Category: All About Guns

Situation: One of our greatest 2A advocates compiles the stories of four women who survived because they had handguns — and a fifth who wasn’t allowed to have one.

Lesson: “Use enough gun.” Get the bullets where they need to go. Have the gun where you can reach it immediately, and if the law doesn’t allow this, fight for reform.

It would be hard to find a more ferocious warrior for gun owners’ civil rights than Tanya Metaksa. The anti-gun magazine Mother Jones called her “one of the most powerful lobbyists in America,” and the Associated Press described her as “a blunt, no-nonsense voice for the gun lobby in Washington.” I had the privilege of meeting her and hearing her speak back in the day.

She would introduce herself as “Metaksa, not Metaska. AK, as in AK-47.” A year prior to her retirement from the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, where she served as Executive Director, the Harper Collins subsidiary Regan Books published her book Safe, Not Sorry: Keeping Yourself and Your Family Safe in a Violent Age.

I thought the most powerful part of that book was the section in which Tanya focused on women who had faced homicidal attack. Four of them prevailed, because they were able to reach handguns in time to fight back and win. One of them could not, because the law in that place and time forbade her to. Here, thanks to Tanya, are their stories.

Armed Home Invader

Friday, May 10, 1996, 6:23 AM. The slender Ms. Sammie Foust had left the sliding glass door of her master bedroom slightly open after letting her cat in. She was in bed watching morning TV when the intruder burst in on her. Metaksa quotes her, “He was wearing a stocking mask, dark clothes, and while all the newspaper articles said he was wearing gloves he actually had socks on his hands. By the time I knew what was going on, he had one hand over my mouth and the other was holding one of those box-cutter razor blades at my neck.”
He demanded money. She gave him her purse. He shook it empty and wasn’t satisfied. Waving the blade in her face, he demanded the “big money.” She pointed to her jewelry box; he dumped that too, and still wasn’t satisfied.

That’s when he began beating her.

The first punch hit her in the eye, a blow so hard and damaging she would never see the same way through that eye again. To distract him, she pointed to some other jewelry elsewhere in the room.

When he turned to look for it, Sammie finally went for her gun.

She would tell Tanya later, “The fact that I had a loaded gun at hand is more than bizarre. I’d spent the two days before the burglary cleaning out drawers and I had stuff spread all over the place. When I opened one drawer, I found two guns, a .25 and a .32. I knew I owned them, but I didn’t remember where I had placed them. Lying next to the little one were four bullets, so I thought, ‘well, I ought to see if I can load it just in case I ever need it,’ and I put the bullets in the magazine. I wasn’t even sure I was putting the right bullets in the right magazine because they were real hard to make fit, so I put the magazine in the gun and pulled back the slide and everything worked. Then I put the safety on and set the gun on the stand by the bed. Never thought any more about it…. And, at that, I don’t even know why I thought to do it, because the last time I fired a gun was when I was about 14 years old, and that was either a rifle or a shotgun. I’d never fired a pistol in my life. I don’t know why he didn’t see it, as it was in plain sight.”

But now it was in her hand, and she had the presence of mind to take the safety off. And when he turned back toward her, she was ready.

She shot him in the mouth.

The tiny bullet had no immediate effect. He lunged at her and she shot him again. She would later tell Tanya Metaksa, “That one got him in the chest and the coroner said it was the one that ultimately killed him. At the time, it didn’t even slow him down. He slugged me again and grabbed hold of me. All I could think about was ‘Dear God, don’t let me pass out,’ and ‘Don’t let go of that gun.’ I have never gripped anything so tightly in my life. As strong as he was, he couldn’t get the gun out of my hand. We were fighting breast to breast, so the gun was between us.”

Sammie fired yet again, hitting him in the abdomen. She told Tanya, “He continued to fight, if anything he fought harder, and that’s when we fell back through the dining room doorway to the master bedroom. We were still breast to breast. He was slamming me into walls and tables, beating me in the head, doing pretty much what he wanted except getting the gun away, and I managed to get off one more shot. That one was at a down angle and ended up in his groin.”

