Free Republic

Since the high school shooting in Florida, the anti-gun rhetoric has been flying fast and furious across the leftist media. There’s no responsibility attached to the shooter who killed 17 people; only the NRA and an AR-15 are to blame, apparently. But just three short months ago, the NRA and an AR-15 were used to stop the Sutherland Springs church massacre in Texas thanks to a brave and well-armed citizen, Stephen Willeford. Willeford retrieved his rifle from his gun safe and ran barefoot over to the church where he placed a precisely-aimed bullet in a small gap in the perpetrator’s...

Heroes need prayers, too.Stephen Willeford — the Texan who confronted and shot the gunman who killed 26 people at a rural Baptist church Sunday — could use a bunch of prayers, his close friend John Wood says.To many, Willeford’s actions outside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs made him a hero.But the hero, who is described as a faithful Christian, was distraught when he called Wood at his Ohio home right after confirming gunman Devin Patrick Kelley’s death.“I talked to him immediately after it happened, basically before any of the law enforcement arrived,” Wood — a retired Church of Christ...

Stephen Willeford, Hero of Sutherland First Baptist Church Gunfight This morning, November, 10th, 2017 I was listening to KBLU 560, in Yuma, Arizona. American Morning News came on at 0943. It was a short segment. I did not have a recorder going, but I heard this report near the end of the segment.  I believe it is fairly accurate, certainly the sense of it. I could not find a transcript of it on the Internet.After a report on heroics at the Sutherland First Baptist Church, in Texas, the scene of a horrific mass murder, this was the report:The gunman...

This week, a discharged Air Force officer with a criminal record of domestic abuse, including cracking the skull of his infant stepson, stepped into a church in rural Texas and murdered 26 people, at least a dozen of them children. Americans broke out into their usual arguments over gun control and whether "thoughts and prayers" are helpful; we argued over politicizing tragedy and legislating away rights. But each time an evil human being decides to attack innocents, it isn't the Twitter battles that stand between the monsters and children. It's heroes. It's men like Stephen Willeford. In a vacuum, Willeford...

Link An exclusive interview with Stephen Willeford, the hero who ended the killing spree in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Stephen recounts the actions that lead him to confronting Devin Patrick Kelley outside First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs.

In Memoriam Franklin Patric Willeford HN3 USN NAVY CROSS March 17, 1943 (Lawton OK) — December 14, 1968 (Quang Nam, Republic of Vietnam) Vietnam Memorial Panel 36W, Row 021 Citation The President of the United States takes pride in presenting the Navy Cross (Posthumously) to Franklin Patric Willeford (3537852), Hospitalman, U.S. Navy, for extraordinary heroism on 14 December 1968 while serving as a Platoon Corpsman in Company C, First Battalion, Fifth Marines, FIRST Marine Division (Reinforced), Fleet Marine Force, in Quang Nam Province, Republic of Vietnam. As Hospitalman Willeford's platoon was participating in a company-sized sweep through an area, the...

What really happened in the brushy South Texas wild that day? How one shot turned a genteel quail hunt into a political crisis? The delicate and the dangerous meet in the ranch lands of South Texas. In the winter, quail gather in the soft gold of prairie sedge, but snakes, scorpions and wild-boar-like javelina lurk too. In 1999 a fourth-generation South Texas rancher named Tobin Armstrong testified before Congress that he sometimes found illegal immigrants dead of dehydration in the unforgiving brush of his 49,300-acre ranch. It was there that Vice President Dick Cheney, out with a hunting party that...