Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, has famously said "the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
As a newspaper reporter, I met with and spoke with a good guy who met a bad guy at a mass shooting. It happened on a cold February afternoon more than 10 years ago, after an angry young man named Robert Bonelli opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon in the Hudson Valley Mall in Kingston, NY.
Bonelli, of course, was the bad guy in that scenario. The good guy was named Barry Davis. This is his story, as I wrote it for the (Middletown NY) Times Herald-Record. See for yourself how Davis's story aligns with LaPierre's statement:
The muffled bangs sounded like books being slammed to the floor. Then Barry Davis saw the horde of panic-stricken people running away from the sounds, running toward him.
The Hudson Valley Mall had suddenly become a free-fire zone. The testing of Barry Davis had begun.
Once the rangy 24-year-old Kingston native realized that the place was under siege, he helped hustle about 20 customers and employees at New York & Co., a women's fashion shop, into the back fitting rooms. His girlfriend, Kristina Benjamin, had been trying on clothes there when the shooting started.
Davis stayed out of the fitting rooms to make sure there were no stragglers.
Then they all heard an agonized, wailing sound. A voice:
"I'm shot! I'm hit! Somebody please help me!"
Davis left the crowd in the back and went to investigate.
"People were yelling, 'Come back, come back. What are you doing?'" Davis recalled. "And I'm not really paying attention. It was like, 'I gotta find him (the wounded man).'"
He scrambled back toward the front of the shop, keeping low. He could hear bullets whistle by and ricochet in the hallway.
Davis looked to his left and saw a trail of blood on the shop floor.
Thomas Haire, a 20-year-old National Guard recruiter, lay on his side in the middle of the shop. He'd been hit by a single bullet in the left leg, just above the knee. He was bleeding badly and screaming in pain:
"I'm gonna die! Please help me!"
No sooner had Davis found Haire than he glanced toward the front of the store. That's when he saw the gunman. He saw the gunman's right arm go up, as if he were about to fire. Davis feared the worst.
"My first thought was to just cover (Haire) up and I told him, 'Hold on, just don't move' and I closed my eyes. It was him, I said."
Seconds disguised as minutes went by. For reasons he could only guess at, the shooter had looked away. Davis turned to the bloody business of keeping Haire alive.
Haire's leg was bleeding "like a gallon jug of water turned upside down."
"I took my hoodie off, ripped my shirt off. I asked him what his name was. He said Tom. I said all right, Tom, this is gonna hurt. Hold on."
Haire begged Davis to "Tie it tight. Tie it tight or I'm gonna die."
Davis tore Haire's fatigues away and found a small hole above his knee cap. He lifted Haire's leg up and the blood flow slowed.
"That's when I decided to put my hands inside his wound to see if I could find where the blood was coming from and try and clamp it down."
Davis said he later told his mother "all those years of watching ER finally paid off."
By the time the blood flow had been nearly stanched, help finally arrived. Davis had no idea that accused shooter Robert Bonelli had been wrestled to the floor outside the shop by three unarmed individuals.
Though authorities urged him to leave his name and go home, Davis stayed with Haire, reassuring him. He helped load the stretcher into the ambulance.
"Leaving him didn't feel right." Haire was taken to Albany Medical Center where he is being treated. His condition is not being made public. (editor's note: he survived.)
Finally, Davis put his hoodie on, wiped the blood off his neck, and went home. He was back at work at Kingston's Allways Moving moving company the next morning. He works there six days a week. He's also an aspiring (legal) graffiti artist.
Standing in front of a giant wall mural he and a friend painted after 9/11, Davis shrugged off what he did at the mall: "I was told when I was a child to put others before yourself. I swear that's not how I am, but . . ."
He let the sentence dangle in the cold afternoon air.
"I just -- all I hope is that if I'm ever in that situation, someone does the same for me."