Sammie fell, and the hulking attacker landed on top of her and began to strangle her. She said, “He weighed almost 200 lbs. and I was pinned down. There was just nowhere to go and I thought it was over for me. He’s choking me, I can feel I’m about to lose it, I don’t know what to do, and I think I’m going to die. I’m not very religious, but in my mind I started to pray. I asked God to forgive me; I even asked him to forgive the son of a bitch who was killing me, and I prepared to die.”

And she adds, “At that very moment, he puked blood all over me and died.”

James Wayne Horne died at 36, with a record for prior burglaries, and a toxicology screen with so many drugs it raised the eyebrows of even seasoned cops who investigated this justified homicide. Sammie Foust survived, albeit with permanently impaired vision, some permanent throat injury, and severe dental damage from the beating. She would later tell Metaksa, “I am very, very regretful that someone had to die, but I’m equally glad it wasn’t me. That was the choice I had to make. I made it and I chose to live.”

Armed Robbery

Charmaine Klaus worked in a convenience store in Michigan, where company policy was employees could not be armed. Tanya Metaksa noted there had been a series of armed robberies of such establishments in the area and, “The thieves would rob the stores, then take the clerks out in the woods, where they tortured and killed them.

The store’s supervisor had told the managers and clerks not to carry guns. If a robbery was attempted, they were to give up the money. If they wanted to take you out of the store, simply refuse to go … (Charmaine) told her husband about the new rules and he got angry. Neither of them liked the odds of getting caught unarmed by a crew like that. After some discussion between them, they decided she would carry and simply not tell anyone about it.” Mrs. Klaus’s gun of choice was a discreet little Smith & Wesson .38 Special.

At 10:30 PM on the night in question, at end of shift, Charmaine was in the back room finishing accounting when clerk Darlene Ramsey, 19, rushed in to tell her a masked man with a gun was entering the store.

He came in shooting.

As Ms. Ramsey tried to close the back room door, the gunman fired through it and then burst in, and instantly opened up on the young clerk. She fell, shot in the chest and the abdomen.

But by now, Charmaine Klaus had her revolver in her hand. She would later tell Tanya Metaksa, “I shot him. Unfortunately, the bullet hit a tooth and broke up. Even though it lodged in his throat and he was bleeding very badly, he continued the assault. I had a Smith .38 revolver; he had a Colt semi-automatic Super .38.

He just kept shooting, but he was somewhat disoriented because of the shock of being hit, and missed me. Bullets whizzed by my head and I started to crawl under the desk. He was in the hall (by then), firing at me through the door. And then he decides to come back into the room and I’m under the desk, blocked from doing anything. He grabs Darlene and shoots her point blank in the head. Then with his last bullet he shot me.”

Charmaine Klaus continued, “I could see he had the gun up by my head and at the last moment I moved my head and put up my hand. His bullet went through my hand and into my jaw. Now his gun was empty so he left, just running out of the store.”

Charmaine survived. Darlene Ramsey did not. Her murderer, Albert Joseph Hartford, Jr. survived and was captured, identified thanks to Charmaine’s bullet and his blood she spilled on the floor, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Charmaine told Tanya, “I’ll spend the rest of my life working to see we don’t lose our right to self-defense.”

Stalker And Abuser

When the man Dottie Collins fell in love with put her through an escalating pattern of abuse that turned into physical beating, she dumped him. He retaliated by ramming her car with his. She called the police, who arrested and jailed him, and she went to the magistrate and swore out a restraining order.

She also acquired a pistol.

She told Metaksa, “I bought the gun, a small .25 caliber semiautomatic, after he ran me off the road. The day after I bought it, I had my son buy a box of shells and load it. I never shot the gun, in fact I’d never shot a pistol before. I know some people raise hell about small guns, ‘Saturday Night Specials’ or some such. All I can say is on a particular Friday night a ‘Saturday Night Special’ saved my life.”

