This is an opinion column.

“The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

I’m calling BS.

We’ve heard this ludicrous fallacy too, too many times—most notably from National Rifle Association mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre, but also, in various incarnations, from others who believe to their souls that two (or more) guns will right a wrong.

We heard it just last month from Donald Trump following the tragic murders of 11 people worshiping inside the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh by a gunman. “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better,” the President said.

We hear it in our own state from zealots like Lt Governor-elect Will Ainsworth, who wants to arm teachers to make schools “safer.” The former Republican State Rep. from Guntersville’s bill was stymied by Democratic opposition during the most recent legislative session. Yet he vowed to “return to Montgomery in one form or another next year, and I will continue pushing for this legislation until our students and teachers are properly protected, and our classrooms are properly defended."

BS.

Georgetown University clinical professor of psychiatry Liza Gold, who studies the relationship between mental illness and gun violence agrees. “It’s a good slogan,” she told ABC News after the high-school shooting in Parkland, Florida earlier this year. "I have yet to see the evidence base for that claim.

Sometimes a good guy with a gun stops another good guy with a gun.

Or the wrong guy.

Then it’s a tragedy. Or worse.

I don’t know Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr., the 21-year-old from Hueytown who was shot and killed by a Hoover policeman amid the frightening and chaotic aftermath of the shooting at the Riverchase Galleria that shook us all on Thanksgiving night.

I don’t know if he was a good guy, by whatever your standard. Truthfully, that’s not for any of us to judge. Most certainly not now, not based on what we know at this early juncture.

But I do know this: Bradford, who was said to have possessed a weapon, was not the shooter who left an 18-year-old young man and a 12-year-old girl severely wounded after an argument at the mall that, like all-too-many-other disputes in this unfortunate age, nonsensically became a gun fight.

We know because the Hoover police, only 20 or so hours after saying the dead man was the shooter, confessed they’d made an appalling mistake that turned tragedy to travesty.

“Our department does not typically issue media updates during an internal investigation but there was information discussed with local media last night that merits update and clarification,” the department said in a statement released Friday evening. “…. New evidence now suggests that while Mr. Bradford may have been involved in some aspect of the altercation, he likely did not fire the rounds that injured the 18-year-old victim … We regret that our initial media release was not totally accurate…”

This isn’t a rant for stricter gun-control regulations. Nor am I about to rail against our open-carry laws (which can, however, contribute to the challenge of discerning, in the midst of mayhem, the good guys from the bad.)

But only the blindly stubborn and blithely irrational—count LaPierre and 45 in that club—will still refuse to admit that good guys with a gun sometimes do bad things. Tragically bad things.

Especially when the bad guy is black.

Two years ago, white Iowan—and bona fide bad guy—Scott Michael Greene killed two police officers and eluded law enforcement for hours before being captured alive miles away.

In April, Travis Reinking, a white man, allegedly killed four African-Americans with an assault rifle in a Nashville Waffle House, yet somehow was captured alive about a day-and-a-half later.

Bradford, of course, was African American.

The investigation into this shooting, as well as the full breadth of what transpired at the mall, will be scrutinized like few others--for myriad reasons.

Let’s start with the undeniable history and still-tenuous relationship between Birmingham and its OTM neighbors, like Hoover. And there are so many nuances and complexities that already the investigation has been handed over the state from Jefferson County, where a potential conflict with a possible witness was already discovered.

It is vital that investigators get this one right rather than fast. With deliberate speed, yes. But not so fast that someone once again trips - even inadvertently - over the truth.

Kudos to the first responders whose actions Thursday evening likely forestalled what could have been an even greater loss of life or injury.

But let’s see the mall video of Bradford’s actual encounter with the officer. It all-but-certainly exists and could reveal Bradford may have created what might have been perceived by the officer as a life-threatening situation with his weapon.

If not, no matter how “involved” in the shooting he may prove to be (Hoover police also said investigators now believe more than two people, including him, were involved in the initial dispute and that the actual gunman was still at large), Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr. did not likely deserve to die on the Galleria floor.

Especially at the hands of a good guy with a gun.

Roy S. Johnson’s column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Hit me up at rjohnson@al.com or/and follow me at twitter.com/roysj or on Instagram at instagram.com/roysj/