BESTPIX - Five Dead, Including 2 Police Officers In Las Vegas Shooting

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officer Harrison Porter (L) prays with Ryan Rasmussen of Nevada during a vigil outside CiCi's Pizza on June 9, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department says officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo were shot and killed yesterday at the restaurant by Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda Miller. Police say the Millers then went into a nearby Wal-Mart where Amanda Miller killed Joseph Wilcox before the Millers killed themselves.

(Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

By all accounts, Joseph Wilcox was the prototype of a "good guy with a gun."

When a gunman took control of the Las Vegas Walmart where Wilcox was making a return on Sunday, he walked toward the danger. He was carrying a concealed handgun, perhaps believing he could save lives by taking out Jerad Miller, who had already killed two police officers and was waving shoppers out of the store at gunpoint.

Wilcox was killed when Amanda Miller, Jerad’s wife, caught him by surprise and shot him as he approached her husband, gun drawn.

Police called Wilcox's death "heroic." It takes courage to approach a man waving assault weapons at a crowd. But Wilcox was an out-of-work web designer, not a trained police officer. He had no formal training in responding to an armed threat, had no partner and no body armor. All Wilcox had was his legally owned firearm, an old dream of becoming a cop and the National Rifle Association's insistence that, when a bad guy with a gun seeks to do harm, he and his brother gun-owners are the answer.

The Millers got the drop on two Las Vegas officers before heading to the Walmart, ambushing them while they ate lunch. They didn’t have a chance.

But would Wilcox be alive if not for the gun industry’s vigilante fantasies, where the answer to America’s gun violence is to make sure law-abiding good guys are armed better than the bad guys?

Days earlier in Seattle, an unarmed college student ended a shooting spree by pepper-spraying and tackling the gunman when he stopped to reload his shotgun. That act shows that the answer to gunfire isn’t necessarily more guns.

Might Joseph Wilcox be alive – and just as heroic – had there been only one shooter in Walmart? Would a different person carrying a concealed handgun have had different results? Both are possible; just as it’s possible that an armed civilian might someday prevent greater tragedy by using his gun.

But on Sunday, the good guys’ death toll was too high. The gun manufacturers’ marketing ploy – encouraging its customers to stand watch as armed sentinels against gun-toting criminals – only ensures that number will grow.

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