On that Friday night, she had just gotten into her car and put it in “drive” when the abuser appeared, leaning over the hood of the vehicle and shouting, “You’re dead!” He fired, and the bullet grazed her right temple. Stunned but still conscious, she fell sideways onto the front seat.

The assailant came around, smashed a side window, and entered. Said Dottie Collins later, “He got in the car and shot me twice more. One bullet went in above the knee and came out below it. It turned out to be a fairly clean wound. My leg gives me some trouble, but the bullet didn’t hit any bones or anything. The other one caught me in the left forearm, shattering the bones. Chances are I’ll never regain full use of it. I’ve already had surgery and there is more to come to rebuild the bone.”

She had fallen across her pocketbook, where she kept her pistol. She was able to retrieve her .25, point it from her awkward position, and fire til it was empty. “I had no idea if I hit him or not,” she told Metaksa later. “I couldn’t see anything at the time, but I could feel the car go over the embankment and drop about 30 feet. The last clear thought in my mind was when Roger got out of the car. He screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘I hope you’re dead, I hope I’ve killed you!’ From then on it’s a blank until I woke up in the hospital.”

She awoke to at least some good news. Her would-be murderer was in custody, and being treated for the bullet wounds she had put in his hand and jaw, causing him to flee the scene. At the time Safe, Not Sorry went to press he had not yet been adjudicated, so Tanya did not include his last name.

Multiple Home Invaders

On a quiet Sunday morning, Brenda Hibbitts was alone at home talking with a friend on the phone when she heard her front door come crashing in. Tanya records her saying, “I had my purse sitting by the couch where I was sitting and I just grabbed my gun out of it … I stood up and looked down the hall and there were three people standing there. One was a great big ol’ guy, about six one or six two and two-forty, muscular, looked like a boxer. He was in front and holding a hammer. Two smaller people were behind him …”

Her S&W Model 3913 Lady Smith 9mm was already leveled on them. Mrs. Hibbitts continued, “I looked at them and I said, ‘Get out of my house or I’ll kill you.’ He just looked at me, that was when I noticed he had a hammer in his hand. He raised the hammer and I took a step back. Then he took a step forward and I fired a shot. It was the first time I ever fired that gun. I thought I’d missed him because he had no change in expression at all. The three of them ran into the bedroom next to the hall.”

In the tense moments that followed, Mrs. Hibbitts had a dialogue with the hulking leader of the home invaders. It culminated with his plaintive, “I’ll leave if you just won’t shoot me again.”
She allowed the trio to flee. Police soon caught up with them; they had dumped their wounded leader at a local hospital. All turned out to be wanted for other armed robberies.

At the time Safe, Not Sorry came out, they were still awaiting trial. Mrs. Hibbitts was unharmed. She would later tell Tanya Metaksa, “I was raised around guns. I don’t shoot like my husband and son do, but I know what I’m doing with a gun. Since this happened I’ve started practicing with a pistol and learning how to shoot a rifle and a shotgun. I’ll always have a gun and I’ll always keep this one. In fact, I just might have it bronzed.”

Disarmed By Law

In 1991, the state of Texas had no provision at law for private citizens to carry guns in public. Newly minted chiropractor Dr. Suzanna Gratia didn’t want to risk losing her professional license over a gun charge, so she took her S&W .38 Special Airweight out of her purse and kept it, legally, in her vehicle. That’s where it was, in a parking lot a hundred yards away, when she had lunch with her parents in a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen.

Mad dog killer George Hennard drove his truck through the windowed front wall into the restaurant and then emerged, armed with two pistols and shooting everyone he could see. He murdered Suzanna’s father when he attempted to disarm him, and as Suzanna’s mom cradled her dying husband, the bastard executed her, too.

