A GOP candidate for Arizona Senate says he knows from experience that a good guy with a gun is the solution to gun violence, because he shot and killed his mother when he was a teenager.

“You can pass all the laws you want to in this world, and when you've got somebody out there that wants to harm somebody, they're going to do it if you don't stop them,” Bobby Wilson told a crowd at an event put on by the gun control group Moms Demand Action last week.

The crowd, predominantly backers of Moms Demand Action, booed and heckled Wilson.

According to the Arizona Republic, Wilson was 18 when he shot and killed his mother in an incident that also left his 17-year-old sister dead.

“[My mother] was hell-bent on killing me in my sleep one night. At 3 o'clock in the morning, I woke up to find a rifle in my face — a semiautomatic rifle at that — and the bullets started to fly, and I started diving for cover,” Wilson told the crowd.

He told the Arizona Republic that his mother, Lavonne Wilson, had entered his room and shot at him multiple times, missing each shot before hitting Wilson’s sister in the back of the head with her gun and killed her. Wilson told the paper his mother continued shooting at him but hit a container of gasoline, giving Wilson time to grab his gun and fire back. When he ran to the living room to call for help, he said he had to turn a light on, creating a spark that ignited fumes from the gasoline, blowing up the house.

The Arizona Republic points out that news coverage of the case differs dramatically from Wilson’s version, with reports indicating the burnt bodies of Wilson’s mother and sister were found in their beds in a way that would have indicated they had died of smoke inhalation, if an autopsy hadn’t shown they’d been shot.

After the shooting, Wilson was charged and confessed to the murder of his mother and sister, according to court records and newspaper articles obtained by the Republic. He later recanted his confession and said he didn’t remember any events from that night. The case was taken to court twice, but the evidence was “inconclusive.” Eventually, the charges were dismissed in Oklahoma.

Ultimately, Wilson says, the larger issue isn’t what happened in the house that night but rather the lesson he learned from it: The only magic bullet is an actual bullet.

“I don't think you can control people's behavior by passing laws,” Wilson told the Republic. “They keep looking for a magic-bullet law that they can pass where it’s gonna put an end to the killings and the gun violence, and they're not gonna find the magic bullet. There is no magic bullet."