An armed police officer shot down a mass shooter in Tucson in under 15 seconds flat — and the establishment press would rather talk about anything else, because an armed good guy ending a rampage doesn't fit the narrative that only the state should have a monopoly on force, and even then, only to apologize for using it.
Surveillance footage from Empire Pizza & Pub on Congress Street captures the whole thing. Around 2 a.m. on Sunday, July 19, 21-year-old David French opened fire into a crowd outside the restaurant during a confrontation between two groups who knew each other, according to FOX 10 Phoenix. Nine people were injured. Most have since been released from the hospital.
The video shows French on the sidewalk firing several shots before darting behind a white car and back onto the sidewalk. What French didn't know was that police were already in the area. An officer fires one shot into the shooter's back. French collapses. Other officers swarm. Start to finish: less than 15 seconds.
One shot. One armed responder. Mass shooting stopped.
French was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries but survived, KVOA reported. He now faces nine counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, nine counts of aggravated assault with serious physical injury, and one count of discharging a firearm at a structure, with more charges pending per Tucson Police.
Here is the part the criminal justice reform crowd won't want to discuss: court records show French had a prior 2024 conviction for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was on probation. A man convicted of assault with a deadly weapon was walking free on probation, and he picked up a gun and shot nine more people. The system that was supposed to protect the public failed. An armed officer with a clear shot is what actually stopped the carnage.
The Gateway Pundit posted the footage and framed the officer as heroic — which, by any plain reading of the video, he is. CBS News, by contrast, spent the same news cycle covering a Fort Worth officer-involved shooting where a suspect who had cut off an ankle monitor — another supervision failure — was fatally shot after producing a handgun. That suspect's original offense, per Fort Worth Police Chief Eddie Garcia, was sexual assault of a minor. CBS framed both Fort Worth incidents as
