What stops mass murderers? A gun

Early in the morning of Dec. 5, 1999, off-duty Las Vegas police officer Dennis Devitte was one of the customers at Mr. D's Sportsbar & Grill, at Rainbow and Oakey boulevards, where he and some pals had gone to hear the band Pigs in a Blanket.

A little after 1 a.m., three armed robbers charged through the back door with guns drawn and their faces covered with T-shirts or bandanas. "I'd only been in the bar a short time and was talking to friends," Mr. Devitte later told an interviewer for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "I saw a ruckus at the end of the bar. ...

"One of the gunmen went right by me and shot a man in a wheelchair, hitting him in the shoulder," Mr. Devitte recalled. "I only had my small .25-caliber off-duty gun, which isn't very accurate, so I knew I had to get really close before I could start shooting. Otherwise I might hit someone else."

The robbers might have taken a moment to consider the name of the band, which featured three off-duty officers. Mr. D's was often referred to as a "cop bar," though the IACP determined Mr. Devitte was, curiously enough, the only patron armed at the time.

Mr. Devitte dug the handgun out of his pocket and approached 19-year-old Emilio Rodriguez, who was firing into the crowd with a .40 caliber pistol. "I went straight at him as he turned and started firing at me," Mr. Devitte said. "He kept firing and hitting me, but I held my fire until I got to less than 18 inches from him."

The incident took 20 seconds and was recorded on the bar's surveillance tape. Mr. Devitte shot Rodriguez eight times -- twice through the heart -- before the officer finally fell, the robber's last round having blown out his knee.

Rodriguez stumbled out the front door and died. The other two robbers fled.

"Dennis was bleeding from everywhere," recalled Mike Richards, a fellow officer who was playing in the band. "I yelled for towels. Then I tried to get Dennis' gun from him. Even though one bullet had blown his right hand apart and another had hit his right thumb, he wouldn't give it up. He told me there were still two more bad guys."

"Please tell my wife I love her," Mr. Devitte told officer Curtis Wills, as he lay bleeding from his wounds. "I did the best I could. I hope I didn't hit anybody else."

The following year, Dennis Devitte -- who recovered and returned to duty -- received the highest honor in law enforcement, as the IACP named him America's Police Officer of the Year.

There are two reasons no innocent parties died at Mr. D's that night. One, beyond any question, was the selfless courage of Dennis Devitte.

The second reason? One of Emilio Rodriguez's intended victims had a gun.

On Nov. 6, America found reason to honor another brave civilian police officer, as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. army psychiatrist about to be deployed to Afghanistan, reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and opened fire at a soldier readiness facility in Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 28.

Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley and Sgt. Mark Todd responded separately within three minutes of the report of gunfire. Sgt. Munley was hit by the mass murderer's rounds in her wrist and both thighs while returning fire, standing her ground. Sgt. Todd then delivered the rounds that ended Hasan's brief career as a jihadist -- providing the current White House doesn't intervene to commute his pending court-martial sentence to singing three rousing choruses of "Kumbaya."

Hasan reportedly had fired more than 100 rounds, requiring him to change handgun magazines several times -- Sgt. Todd said Hasan was reloading again when he shot the suspect. Why didn't any of the hundreds of Army personnel in the room shoot back, ending his killing spree far sooner?

Because they couldn't.

Among President Bill Clinton's first acts upon taking office in 1993 "was to disarm U.S. soldiers on military bases," the Washington Times points out.

But mass murderers do generally have a harder time of it in Texas, nowadays, thanks to the legislative response to the second deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, which also occurred in Killeen, Texas -- home to Fort Hood.

In 1991, George Hennard drove his pickup through the window of a Luby's cafeteria in Killeen, jumped out and began firing two pistols at the defenseless customers and employees inside, killing 23.

As Jacob Sullum pointed out in his syndicated column in last week's Review-Journal, one customer, Suzanna Hupp, saw Hennard gun down her parents. Mrs. Hupp later testified that she had brought a handgun with her that day but, to her bitter regret, left it in her car, as required by state law.

Hupp ran for and was elected to the Texas Legislature, where she was able to win passage of a "shall issue" law that requires authorities to issue a concealed carry permit to any resident who meets certain objective criteria.

Unless they join the Army.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal, and author of "The Ballad of Carl Drega" and the novel "The Black Arrow." See www.vinsuprynowicz.com/ and www.lvrj.com/blogs/vin/.