Shooting heats up debate over guns

January 16, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

TUCSON, Ariz.

Joe Zamudio was buying cigarettes Jan. 8 when he heard what sounded like fireworks but quickly realized were gunshots. He reached into his coat pocket for the 9-mm semiautomatic pistol he carried, clicking the safety off.

He heard yelling around him: “Shooter, shooter, get down!”

Zamudio saw a young man squirming on the ground and an older man standing above him, waving a gun.

Zamudio, 24, had his finger on the trigger and seconds to decide.

He lifted his finger from the trigger and ran toward the struggling men.

As he grabbed the older man’s wrist to wrest the gun away, bystanders yelled that he had the wrong man — it was the man on the ground who they said had attacked them and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. The gun the older man was holding had been wrested away from the shooter. Police later identified 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner as the suspect.

“I could have very easily done the wrong thing and hurt a lot more people,” said Zamudio, who helped subdue the suspect until authorities arrived.

The fact that Zamudio was carrying a gun, and his split-second decision to keep it in his pocket, has come to encapsulate the complexity of the national gun debate.

Gun-rights advocates say his quick action showed that a well-armed — and well-trained — person could protect himself and the public.

But gun-control advocates see Zamudio’s story as an example of how Arizona’s gun-friendly culture and lax gun laws have not only failed to make the streets safer, but also have potentially endangered lives.

“They always say, ‘What if someone with a concealed weapon was there and could stop this,’” said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the Washington-based Violence Policy Center. “Well there was, and he almost shot the wrong person.”

Even if Zamudio hadn’t been close by, there was a good chance that someone in the crowd would have been armed. About 40 percent of Arizona adults own guns.

Zamudio had no formal firearms training. His father, a prison guard and Vietnam veteran, taught him to shoot as a boy in the desert outside town. When his father died five years ago, he left Zamudio an antique revolver and one rule to live by as a gun owner: “Pray you never have to use it, but be prepared to use it if you have to.”

National research, including studies by the National Academies of Science, has not come to a clear conclusion about whether allowing more concealed weapons makes communities safer. Experts say it is nearly impossible to tease out how one factor affects something as complex as crime.