Hennard murdered 24 victims and wounded 19 more before police arrived. Wounded by their gunfire, he blew his own brains out. Suzanna had been as close as 15 feet to him and, a good and experienced pistolera, could have easily shot him down — but when she reached reflexively to her purse, her gun was in the car, leaving her helpless to stop the massacre and prevent her parents’ death.

Suzanna Gratia went on to become a wife and mother, and one of the strongest voices ever for the responsible armed citizen movement. Her testimony helped Texas get shall-issue concealed carry, and today Dr. Suzanna Gratia-Hupp is still an influential champion of gun owners’ civil rights. I was present when she gave a speech at a SHOT Show in Texas years ago.

In the front row were several reporters from the mainstream media, many of them snickering and sneering before she spoke. But by the time she was done, some of them were wiping away tears, and not a one of them had anything negative to say in their news reports of her talk.

Lessons

Tanya Metaksa made the first lesson abundantly clear. As Mark Moritz famously said, “The first rule of gunfighting is, Have A Gun.” Listed here in the order in which Ms. Metaksa presented them, the four armed women had a much better outcome than the one disarmed by what were then the laws of her state.

Have your gun where you can get to it in time. The only one of the four armed defenders here to emerge unscathed was Brenda Hibbitts, the only one to get her gun in her hand before the actual fight started. This is probably not a coincidence.

As Robert Ruark put it so well, “use enough gun.” We look at how much injury Sammie Foust sustained while waiting for the wounds inflicted with her tiny .25 auto to take effect, and at the fact Dottie Collins’ assailant was still capable of vigorous, conscious, purposeful physical activity after she shot him in the face with her .25. It’s easy to say, “Get a bigger gun!” There’s validity in this, but it doesn’t go far enough. Charmaine Klaus’ attacker was still able to kill after she shot him in the face with a .38 Special, and Brenda Hibbitts’ assailant was a “psychological stop” who remained up and running with a 9mm hollow point in his chest. On the good people’s side, Charmaine Kraus was shot in the jaw with a powerful .38 Super but was able to stand, move about, telephone her husband, calm customers verbally, and talk to police when they arrived, all after sustaining the wound.

Experts agree shot placement is key. Not “chest” or “head,” but heart or brain. It takes skill, born of training and practice, to achieve that level of hit potential. Yes, and some luck, but luck seems to favor the trained and practiced. The chest is a big place. Old West outlaws like Jesse James and John Wesley Hardin took pistol bullets in the chest and rode away to heal on their own without medical attention. There’s a lot of “head” that doesn’t contain central nervous system, and the skull and maxillo-facial structure have lots of hard, angled bones comprising a natural protective helmet, as three of the above-cited women discovered. Read Dr. Jim Williams’ book Tactical Anatomy, available at tacticalanatomy.com.

As important as shooting skill is, we can’t ignore the fact three of the four who successfully shot their assailants did it with guns they had never fired before. With the lack of prior commitment, it’s unlikely any of them would have taken mandatory training, and a strict training requirement as urged by some anti-gunners would have left them unarmed, helpless and probably dead.

Coming back to training, though, do you doubt if Dottie, horizontal in the front seat, and Charmaine caught under a desk, had been trained and experienced in shooting from awkward positions, they might have been able to fire from there with immediate effect?

Above all, they had the courage to fight back, and they prevailed. We salute these strong women, and we tip the American Handgunner hat especially to Tanya Metaksa for bringing their stories to us all. Their experiences were too valuable and too instructive for us not to share with you.

Situation: A man is beating a woman and child. He is armed with a bat. You are the only one effectively capable of stopping him.

Lesson: Aimed fire works at close range. Deadly force against a violent criminal attempting to disarm you is justifiable. And even the most righteous shooting can have devastating reverberations.

October 16, 2018, Clarksville, Indiana. Dusk is fading into darkness. It is early evening at the River Chase apartment complex, a pleasant neighborhood where families barbecue and children play on lawns. It is not the sort of place where one expects deadly violence to break out.

Until it does.

