Editor's Note: The writers below are addressing the question, "Is the man who killed the Indiana mall mass shooter a hero?"
Yes, Elisjsha Dicken is a hero
Cam Edwards, InsideSources.com (TNS)
Is Elisjsha Dicken a hero? It depends on whom you ask. The police chief in Greenwood, Ind., thinks he is, as does the mayor. Even the property management company that owns the Greenwood Park Mall where Dicken killed an active shooter in July called his actions "heroic," although Dicken violated mall policy by having his concealed pistol on him while he was shopping with his girlfriend.
Talk to gun-control advocates, on the other hand, and you're likely to hear complaints about praising Dicken for his actions. Sure, he saved lives, but what if this leads to more people carrying guns to protect themselves and others? What if the police thought Dicken was the perpetrator instead of the public defender?
The one "what if" these anti-gun activists don't want to bring up is, "What if there hadn't been an armed citizen on hand to stop this attack within seconds?"
Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts originally called for Dicken to be arrested before deleting her tweet and replacing it with one that huffed, "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."
Others took issue with describing Dicken as a hero or a good Samaritan.
Dicken's heroism is inconvenient to the gun-control crowd because his actions pose a real-world counterpart to their simplistic argument that we can ban our way to safety; that there's some magical set of regulations that, if put in place, will prevent committed killers from carrying out their heinous attacks.
That may be a comforting fantasy for some, but it defies both logic and reality.