It's been five years since a man named Johnny Hurley took down a man on a shooting rampage in Arvada, Colorado. So why is the New York Times suddenly doing a deep dive on the defensive gun use?
My guess is it's because Hurley was shot and killed by a responding officer who mistakenly believed the armed citizen was, in fact, the perpetrator. The NYTimes doesn't generally cover defensive gun uses when they happen, and I've never seen it go back and do a retrospective until now. But if the paper can use Hurley's death to make the case against concealed carry, I guess the editors are willing to make an exception to their unwritten rules.
Reporter Mike Baker's piece doesn't reveal the fact that Hurley's heroism happened five years ago until about halfway through the story, giving readers the initial impression that this is new news. Baker doesn't demonize Hurley in his lengthy report, and he does make it clear that Hurley was the one who stopped the killer's shooting spree, which began with the murder of Arvada police officer Gordon Beesley.
Baker's reporting even hints that the officer who shot and killed Hurley should have known better, pointing out that Hurley was wearing a red shirt when the responding officer had earlier seen the shooter wearing a black hoodie.
Mr. Hurley, with his gun pointed toward the ground and his red shirt pulling away from the brick wall, inched in the direction of Mr. Troyke. Believing that Mr. Troyke was incapacitated, he ran forward, grabbing the rifle Mr. Troyke had dropped to disarm it.
Officer Brownlow opened the door of the office where he and the others had been waiting. He spied a man in a red shirt who looked like he was fiddling with the rifle, perhaps to fix it or reload. Had the gunman taken off his sweatshirt?
He considered ordering the man to stop, but decided it was too risky — he did not stand a chance should the man turn the rifle in his direction.
He fired three shots. One of them struck Mr. Hurley in the hip, tearing through his arteries and killing him.
Moments later, the officers cautiously moved outside and found three bodies on the ground.
Mr. Brownlow, feeling a sense of pride that he had helped bring the shooting to a quick end, told investigators later that he immediately thought of the Columbine massacre, which had been committed by not one but two teenagers, acting together. There must have been two attackers, he thought.
Johnny Hurley's death was a tragedy, and arguably one that should never have happened. His mother ended up suing the Arvada Police Department over her son's death and reached a settlement with the city for an undisclosed amount of money. The vast majority of DGU's, however, don't end up with armed citizens shot by police, and I can't help but think that Hurley's untimely death was the impetus for the NYTimes coverage of this story five years later.
In his report, Baker goes out of his way to downplay the role that armed citizens have played in stopping active shooters, writing:
Of the nearly 600 active shooter incidents since 2000 tracked by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University, only 15 were halted by ordinary people shooting the attacker.
Dr. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center, disputes that number. In a paper co-authored with William & Mary professor Carl Moody published last fall, Lott says there were 562 active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2024, and that armed citizens stopped 199 of them, compared to 167 interventions by law enforcement. Lott also found that these defensive gun uses were generally not covered by the local media in as much detail, and in some cases may not have been covered at all.
After controlling for the number of casualties, the locations of attacks, and fixed effects,we found that the media devotes more coverage to cases stopped by police than those stopped by civilians. Reports of civilian interventions often omit key details and are presumably more likely to not be reported at all. The evidence we provide on the underreporting of civilian cases implies that our results are biased against showing the benefits of armed civilians. This form of endogeneity would be more of an issue if the effect was in the opposite direction and biased the results in favor of armed civilians.
The New York Times certainly doesn't regularly cover the actions of armed citizens. That's one reason why Baker's piece immediately stood out to me. If Johnny Hurley had taken down the attacker in Arvada without being shot and killed by a police officer, I doubt the paper would have devoted even an inch of space to his heroism, and it's inconceivable that the Times would have looked back on Hurley's bravery five years later. I suspect the only reason why the Times detailed the Arvada shooting now is to try to make the case against armed citizens at a time when more of us are carrying than ever before.