Brandon Haycraft, 31, lives there. He is a tormented man. His baby has died a short time before, while lying in bed next to him, and he is swamped by guilt. He has been caught up in a cycle of substance abuse. One co-worker will later describe him as “a mean drunk.”

THC is in his bloodstream now, but the marijuana hasn’t mellowed him. He has taken anti-depressants, but they aren’t helping. Neither is booze. At the moment, his blood alcohol content is 0.228%, almost three times the legally drunk limit. He has told his significant other that he’s going to die tonight one way or the other, and he might just take her with him.

His prediction is at least partly correct.

Meanwhile …

Among Brandon’s many neighbors in this peaceful area is Adam Nesvick, 37. On this seemingly normal Tuesday evening he is home alone for the moment, preparing a dinner of tacos for the rest of his family who are due to arrive at the apartment soon.

He is interrupted by the sound of loud shouting. This is a neighborhood where children commonly play outside at this hour, and at first, he thinks it’s just kids getting a little rowdy. Glancing out the window, he sees his wife’s car has just pulled up, and he goes outside to meet her.

The tableau before him is unexpected. He notices his wife is on her cell phone, and he hears her scream, “My God, he’s going to kill her!” He’ll later learn 911 dispatch is on the other end of his wife’s conversation. A neighbor cries out plaintively, “My God, isn’t someone going to do something?”

And now Adam sees the cause of the trouble. His neighbor across the street is brutally punching his girlfriend in the face as she sits on the ground, feebly trying to protect herself. Her daughter, age nine, swings what appears to be an aluminum T-ball bat into the big man’s back, trying to stop him from beating her mom.

Adam watches in horror as Brandon rips the bat away from the child and throws her some six feet away.

Adam and Brandon both weigh about 240 lbs., but Adam is five-feet-nine while Brandon stands six-feet-two and is rippled with muscle. He’s also now armed: He has the metal baseball bat. Adam realizes he can’t deal with this bare-handed.
Adam runs back inside his apartment for his gun.

He’s had a carry permit since he was 18 years old. His current carry gun is a SIG SAUER M11-A1, fully loaded with 9mm Speer Gold Dot 124-grain +P bonded hollow points. He’s left it on his desk in an IWB Comp-Tac holster, and now he pulls it from its Kydex scabbard and sprints back toward the door, the pistol in his dominant right hand.

When he emerges from the door, he can see the situation has degraded. Before, the man had been punching the downed woman in the head, brutally. Then, she had been down on her butt as he beat her; now, she is down on her back on the front lawn with the boyfriend hulking over her, holding the bat horizontally in both hands across her throat, trying to crush her larynx.

The beatdown has turned into attempted murder in progress.

Closing to a distance of about 15 feet from attacker and victim, Adam stands in the street, levels the gun at Brandon and shouts, “Get the f**k off of her! Sit the f**k down or you’ll be shot!”

The big, angry man turns to face the rescuer. He flings the bat at Adam. It lands halfway between them on the lawn, some six or seven feet from the armed citizen who is still standing in the street.

Safe for the moment, the little girl runs into her apartment, followed by her mom. Brandon sits on the steps and puts his head in his hands. Adam lowers his SIG to a ready position. The man has obeyed his commands. Adam hopes it is over.

It isn’t.

Attack

The lull in the action lasts about 30 seconds. Then Brandon rises, his muscled body tensed with rage, and screams at Adam, “You don’t know me, motherf**ker!” He starts moving toward Adam and yells, “You gonna shoot me, motherf**ker? You aren’t going to do anything with that [gun], you fat ass!”

Adam is backing away from him, the pistol raised again now, and he is shouting, “Stop! Don’t do it! Stop! Stop!”
But the antagonist can move forward faster than the defender can backpedal, and is closing the distance fast, and at last there is only one thing left to do.

Shots Fired

Under the streetlights, the sky nearly dark, the green Trijicon night sights on the SIG glow like beacons. Adam Nesvick puts the front sight high on his attacker’s chest.

