Fort Smith, AR — A tragedy unfolded over the weekend in Fort Smith, Arkansas as a US Army veteran apparently snapped and went on a shooting rampage at an apartment complex. Zachary Arnold, 26, was armed with an AR-15, and began shooting up the apartment complex, killing 87-year-old Lois Hicks. However, Arnold’s name was not paraded on mainstream television and media didn’t harp on the fact that he had an AR-15, thanks to a good Samaritan who was also heavily armed.

The shooting took place on Saturday morning as residents in the apartment complex awoke at around 7:23 a.m. to the sound of a high-powered rifle discharging rounds outside their doors.

According to reports, Arnold murdered Hicks inside her apartment after yelling for people to exit their homes.

“He was yelling and screaming, “You guys get out here, come out here, everyone get out of this building right now,” says Janey Peugh, a resident of the apartment complex, according to 5 News.

As 5 News reports:

Another resident, Amber Lane, says Lois Hicks and Arnold live in the same building. She says Hicks and another neighbor went outside to console Arnold, but when they saw the gun, they ran back inside their apartments.

“There were two older women, both had come out. One of them had ran back in, and the other one ran back in, but she didn’t close her door, then he walked in and did what he did,” says Lane.

According to witnesses, after people retreated back into their apartments, Arnold began firing at anyone he could, shooting rounds at neighboring apartment units.

That’s when an unidentified good Samaritan grabbed his high-powered hunting rifle and a bipod and setup his position. As Arnold continued to randomly fire into the homes of innocent people, this good Samaritan took aim and eliminated the threat. The potentially catastrophic mass shooting being carried out by a bad guy with a gun, had been averted — all thanks to a good guy with a gun.

“If he didn’t do that, who knows how much worse it could have gotten,” says Lane.

Other witnesses and neighbors agreed, offering up praises to the man who saved countless lives that morning.

“If he had not done that, we don’t know how many people could’ve died,” said Property Manager Cherre Miller, releasing the following statement as well:

“We are terribly saddened by the incident which happened this morning. We are working diligently with the police in any way we can. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families today.”

It should come as no surprise that this incident is absent from the mainstream media networks as it does not fit their narrative. The establishment gun control crowd only wants cops to have guns while everyone else is disarmed. However, as TFTP has consistently reported, when law abiding citizens are disarmed, criminals do not give them up, leaving only cops and criminals with guns.

The fact is, good guys with guns prevent a lot of bad guys with guns from carrying out extreme violence because cops cannot be everywhere at once.

Indeed, as TFTP reported, according to a recent FBI report, good guys with guns—who are not police officers—have stopped multiple mass killings, just like the one in Fort Smith.

According to the FBI report, citizens successfully intervened in eight active shooter incidents in 2016 and 2017. These heroic citizens prevented or helped to stop what could’ve been some of the worst shooting incidents in US history.

As the report notes, citizens “safely and successfully” ended the shooting by confronting the shooter—not police.

“Their selfless actions likely saved many lives,” the report stated.

Out of those eight incidents, four of the heroic citizens were carrying legal firearms and stopped the shooters in their tracks. In two of those incidents, the citizens actually exchanged fire with the shooters, illustrating how a properly trained—and armed—citizen can be an effective deterrent in mass shootings.

In the other two incidents, the armed citizens held the shooters at gunpoint until police arrived.

Given the current anti-gun climate within the establishment, stories like this one tend to smash the paradigm that disarming Americans is a good thing. Please share this story with your friends and family so that they may see the positive side to the gun control debate.