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The Concealed Handgun ManualExcerpt from Chapter One According to the (Virginia Tech Incident Review Panel’s) report, police officers started to arrive at Norris Hall three minutes after the university police department received the first call. The officers were slowed by the chained entrances but eventually found a locked door to a maintenance shop. They shot the lock with a shotgun and entered the building. Two police teams entered and ran up the stairs to the second floor where the shots were coming from. They heard the last shot as (Seung Hui) Cho shot himself in the head ending the worst massacre by a gunman on a U.S. university campus. The panel’s report estimates that between 9:40 and 9:51, Cho shot and killed twenty-five students and five faculty members in the hallway and in four of the classrooms. He wounded seventeen other students. Immediately the local and national media were all over the incident like blowflies on a dead cow in August. They concentrated on the victims, on the university and police response, on Cho’s obvious mental problems, and that the country obviously needed more gun control laws. There were comparisons to the shooting in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in which two students killed twelve students and a teacher before shooting themselves. They were aided and abetted in calling for more gun control laws by the usual suspects – the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence (Formerly Handgun Control, Inc.), the Violence Policy Center, and other anti-gun and anti-self-defense groups. Although the media and anti-gun organizations responses were predictable, the political response was muted. It was interesting and encouraging that after the shooting many politicians kept their mouths shut about gun control, saying it was too early or inappropriate to raise the issue. Many Democratic politicians have been stung by the party’s enthusiasm for disarming law-abiding citizens. After prompting by former President Clinton, they have come to realize that gun control likely cost the Democrats control of Congress and the Presidency. It is an issue they don’t want to deal with. Newsweek noticed the hush from Democrats in the wake of Virginia Tech. Even such rabid anti-gun politicians as Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel didn’t want to talk about gun control anymore than he wanted to talk about term limits for congressmen. The Democrats recruited some pro gun politicians to run for Congress in 2006 and were trying the court gun owners, albeit with their fingers crossed. The response from the pro gun, pro self-defense citizens and organizations was also predictable. The feedback I heard again and again from people interested in taking responsibility for their own safety was: “If only one student there had had a gun . . .” But Virginia Tech was a “gun-free zone.” Even students and faculty members with concealed handgun licenses were forbidden to take their guns on campus. In 2005, a student with a concealed handgun permit was disciplined for bringing a gun on campus. For more than two years, the Virginia Citizens Defense League had been trying to get a law passed in the legislature that would prevent public colleges and universities from banning guns from their campuses. The bills were stalled in committee after much lobbying by Virginia Tech and other institutes of higher learning in the state. Apparently Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was pleased the bill in 2006 was defeated. He was quoted in The Roanoke Times as saying: “I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly’s actions because this will help parents, students, faculty, and visitors feel safe on our campus.” Right. In the days and weeks after the Virginia Tech shooting some people spoke in favor of allowing students and faculty members who have concealed handgun licenses to carry handguns on campus just as they can off campus. Texas Governor Rick Perry was quoted as saying that Texans with concealed handgun licenses should be able to carry anywhere. He included college campuses, bars, courthouses, and churches. Suzanna Gratia Hupp who saw her parents killed in the mass shooting at Killeen, Texas, in 1991, told a reporter from Time magazine that she puts some of the blame for Virginia Tech on politicians. She was angry because the shooting was preventable, she said. “The politicians haven’t figured it out. They have created gun-free zones, and all of the dreadful things that have happened were in these gun-free zones,” Hupp told the reporter. Hupp’s story is told in Chapter 3. Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, agreed. He said that every tragic school shooting and some other mass shootings had one thing in common. “They all happened in so-called ‘gun-free zones,’” he said. “You can pass all the laws you want, but the only proven way to stop shootings in ‘gun-free zones’ is an armed response.” Sheriff Wayne Rausch of Latah County, Idaho, favors more law-abiding citizens, including adult students, getting permits to carry concealed handguns. However he has experienced occasions when permit holders have hindered police while intending to help. In most cases permit holders should use their guns only to defend themselves or their families, he says. “An active shooter situation is certainly an example of an exception where I would like to see the armed citizen get involved,” Rausch said. “Because one of the questions that was posed to me by many of the people that called was: ‘What could law enforcement have done differently at Virginia Tech?’ “Quite frankly I’ve spoken to a lot of my fellow sheriffs and chiefs and we all agree: basically nothing. It’s absolutely ludicrous to think that on a huge campus like that when there is an isolated incident going on that is not only dynamic but changing fast that somehow or another police are miraculously going to be able to pinpoint the exact location and have immediate response to shut it down before it gets worse. That’s just not feasible; that’s just not going to happen.” Rausch feels that the most reasonable expectation is that law enforcement is probably going to get the information about a shooting by someone calling on a cell phone. When police are alerted, they go there and take care of it as quickly as possible. “On the other hand, the quickest answer to this obviously is that if you’ve got a classroom full of students and you are lining them up to shoot them and some of them are armed themselves, there is a possibility this may be shut down much quicker.” He says the deterrent factor of some students being armed should not be discounted. “It seems to me that there must be some sort of intimidation factor for the bad guy – that if I know I am among an armed populace, I could be picking a fight with someone who is going to kill me.” The University of Idaho with a student body of ten thousand is located in Latah County and the city of Moscow. Rausch says the university has a policy of no guns on campus but the state attorney general was trying to determine if the policy was legal. While some colleges and universities have not banned students or faculty with permits from carrying concealed handguns on campus, one state has tackled the issue head on. Utah has fought the battle against such bans in the courts and so far has won. In 2006, the Utah Supreme Court upheld a law passed by the legislature in 2004 that requires public colleges and universities to honor concealed handgun permits on campus. No mass shootings have been reported at Utah colleges since the law went into effect. The Virginia Tech Incident Review Panel’s report stated that data on the effect of carrying guns on campus are “incomplete and inconclusive.” “The panel knows of no case in which a shooter in campus homicides has been shot or scared off by a student or faculty member with a weapon.” However, in an appendix that lists school mass shootings, the report notes two cases where this happened. One of the incidents mentioned happened five years before and only a hundred miles west of the Virginia Tech campus. Another foreign-born student went on a shooting rampage on January 16, 2002, this time at the Appalachian School of Law, near Grundy, Virginia. When Tracy Bridges and his friends got back to the law school after lunch they were late so Bridges parked his Chevrolet Tahoe in a faculty spot near one of the exits from the classroom building. He and the friends with him climbed the stairs to the second floor and entered the classroom. About fifteen students were waiting in the room for the professor to arrive. Bridges, twenty-five, was in his third and final year at the law school. He was also certified as a peace officer in North Carolina and was a deputy with the Buncombe County sheriff’s office in the far western part of that state. The students were talking among themselves when they heard what could have been a shot, Bridges said. One of the students in the class was Ted Besen, another third-year student who had been a law enforcement officer also in North Carolina. “We both kinda looked at each other and kinda jokingly said that sounded like a gunshot. And then when we heard the second and third; that’s when we knew it was a gunshot,” Bridges said. He and Besen ran into the hallway where they saw Professor Wesley Shinn who, according to Bridges, told them: “Peter’s in the building and he’s got a gun.” Excerpt from Chapter Two
“I’m not the kind of guy to read people, but I thought that my employee must know the guy ‘cause of the way the guy was talking to him,” Stroud said. He saw the employee step to one side and point at the store’s video security camera. The man made some excuse about going to get his drill and left. When the employee came over and told him what had happened, Stroud was concerned enough to call the police. The police found the man who was carrying a .357-caliber revolver and several bags of crack cocaine, Stroud said. They arrested him. Later Stroud told his father and other family members about the incident, so they would be aware of the possible dangers. He also bought several handguns and hid them in the store with one behind the counter.
“It was a very bad situation that was sort of on the heels of all this. So that’s when we got our guns and started being prepared ‘cause there were a lot of robberies,” he said. “I had guns previously, but now they are stashed where I can get to one.” Several months later, in the early summer of 2001, Stroud had a particularly disturbing dream. He dreamt that he was in his store when a man came in and shot at him. He fired one round in return and the man shot again. “In this dream, I saw something fly out of my chest, so I looked down and didn’t feel anything, but there was blood coming out of my chest. And I died. I woke up at the point that I died,” Stroud said. The dream upset him to the point that he told his pastor about it. The pastor suggested that God was trying to tell him something – that perhaps he was going to get robbed, Stroud said. Nothing happened for about a month, until Friday, July 20, 2001. Shortly before 5 p.m., Stroud was behind the counter working on a report. One employee was also behind the counter, sitting on the floor counting drill bits. Another was over in a corner behind some toolboxes. Stroud said he had just finished talking to Jerry Wilson, a customer and off-duty police officer from nearby Bossier City. Wilson, who was unarmed at the time, was looking at a jointer planer, they had been discussing, Stroud said. His wife would have been working behind the counter but they had adopted a baby two weeks before and she was at home, he said. A man entered the store. Wilson later described him as a black male, about 17 years old, five feet six inches tall, weighing about 135 pounds. He was wearing a dark blue print shirt, dark blue golfer type ball cap. He was holding a dark blue or black bandana or “do-rag” to his face covering his mouth and nose. Stroud was conscious that a man had entered the store and was making a lot of noise. “When I’m working, I like tune out the world,” Stroud said. “I was doing my work, not paying attention or even looking up for a minute. I was thinking: as soon as I get to where I need to be I’m gonna see what this loud customer wants.” When finally, Stroud did look up the man was about eight feet away pointing a .38-caliber snub-nose revolver at him and yelling at him that he wanted the money from the cash register. “He was obviously on drugs, upset at how I was ignoring him, and about to explode. So when I looked up, he had that gun on me. I thought he was going to shoot us all.” Stroud had an Arminius .357 Magnum caliber revolver loaded with .38 Special +P cartridges just under the counter. He picked up the gun just as Wilson, the police officer, made a movement. Wilson later told investigators that the would-be robber pointed the gun at him and told him not to move. He said that the man yelled at Stroud that if he didn’t give him all the money, he would shoot him (Wilson). The distraction gave Stroud time to cock the gun and bring it up. “When I pulled my gun up, he started coming at me, and when he did, I didn’t aim or nothing – boom. When I did that, he shot and hit the wall,” Stroud said. He dove down behind the counter on top of the employee who had been counting drill bits. When Stroud got up he was in time to see the robber running out of the door. “I shot over his head deliberately, wanting him out of my store,” he said. That bullet shattered a window in the front of the store. At the time, Stroud didn’t know whether his first shot had hit the man or not. After he had gone, Stroud did find the revolver the man had dropped in his haste to leave. The robber was later identified as 19-year-old Deandre Lias, according to police reports. He was picked up by two friends and driven to Louisiana State University Medical Center where they dropped him off. Stroud’s bullet had hit him in the center of the chest between his nipples, according to the police report. He died shortly after his arrival at the hospital. His friends told police Lias had been hanging out with them and had gone to get a hamburger. When he didn’t return they had gone looking for him. When they found him walking along the street, he was patting his chest with both hands and staggering. One of the friends told police he thought Lias was playing around but he collapsed into the car and said: “Carry me to the hospital. I been shot, and go get my mama.” Lias was known to several of the police officers involved in the subsequent investigation. At the time of his demise, he was a fugitive, wanted on a warrant for a charge of attempted murder. He was also a suspect in seven armed robberies in the previous month, according to the police report. The district attorney determined the shooting was a justifiable homicide and Stroud was not charged. Excerpt from Chapter Ten Jim Eichelberg ran a trapline of vending machines in northwest Houston. He serviced these machines early in the morning before the traffic got too heavy. He often had a few thousand dollars on him from the vending machines, so he had a Texas concealed-handgun license and usually carried a gun. The gun was a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Model 37 five-shot revolver which weighed 13.5 ounces. In it he carried MagSafe rounds in .38 caliber. These rounds kick less than regular ammunition in the light gun and are designed to fragment on contact so they won’t go through three apartment walls and hit a little old lady two rooms away. Eichelberg had been shooting most of his life. He practiced with his father-in-law at least once a week, he said. That morning, he left his home about 5 a.m. when it was still dark and started his route. About 5:45 a.m., the 49-year-old Eichelberg was driving his 1985 Ford van east on Milwee towards the Northwest Freeway. Just before he reached the stop sign at the freeway service road, he passed a man walking in the direction he was driving. Eichelberg pulled up at the stop sign and waited for the traffic to clear on the service road. As he waited, he looked in his rearview mirror but he couldn’t see the man he had just passed. Wondering why the man had disappeared, Eichelberg looked at the rearview mirror on the passenger side. He saw the man running along the passenger side of the van. The man was holding a revolver in his right hand. “You could see that gun. It was almost like there was a spotlight on it because the street light down the street was reflecting off that gun,” Eichelberg said. “I got a real good look at that gun.” Eichelberg had no doubt that the man was going to try to rob him or hijack his van. His gun was on the floor of the vehicle under his jacket and a mass of paperwork. He groped desperately for the gun. By the time he found it, the man was yelling at him through the passenger door window. “He had his face against the window. His nose was almost touching it and he had the gun next to his head,” Eichelberg said. The man was later identified as James Turner, 32, a skinny black parolee who was dressed all in black. Turner was shouting at Eichelberg and pointing the revolver at him through the window. However, with the noise of the traffic on the service road and the windows being closed, Eichelberg couldn’t hear what he was saying. “I didn’t figure he was there to sell me newspapers.” Eichelberg brought his gun up and fired one shot at Turner. The window shattered and Turner’s face disappeared. Eichelberg thought he had hit him but he wasn’t sure. He was deaf and half-blinded by the explosion of his gun inside the van. He was aware he was not in a good position if the man came back so he jumped out of the van. He started running towards the back of the van, still holding his revolver. Eichelberg was hoping to put some distance between himself and his would-be attacker. Turner apparently had the same idea. He started running back the way he had come. The two men met at the back of the van… |
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This Book Could Save Your Life! 
Bill Stroud was a Baptist Youth Minister when he took over the Tool
House (in Shreveport, Louisiana) from his father. In early December
2000, the area suffered from a rash of armed robberies, he said.
Although his store wasn’t hit, one incident concerned him.
He was working behind the counter when a man came in and started
talking to one of his employees while standing behind him.
Just before Christmas that year, Stroud’s second cousin was
raped and murdered during a car-jacking incident in southern Louisiana.