He fires as fast as he can hold the front sight in place. He sees blood squirt toward him from the man’s chest. Suddenly Brandon falls, pitching forward at about a 30-degree angle, and lands heavily face down in the street, motionless.

And, just that quickly, it’s over.

Immediate Aftermath

Nesvick’s first realization he wasn’t in trouble was probably when a female officer approached him while he was still handcuffed and confided, “You know you’re a hero to that woman and little girl.” Adam later told American Handgunner, “That remark helped steady my nerves and ground me.” He added, “I … was approached by the Chief of Police for our town and he said, ‘What you did was heroic, you probably saved their lives.’ He told me they had had prior dealings with the man and he was a dangerous individual.”

Says Adam, “Fast forward another hour and I’m sitting in the office area of the police station waiting to make my statement, watching the forensics officer check in the evidence … I saw them check in my gun, and there was blood on the slide. They checked in the bat, and they checked in a chunk of hair that had come from the mother, and a few other miscellaneous things.”

Adam continues, “While I was sitting there, finally in some kind of light, I noticed blood stains all over my shirt and pants. He was really close when I shot him. Anyway, I gave my statement, keeping it simple and to the point. The biggest thing I remember them pressuring me on was ‘Was it an accident? Did you inadvertently fire?’ My answer was ‘No, officer, I was scared shitless, but it was a conscious act to fire because I knew my life was in danger.’ I had my wife bring me new clothes so they could put mine in evidence, and I walked out and got in the car. The officers thanked me repeatedly for being cooperative.”

It took a while for the prosecutor to call Adam to confirm he considered Adam a hero, and he definitely wasn’t going to be charging him with anything. At this writing, no lawsuit has been filed, and the window for plaintiffs to do so will have closed by the time you read this. The prosecutor’s finding actually came sooner than that.

Wave3 News reported soon after the shooting, “‘He did approach the individual who was assaulting the lady and her child and did, at gunpoint, instruct him to leave them alone and sit down on the curb,’ said Clark County Prosecutor Jeremy Mull. Police said the man complied for a while, but then tried to attack the neighbor and ignored warnings to stop. When he came at the neighbor, police said he shot him. ‘Based upon what we learned last night, I’m of the belief that it was self-defense, that it was justified under the law and therefore there was no arrest made in the case,’ Mull said. ‘In a case where an individual was acting violently and had just violently assaulted a child and a defenseless lady. Due to his intervention, the assault was terminated, and this individual was ultimately killed in an act of self-defense.’”

The legal side of it was, for all practical purposes, over. It had clearly been a justified homicide. But there were still the emotional and psychological elements to deal with.

Personal Aftermath

It is common for defensive gun usages to happen at or near one’s home. Often, family members are present, and it’s a traumatic thing for them to experience. You’ll recall Adam’s wife, Shannon, was outside the house and in fact the first to call 911. She told American Handgunner, “When Adam stepped out with the firearm, I told 911, ‘My husband has a firearm, he has a permit, he’s trying to get the guy to sit down.’ I heard the dispatcher say ‘Weapon involved’ or ‘Weapon on scene.’ My husband walked over to the curb and had the husband sit down. I saw the woman and girl run into the house. A car blocked my view of Brandon, I couldn’t see if he was sitting or lying.

In 30 seconds, I saw the man jump up and come rapidly toward my husband and when they got about 10 feet apart, my husband started backing up. He was telling my husband, ‘You aren’t going to do anything with that, you fat ass.’ He began to lunge at Adam, and Adam fired. I thought it was three shots. He collapsed. I saw blood squirting everywhere.”

Altered perceptions are extremely common in these incidents. Far more often than not, auditory exclusion or auditory muting will occur. Adam Nesvick was no exception. He told AH, “I had auditory exclusion so bad I didn’t hear everything he said as he came at me while I was screaming ‘Don’t do it!’ When I fired, I remember hearing muffled gunshots. I heard little pops, but I was deaf as a post for three days later.”

