saying that “it is unclear if the Samaritan will face any repercussions for breaking property policy by carrying a gun … .”
Mayer’s speculation notwithstanding, it seems unlikely there will be any “repercussions for breaking property policy,” as Greenwood Park Mall issued a statement that referred to “the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.” Such sentiments were echoed by numerous local and state officials and politicians.
Meanwhile, Shannon Watts, head of Moms Demand, also chose to focus on the fact that the hero armed citizen was carrying his gun in an area that had a no-gun policy without noting that mass murderers nearly always choose such areas to commit their atrocities.
“I don’t know who needs to hear this but when a 22-year-old illegally brings a loaded gun into a mall and kills a mass shooter armed with an AR-15 after he already killed three people and wounded others is not a ringing endorsement of our implementation of the Second Amendment,” tweeted Watts.
If stopping a mass murderer in his tracks isn’t a “ringing endorsement” of the Second Amendment, it is hard to say what is. Lives were saved. Watts later removed the tweet.
In the end, a murderer came into a so-called “gun-free zone” with the intent to kill as many people as possible. He was stopped because an armed citizen was there and acted to save lives.
This investigation is ongoing. We will report more information as it becomes available.
