It wasn’t long ago that a man walked into a Sutherland, Texas, church with an AR-15 and began firing on parishioners who were attending Sunday service.

Next door, former NRA instructor Stephen Willeford sat in his home and heard the shots ringing out. Grabbing his own gun out of his safe, he ran over to the church and the rest was history. The church shooter fled after exchanging gunfire with Willeford, who swears that he hit the shooter.

The shooter attempted to flee in a vehicle but thanks to the assistance of Johnnie Langendorff and his truck, the duo gave chase. The gunman, unable to escape, at one point, sped into a roadsign where he proceeded to flip into a ditch.

The shooter never exited his own vehicle, and when law enforcement finally caught up, the shooter was dead, believed to have committed suicide in his truck.

That was just back in 2017, and two years later, we have yet another tale of a Texas church shooter that went much the same way, only this one didn’t make it out of the church. He was shot dead almost immediately by parishioner Jack Wilson at the West Freeway Church.

While these stories are harrowing, defensive gun use is not at all uncommon. According to the National Survey of Private Firearms Ownership, there are 1.5 million self-defensive gun uses every year.

I also want to bring to your attention a few things. The first point is easily deduced, but the second isn’t highly recognized.

Firstly, the police are uninvolved in all of these stories until the very end. I’m the son of a police officer. I have great respect for the police and believe them to be a very necessary thing for a society to function correctly. They are the thin blue line between order and lawlessness.

The old saying, however, remains true. When seconds count, the police are minutes away. They cannot be there the moment something goes down unless they are there already. Even when it comes to certain calls of escalated danger, police are sometimes required to stay away from a scene until a minimum number of officers can be gathered to answer. If you live in large cities with decreased budgets for police, you may be waiting a while for authorities to arrive, and trust me, they’ll arrive long after the danger has passed.

It’s happening in Dallas even now.

(Report: The City of Dallas Is Under-Funding the Police to the Point Where Life-Threatening Calls Go Unanswered)

Again, however, police were nonentities in this story until after the fact. Everything was handled by the citizenry in the moment and with complete and total control of the situation. Willeford and Wilson were there with “big irons” ready to go right then and there.

There is no defense quicker than self-defense, and Texas makes it easy for one to defend one’s self with the best means possible. Had Texas been the same anti-gun state like California, how many more deaths would have resulted from these church shootings? It’s a question worth asking, but  one that gun control advocates and Democrats would rather you not.

This brings us to the thing Democrats need to learn, and one that many of us need to raise as an issue when having conversations about these very topics.

I watched as Democrats, left and right, did one of two things after the shooting. They either completely ignored it, or tried to foolishly downplay it.

Failed 2018 Texas Senate candidate and failed 2020 presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke tried to pass off the shooting as a failure of gun laws in Texas and the United States in general.

“So saddened to hear about another church shooting in Texas, this one in White Settlement near Fort Worth,” tweeted O’Rourke. “Clearly what we are doing in Texas, what we are doing in this country when it comes to guns is not working.”

So saddened to hear about another church shooting in Texas, this one in White Settlement near Fort Worth. Clearly what we are doing in Texas, what we are doing in this country, when it comes to guns is not working. https://t.co/krwcpL1lih

— Beto O'Rourke (@BetoORourke) December 29, 2019

What didn’t work though? Yes, it’s true and tragic that a man shot people in a house of worship, and did so with the help of his ability to procure a gun in a country filled with them. It’s horrific that people lost their lives and they should be grieved for.

But nothing didn’t work. The problem was solved immediately by a citizenry who was using a right that worked exactly like it was supposed to. It allowed people to solve the problem on their own without the use of government power. The power literally was with the people.

Democrat 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg had some comments on that and said that the citizens in the church shouldn’t have been able to have the guns available to them and that only police should be deciding who does and doesn’t get shot.

Both of these Democrats essentially said that it would have been better if the people who used a gun to defend themselves didn’t have access to the guns that saved the lives of many in the church.

How does that make any sense?

The left would immediately say that it’s not that they didn’t want the churchgoers to have guns, but prefer that no one have guns. Two problems are faced here. First, we know for a fact that taking guns doesn’t solve the murder problem. London’s skyrocketing knife violence and a murder rate that passes up New York’s is proof of that.

Second, and most importantly, we have guns. Millions of them. The vast majority of which are completely unregistered. As I’ve highlighted in a video, guns in America are not going away.

What Democrats are suggesting is that we, the citizenry, should get on board with a fantasy that will never happen and only get more of us killed. They tell us that our system has failed us in the face of it working exactly as it should with everyday citizens doing what the government can’t.

What have we learned?

That when push comes to shove, the government isn’t just useless, it’s working against us in many ways. Those who advocate for its growth work toward our failure while carrying around the delusion that it knows what’s best for us, even unto our deaths.

The best bet we have to, not just our elevation as a society, but to our survival as one, is to not vote in anyone who advocates for the growth of governmental power over us, especially those who deem it wise to strip us of the very rights that have kept our society the best in the world on top of keeping us alive.

Yes, freedom is dangerous. Freedom and chaos are cousins after all. Bad things happen when people abuse the freedoms given to us by God, but as we can see, people are going to use those freedoms to the benefit of humanity far more often than not, while it’s proven that the government can only abuse power either intentionally or through absolute ineptitude.

Vote accordingly.