Yesterday, a good guy with a gun saved a lot of lives.

A gunman who has since been identified a 43-year-old Keith Thomas Kinnunen entered West Freeway Church of Christ, a suburb of Fort Worth. He was wearing a fake beard and carried a concealed shotgun. While the service was in progress, he pulled the shotgun and opened fire killing a deacon, 64-year-old Anton Wallace, and a parishioner, 67-year-old Richard White. On the scene was 71-year-old Jack Wilson, a firearms instructor and retired reserve sheriff’s deputy. He killed Kinnunen with a single shot. (See Alex Parker’s post on the incident.)

"Jack Wilson, a 71-year-old former reserve deputy sheriff, took out the shotgun-wielding suspect with a single shot to the head …"https://t.co/GM7J5TscDK

— Brian Anderson (@AZBrianAnderson) December 30, 2019

This was possible because not long ago Texas passed into law a bill that allows firearms to be carried in churches. If you’ve followed the anti-gun wackos long enough, you know that they were incensed by the idea that free men and women should have the ability to defend themselves. You didn’t have to be a genius to see what was going to happen next. The anti-gun nuts came out of the woodwork. At first some of them were insisting that some of the people had probably been killed by worshipers spraying bullets everywhere. Then they claimed that Wilson was part of the church’s “security force.” As far as I can tell, that “security force” is pretty much armed members of the church and not the highly trained rent-a-cops that the anti-gun nuts want you to believe.

As serious as the incident was, it was not without levity.

Enter Internet Expert Tom Nichols. No one is quite sure what Nichols is an expert in other than being an expert. He did write a book decrying the fact than no one believes experts, perhaps stuff like this and virtually every expert prediction since Thomas Robert Malthus confidently demonstrated that the human race was doomed because math.

This, via @axios, is pretty wild, and a good reminder that we are pretty abysmal at projecting even the intermediate future. https://t.co/CyYyWXGhQg pic.twitter.com/NcnVPMwD4A

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) December 23, 2019

The hilarity started when Washington Examiner’s Jerry Dunleavy decided to recycle some of Nichols’s old tweets tweeting expert expertise and an op-ed likewise chock full of expert advice about how carrying guns in churches won’t work.

pic.twitter.com/d9Y0ODXgcc

— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) December 30, 2019

To say Nichols’s head would have challenged the ability of the best duct tape to keep it from exploding is an understatement. It popped like an overripe zit.

This is because people who believe that low-probability events are more common than they are latch on to every example of a low-probability event as proof. It's called "confirmation bias." It';s dumb, but very human. /2

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 30, 2019

Jerry's the guy who sees a plane go down and says: "See. Should've driven. Or taken that insurance thing they sell at the gate." So it goes.

For those of you who'd like to read the piece from the @latimes, it's here:https://t.co/FM2M0fcNF5

/3x

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 30, 2019

Protect your churches, your synagogues, your temples, and your mosques, and do not buy the bullshit peddled here that wanting to defend your houses of worship is something you should be ashamed of. https://t.co/M3smdX6k0b

— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) December 30, 2019

No matter your faith, never let anyone shame you for wanting to be able to defend your house of worship. https://t.co/JudoBQhxw8

— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) December 30, 2019

Nichols’s arguments about insurance and guns in churches are just that kind of uneducated nonsense that Nichols has been generating for years. Of course you buy insurance against high cost, low probability events. That’s what insurance is for. That’s the reason you can buy major-medical insurance (or at least to be able to) and it takes the force of the federal government to let you get insurance for a pre-existing condition. If you own a gun, Nichols’s entire argument breaks down. Because you have a choice, in Texas, of either bringing it to church or not. If you don’t, you’re essentially engaging is a bet that nothing bad will happen. It is basically like choosing not to wear a seatbelt. The odds of you needing it are damned small, but you have it so why tempt the Fates?

Gun nut conservatives: Liberals worry too much about guns, they want to ban them because they're just weenies who have a fear of guns.
Also gun nut conservatives: People shooting it out in churches is so common that we should all be packing in the pews every Sunday morning.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 30, 2019

The dragging Nichols took did nothing to improve his temper and soon he was hiding behind his expertise of being an expert. That didn’t go well.

Tom thinks people should lose the constitutional right to defend themselves because I corncobbed him https://t.co/cL3HvAU2px

— JERRY DUNLEAVY (@JerryDunleavy) December 30, 2019

The incident in Texas ended with the loss of three lives ONLY because Texas allows concealed carry in churches. Period. Otherwise the shooter would have had a field day racking up a body count if that was his intent. It ended as it did because the ‘good guy with a gun’ had the training, reflexes, and presence of mind to make it work. We don’t know how it would have played out if Wilson had not been there but we can surmise that the five people who pull pieces in the video of the shooting would have soon given the shooter something to be concerned about.

To claim that this does not make a case for how concealed carry can reduce the impact of random shootings and to try to argue that a church full of unarmed worshipers would have fared better because of expert expertise experting is demeaning to anyone reading the argument and it should be demeaning to the idiot making it…well it was demeaning to him, he just doesn’t have the expertise to realize it.

@RadioFreeTom a war was fought here in the U.S. to end slavery, but apparently it still exists, as Jerry is clearly your owner.

— Brutus Maximus (@BRVTVSMAXIMVS) December 30, 2019