Naked

by Sis Cat

The author has placed a warning on this post for sexual content.

"It takes a good guy with a gun
to stop a bad guy with a gun,"
or so the saying goes in America
where to be without a gun is to be naked.

But I've heard of a man,
James Shaw Jr.—
clothed, unarmed, and unprotected—
who rushed and wrestled
a naked mass shooter
clothed in only a green army jacket
and armed with an AR-15
in a bullet-riddled
Nashville Waffle House.

"The gun was hot
and he was naked,"
Shaw later told reporters,
"but none of that mattered.
I was just trying
to get the gun away from him."

Shaw grabbed and threw the gun
behind the counter.
Disarmed,
the shooter fled and shed
his one item of clothing
and was captured later.

"I don’t want people to think
that I was the Terminator or Superman
or anybody like that.
I was completely doing it
just to save myself," Shaw said.

Within each of us lies the potential for heroism,
to clothe ourselves with a garment of courage
we never knew our closet possessed.

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Recognized

On April 22, 2018, a Nashville, Tennessee Waffle House customer, James Shaw Jr., stopped a mass shooting in progress when he wrestled the gun from the naked shooter, Travis Reinking, who had killed four and wounded two at the restaurant. I took Shaw's direct quotes from Holly Yan's April 24 CNN article "Hero customer rushes Waffle House killer and rips away his gun." I paid PoliticalCartoons.com for permission to use Taylor Jones' cartoon.

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The gun was hot and he was naked.

Naked

by Sis Cat

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