Another extremely common phenomenon is tunnel vison. Adam told us, “When the woman and the little girl went into the house and he got up, I realized ‘Oh, my God, this is going to happen, I’m probably going to have to shoot,’ and I hyper-focused on him from then on.”

When multiple shots are fired, relatively few participants remember the round count correctly. This was true here as well. Adam and Shannon each thought Adam had fired three shots, while one eyewitness insisted five shots were fired. All were incorrect: Evidence incontrovertibly proved Adam had unleashed four rounds.

After you’ve been in an incident like this, people treat you differently. Dr. Walter Gorski, the great police psychologist who is credited with defining “post shooting trauma” as something separate and distinct from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) referred to it as Mark of Cain syndrome.

Sometimes, you are excoriated as a murderer. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you may be treated like a hero. The latter of course is better, but can still leave you wondering whether people still see you as the good neighbor, the good professional, the good worker at your job; instead, they see you as “He Who Killed,” and it changes the way they treat you, which in turn can change the way you feel about yourself.

Little kids had always seemed to play outdoors in their neighborhood; after the shooting, not so much. The mom and daughter whom Adam had rescued spent a couple of days in the hospital, refused to look at Adam or Shannon after coming home, and soon moved away. Other neighbors started moving away too.

That said, though, Adam reports, “No one really dumped on us. One of the little kids, who was a friend of the little girl who used the bat to try to get Brandon to stop beating her mom, saw us on the street and gave us a big thumbs up. Brandon’s best friend told me, ‘I’m sorry he died, but you did what you had to do.’ The apartment complex gave us a $50 gift certificate to go to dinner on them.”

Sleep disturbance is a virtually universal experience among those who’ve had to kill to survive. “I didn’t sleep for three days afterward,” Adam told us. “This eventually went away. I had flashbacks for a long time and still do occasionally, but not as bad or as vivid. Shannon had really bad flashbacks. We were comfortable talking about it, and that got us through a lot. Shannon got counseling. I got help from friends who had been through similar things, maybe more help than I would have gotten from a psychologist.”

In 2020, the Nesvicks moved to another state. “I thought getting away was the best thing, not being in the place every day where I had shot someone,” Adam explained.

The police gave him his gun back a month later. He was deeply touched to note the cops had not only wiped the blood spatter off the SIG but had cleaned and oiled it too.

His SIG went away. It carried too many unpleasant memories. Today Adam carries a CZ P10C.

Lessons

Excellent marksmanship, delivered at speed with the front sight visually indexed, put every shot where it needed to go and quickly ended the attack. The SIG M11-A1 had a full magazine of fifteen 9mm rounds. If Brandon had gotten it away from Adam, that was enough to kill the rescuer, his wife Shannon, and Brandon’s own significant other and her little girl, and any other witness who came into the line of fire. Adam Nesvick’s defensive gunfire very likely saved more lives than his own.

Adam had worked hard to develop shooting skill. He had learned from friends, read many books, and participated in gun-related internet forums. After the incident, he decided to seek formal training, and took a class from nationally recognized instructor John Murphy of Virginia. John told me Adam was very competent. Indeed, it was John Murphy who put me in touch with Adam and brought his story to these pages.

A lot of gun owners think home carry — wearing a handgun on their physical person when at home — is paranoid. If we think about it, the practice is a minor inconvenience for which in trade the homeowner gets instant access to a loaded gun when deadly danger suddenly presents itself. Had the SIG been on his hip instead of on his desk, Adam might have been able to back down Brandon before the latter put his bat to the throat of his victim. But there is no telling for certain.

You’ve all heard of “suicide by cop,” the self-destructive person who forces a lawman to kill him. This incident is a case of “suicide by armed citizen,” not the first such I’ve seen.

Adam Nesvick did the right thing. The criminal justice system immediately recognized that. Adam doesn’t consider himself a hero. He’s the only one who doesn’t.