What stops a bad guy with a gun? You guessed it:

Lowery says he saw the suspected gunman, identified as 24-year-old Damien Durham of Wilcox County, walking down the street making a nonchalant getaway. Witnesses say it was a bizarre sight, but what happened next was even more unbelievable.

“People just kept coming around and they were mad, people in Rhine were mad,” Lowery said. “Here we had an armed robbery in the middle of the day at Aden’s and they wanted to form a posse.”

Lowery says more than 20 people, many of them armed, spread out looking for the gunman, in trucks and on foot.

“We didn’t have no leader of it all, we just went all our separate ways and the people in Rhine they knew they were going to get that rascal,” Lowery said.

Lowery, a retired corrections officer, ended up tracking the suspect down roughly 200 yards away from the store. He fired a warning shot from his deer rifle and says the suspect stashed his gun and money, and hid in a nearby  shed, where he was soon arrested by Dodge County sheriff’s deputies.

Major Donald Helms of the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office says it’s just a story of good guys with guns. People in a small town excerising their right to bear arms.

“You might not want to come down there and mess with the Rhine folks,” Helms said.

You know what’s sad about this?

In New York or California or other states where their morals and laws are completely screwed up, Lowery would likely be facing a longer criminal sentence than Durham for any number of charges, ranging from assault with a deadly weapon to false imprisonment, for the simple reason that the nanny governments in those states are appalled at the thought of citizens acting on their own to stop criminals without the blessing and the power of the state’s authority.

I’m glad the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office still has their heads screwed on straight.