I used to be an Army pilot, and I maintain a small plane today. In early August of 2019, one of my adult kids and I flew to Dayton, Ohio, to spend the weekend walking around the Air Force museum. Theirs is likely the greatest collection of vintage warplanes in the world. As quality time with the family goes, it was epic.
In the evening we went into Dayton for dinner and a movie. These were the days before Covid, so we could just wander about taking in the sights without worrying about contracting some ghastly disease. Ohio enjoys concealed carry reciprocity with my home state so I packed a nice carry gun, in this case a Springfield Armory Hellcat charged with fourteen SIG SAUER 147-grain V-Crown 9mm hollowpoints. The trip was great, and we made it home without incident.
One Week Later…
One week after we had been strolling around the Oregon Historic District in Dayton, Connor Betts was hanging out in a nearby bar with his 22-year-old sister Megan. He had been texting a former girlfriend earlier in the evening and seemed to her to be fairly normal. After a couple of hours in the club, Betts disappeared. He returned in short order wearing body armor and some kind of creepy mask while carrying an AR15 pistol.
For reasons that are not well understood, Betts then opened fire on the revelers in the street outside Ned Peppers Bar. In thirty seconds he fired forty-one rounds. In that half-minute, he killed nine people and injured another seventeen. One of the dead was his sister Megan. One of the severely wounded was his best friend Chace.
At the first sounds of gunfire, the partiers in the streets fled indoors through any handy doorway. People streamed into establishments around the neighborhood trying to avoid Betts and escape his rampage. Betts made a beeline for Ned Peppers, now packed with terrified people.
There were several Dayton police officers nearby when Betts opened fire. They responded immediately, running to the sounds of battle. Miraculously, the cops engaged Betts a mere 32 seconds after he fired his first shots. An autopsy determined that Betts had been hit by thirty rounds fired by police. He collapsed at the threshold of Ned Peppers and died at the scene.
The Gun
Much hay has been made over the details of Connor Betts’ firearm. A no-frills Anderson Arms AR15 pistol with an 11.5-inch barrel and unremarkable round forearm, the gun featured a flat top upper and a red dot sight. Betts fed his gun via an imported 100-round drum magazine. Betts’ AR also included a Shockwave Pistol Stabilizing Brace (PSB).
Betts had no criminal record and bought the gun legally from a supplier in Texas. The weapon transferred to him via a local FFL. When Betts was gunned down by the Dayton cops he dropped a thirty-round magazine onto the ground.
PSB’s are curious things. Initially developed by Alex Boscoe of SB tactical to aid disabled shooters in running heavy handguns one-handed, these accessories have spawned an entirely new genre of firearms. By including a PSB on an otherwise unremarkable AR or AK pistol, these short-barreled weapons become easier to operate despite their stubby barrels. These weapons also transfer like regular handguns rather than heavily regulated short-barreled rifles. PSBs have subsequently been fitted to shotguns and pistol-caliber weapons like the CZ Scorpion EVO and SIG MPX as well. There are estimated to be in excess of four million brace-equipped handguns in circulation in America. At the time of this writing, Connor Betts’ shooting was the only example I could find of a PSB having been used in a crime.
One subsequent headline screamed, “Dayton Shooter Used Gun That May Have Exploited an ATF Loophole.” The presupposition on the part of the less durable members of society that a guy who would willingly undertake mass murder might somehow inexplicably be motivated to adhere to gun laws seems utterly bewildering to me. However, in the aftermath of the Dayton shooting the loudest voices on the Left were screaming not about the psychopath Connor Betts but rather for enhanced restrictions on firearms. There was relatively little furor over what might have been practically done to stop the deranged shooter himself.
The Shooter
Connor Betts never was quite right. A bully in high school, Betts was bipolar and carried a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He also admitted to hearing voices, though apparently he had not been formally diagnosed with schizophrenia at the time of his crime.
Betts took rejection poorly. While at Bellbrook High School he kept a list of girls who had spurned him and anyone else he perceived to have slighted him in some way. He told friends he intended to rape the girls and kill the boys on his list as the opportunities arose. He also told fellow students he intended to shoot up his school. Betts was suspended for a year as a result in 2012 and subjected to a police investigation. He worked at a local gas station as well as Chipotle.
Betts was an avid supporter of Antifa and regularly retweeted posts espousing extreme left-wing, anti-police views. He was a vocal supporter of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. He was tepid toward Kamala Harris based upon her historical connections to Law Enforcement. On his Twitter bio he described himself as a “Metalhead Anime-fan Leftist.” He wrote, “I’m going to hell and I’m not coming back.” He often used the hashtag #HailSatan.
Betts was the lead singer in a pornogrind metal band called Menstrual Munchies. His lyrics orbited around violence, gratuitous gore, and necrophilia. His music glorified sexual violence.
A former classmate of Betts had this to say about him, “Connor Betts was a psychopath…I remember when he threatened to shoot up our school and had a hit list of people that he wanted to kill. I’ve worked with him, too, and he scared the employees on a daily basis.
“Everyone who knew him knew he had issues. I would tell people all the time to just stay away from him because he’s threatened to kill people. When the customers didn’t tip him, he would threaten to go to their house and kill them. I thought he was just all talk but then I would be at work by myself with him and hear him chanting things that sounded like he was worshiping the devil. I would be calling his name for him to stop and he wouldn’t answer.”
Ruminations
This devil-worshipping Antifa loser exhibited all the hallmarks of a dysfunctional mass shooter from an early age. He was aggressively investigated by Law Enforcement fully ten years prior to his murder spree. He was being treated for serious mental health issues and was the lead singer in a band that screamed about killing women and then copulating with their corpses. And the primary problem is that he had a pistol brace on his firearm? As a society could we really be that naïve?
Hating the cops is both in vogue and in the news these days. However, Connor Betts’ final moments were captured on surveillance footage from outside the Ned Peppers Bar. The Dayton PD simply could not have been any faster. They were on-site and engaging less than a minute after the first shots were fired. They killed this guy literally seconds before he made it into a bar packed with terrified humanity.
When Betts was shot he presumably had 59 rounds left onboard his weapon and carried his next 30-round magazine ready to go. I think this may be the finest example of tactical police work I have ever seen. It is literally impossible to determine how many lives were saved by the bravery and selflessness shown by Dayton’s finest that fateful evening. And yet the Left persists in denigrating police in general while minimizing the importance of the services they provide.
I was walking these same streets with my child a week prior to this event. But for the grace of God, we weren’t there when Connor Betts detonated. There are some 400 million firearms in America. If all guns were outlawed tomorrow under pain of death, psychopaths like Connor Betts would still be armed a century from now.
I don’t carry a gun to prove anything. If I’m doing it properly nobody will ever know. I carry a gun because my family and I share the world with anarchist Satan worshippers who are lead singers for pornogrind bands that celebrate murdering people and then desecrating their corpses. Some people study the Dayton shooting and see a desperate need for more gun control. I narrowly miss experiencing the same thing and give thanks that I live in a place where I don’t have to walk among such predators unarmed. Had I been there that fateful night I likely would have been killed along with the rest of them. However, I would have nonetheless had the means, the skill, and the will to fight back.
