It’s easy for many of us to look at Chicago and see a great big hole when it comes to guns. After all, Chicago is the driving political force in one of the most anti-gun states in the nation. It was a city that enacted such draconian attempts at gun control that the Supreme Court had to smack them down via the McDonald decision.

Yet it’s important to remember that Chicago isn’t a monolithic entity. There are gun people in the city. Law-abiding gun people, that is. We already know they have plenty of armed criminals.

Well, one of those armed criminals decided to tangle with an off-duty firefighter. The problem for the bad guy is that the firefighter didn’t intend on being easy prey for anyone.

An off-duty Chicago firefighter who was shot several times while chatting with friends and cutting the lawn on the Far South Side Thursday night fired back at the assailant in self-defense, officials said.

The firefighter, 54, was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he was stabilized and where his family was gathered at his bedside Thursday night, according to Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

“He had multiple gunshot wounds to his lower extremities,” Langford said.

About 6:45 p.m. an assailant ran past the fireman and several of his friends who about talking near an alley or gangway and fired thirteen times at them near the 9900 block of South Yale Avenue in the Fernwood neighborhood, Langford and police said.

After bullets ripped through the fireman’s ankle, buttocks and right leg, he returned fire in self-defense, but didn’t hit anyone, police said. He was not the intended target.

Chicago police did catch the suspect, recovering his coat and firearm from a nearby garbage can.

It’s a shame that the firefighter didn’t hit the target, but even putting up a fight is important. This particular thug and all his buddies are now going to have to think about that when they’re running around shooting up the entire city. They’ll remember that there are armed citizens who don’t appreciate being caught in the crossfire.

Putting a couple of holes in the bad guy might have been a better reminder, but we have to take what we can get.

The firefighter is one of tens of thousands of armed Chicagoans, but that’s a city almost 2.7 million people. It’s simply not enough to have an appreciable impact on crime as a whole.

But just imagine hundreds of thousands of people with their carry permits in the Windy City. Hundreds of thousands of people who can fight back against the thugs who dominate so many Chicago headlines. If that happens, watch how things change. It won’t be the gun laws that legislators in the state keep trying to cram down people’s throats, it’ll be the actions of ordinary citizens empowered by the Second Amendment that change Chicago for the better. That’s what it will take to end the bloodshed.

The problem is that too many people have been indoctrinated to believe otherwise.