Our sister site Bearing Arms has video of a fascinating experiment conducted by a DFW television affiliate as to whether an armed citizen stands a reasonable chance of materially affecting the outcome in an active shooter situation. One of the tiresome canards of the left is that citizens with concealed handguns would be of absolutely no value in an actual active shooter situation versus someone with a rifle.

To put this theory to the test, the television station pitted four ordinary gun owners with various levels of firearm training against a 22-year veteran SWAT cop with highly specialized training. The least experienced shooter had only 6 hours of training, like you would get in a standard CCP class. The most experienced had 50 hours of handgun training from the DFW shooters academy.

The four volunteer “good guys” were placed into three different scenarios:

• A workplace mass killing, where a fired employee came back to shoot up his office after being terminated. The “good guy” is armed with a handgun as the “bad guy” enters the office and indiscriminately opens fire with an AR-15 while wearing body armor.
• A terrorist attack eerily similar to San Bernardino where a terrorist forces his way into a packed conference room and begins executing hostages with an AR-15 while wearing body armor.
• A workplace domestic violence situation, where an armed husband threatens his wife in her office with a gun.

The video here shows some surprising results:

Obviously, as Bob Owens notes, the results were “mixed” but in virtually every scenario, the presence of a lawfully armed citizen with even minimal training improved the overall outcome, even against a person who had more and better training than the average ISIS-inspired (and trained) terrorist, by far. As Bob notes in general:

• “Bad guys” intent on killing will not listen to reason, so you are either a disarmed victim, or you are an armed person with options.
• Even in those scenarios where they were “killed,” the “good guys” engaging the bad guys bought time for other employees to escape, saving lives.
• While the “bad guy” wearing the body armor did not react at all when struck in the armor in the scenario, real bullets impacting soft body armor is akin to taking a sledgehammer to the chest, and will have an impact on a “bad guy’s” behavior and may cause serious injuries including cracked ribs and bruised organs, altering the fight and giving the “good guy” the time needed to make a more effective shot.

The videos as a whole are well worth your time to watch to see how the scenarios played out. Not all of them were rosy, but when a person busts into your workplace with an assault rifle and starts killing indiscriminately you are already in a scenario where “good” is an option that has gone out the window and you are really trying to prevent “bad” from turning into “much worse.” And in this case, the ordinary Joes in the video usually succeeded in doing just that.