The Arizona Star doesn’t share the outlook of the larger coastal papers. It discusses Saturday’s event from the perspective of one gun-toting bystander:
Zamudio, 24, said the clerk at Walgreens was waiting for his debit card to clear when he heard the gunshots.
He ran outside.
“It was crazy. A photographer with a telephone lens was outside and he yells ‘Shooter! Shooter! Get down! And I didn’t,” Zamudio said.
Instead, Zamudio said he ran toward a man and a woman who were grappling with a man on the ground. When he saw another man holding a gun, Zamudio grabbed his arm and shoved him into a wall.
“He told me ‘It’s not me. It’s not me,’ and I just told him to put it on the ground to make all of us feel safer,” Zamudio said.
Reassured by the others involved that the man wasn’t the shooting suspect, Zamudio helped hold the suspect down.
“He was just laying there until the guy who had the gun put more weight on and he said ‘Oh, my arm! You’re breaking my arm,’” Zamudio said.
When deputies arrived, Loughner resumed his silence and refused to roll over for them, Zamudio said.
Zamudio, who was armed, said he didn’t draw his weapon because it wasn’t needed and he didn’t want to be confused as a second gunman.
Zamudio doesn’t think of himself as a hero; the elderly man who tackled Loughner despite a head wound deserves much of the credit, he said.
“Somebody had to do something,” Zamudio said. “I just joined in. They’d already started it.”
[...]
Ironically, Hamilton said family members have been teasing Zamudio for years about carrying a gun, saying he’d never be in a situation where he might have to use it.Had Loughner not been tackled, Zamudio said he would have shot him.
I would like to hear the story of the innocent armed fellow who was grappled and subdued by bystanders. Or was he simply holding the disarmed shooter’s gun?