When people carry guns, most say it’s to protect themselves and their families. That’s certainly the driving motivator for most folks, to be sure. The thing is, a lot of people also carry so they can protect others if it becomes necessary.

I’m not talking about people think they’re police officers or are trying to be heroes. I’m talking about the kind of people who just can’t let someone die or get seriously hurt without acting. Maybe they walked away without doing more to help at some point in the past and have had to live with that since. Maybe they realize that even if they call the police, it’ll be too late before the police get there. Who knows?

What matters is that these good people are willing to step up and protect others. Right now, there’s an elderly man able to recover from a brutal attack because of one such individual.

Neighbors were forced to intervene in an attack and shoot a man who was brutally beating an 86-year-old Bartow County man with a metal pipe around 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Those neighbors, a father and his son, said they didn’t know the 86 year old, they just knew they had to help.

…

That’s when the neighbors heard Lee’s wife scream for help and came running.

“Grabbed his gun, came down, tried to intervene and stop the fight,” said Gravley.

Those neighbors say the attacker turned on them. He punched one in the jaw and tried to take the gun away from the other. That’s when they fired two shots, hitting the attacker.

That’s a good, clean shoot no matter how you judge it.

And really, that’s what you get from armed citizens. Those that want to be cowboys and pretend they’re cops do exist, sure, but every group gets its fuggheads. They’re in the distinct minority. What most of us want to do is intervene if necessary. For me, it’s so I never have to live with the guilt of not acting. I don’t want to have to wonder if I could have made a difference “if only” or something like that.

For others, there are other reasons.

Yet at the end of the day, the result is the same. Good people are safer because other good people have guns.

Note that the criminal had a pipe. He could have killed the victim and the citizens who intervened. If he had, would we hear about the need for pipe control? Probably not.

Good people can only protect themselves and one another from violent criminals if they have the best tools for the job. Oh, the odd good guy might get lucky with a pipe of his own, but probably not.

I’ve long said that violent criminals will be violent with anything they can get their hands on while good guys can be trusted with a rocket launcher and they won’t harm a living soul except in self-defense. This was a bad person with a pipe who was intent on brutally beating and probably murdering an old man.

How is gun control going to stop him?