July 17, 2022, had the distinct probability of going down as a very dark and infamous day. It was on that day that a psychopath, a deranged devil in the flesh, chose to commit mass murder. He entered the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana with three guns and more than 100 rounds of ammunition. He had the means and the opportunity to produce the worst mass-casualty shooting in American history.
But instead, he killed just three people. That is still an unspeakable tragedy, a horrifying event that no family should ever have to contend with. But it is what made the death count stop at three that is so very remarkable. A 22-year-old man in that same mall pulled out his own weapon, engaged the murderer a mere 15 seconds after the killing began and shot the fiend eight times from 40 yards away. Eli Dicken was carrying a gun under the constitutional carry law that went into effect on July 1.
A young man who could have easily run from danger instead ran toward it on behalf of others. And because of that, Greenwood Police Chief Jim Ison hailed him as a Good Samaritan.
And that is where the lofty practitioners of what I call “professional, no-risk piety” took great umbrage. There were many, but one that particularly caught my attention was Justin Kollar, CBS 4 Indy traffic anchor, who tweeted, “The term, ‘Good Samaritan’ came from a Bible passage of a man from Samaria who stopped on the side of the road to help a man who was injured and ignored. I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone *killing* someone my God.”
Here, by the way, is the passage he was grasping at: