Good Guy with a Gun #228: Phoenix, AZ
Pro tip: Before attacking someone in a parking lot, see if he's MMA world champion Shannon "the Cannon" Ritch. Pro-er tip: Also see if he's a firearms instructor. | Original incident: June 15, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
There are two deep ironies in this incident.
The first is that our aggressor in this story attacked Shannon “The Cannon” Ritch as if he were going to win a street fight with him.
To be clear, this is the gentleman we’re talking about, I think in 2019. Start watching at about 2:35. (The thumbnail shows the other guy, not Ritch.)
The second is that Ritch — an international heavyweight bare-knuckle boxing champion, an 8x mixed martial arts (MMA) world champion, and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt — ended the situation with a gun. Then again, he is also a firearms instructor.
(Need more context? See him on X and Instagram, or find out more about him at ESPN, Tapology, IMDB for his stunt and acting work, or Wikipedia.)
Let’s back up.
Just days before the incident, Ritch had gone to Doha, Qatar for a fight. He had trained hard: He was in the best shape he’d been in for a decade. Unfortunately, the fight had been postponed, and he’d just spent 40 hours awake, traveling home to Phoenix.
So except for lack of sleep, Shannon “the Cannon” was doing really well, physically. And I would imagine that he was happy being back in his old stomping grounds, and so (after a few days with appropriate rest, I hope) he ended up in the parking lot of a local bar called Twin Peaks.
That’s where he got into an altercation with Alejandro Samplina.
Maybe Samplina thought Ritch didn’t look like much. That doesn’t seem likely — it was June in Arizona, so I imagine Ritch wasn’t hiding his muscles under a parka. He’s “only” five feet, nine inches tall, and maybe Samplina was taller. Maybe Samplina thought his relative youth, at 32, would win out over 53-year-old Ritch.
Or maybe Samplina thought his knife would make the difference for him.
(There’s a cliché, which I will avoid using, that telegraphs the end of this story.)
Make no mistake, part of knowing how to fight is knowing when to retreat. Samplina chased Ritch around his car several times.
But before long, Ritch was able to access a gun from his car. He shot Samplina, who died at the hospital.
According to police, surveillance video and witnesses corroborated Ritch’s story, and he wasn’t charged.
Lucky for the rest of us, you don’t have to be an MMA fighter to know how to deploy appropriate force at the appropriate time.
Sources
Primary
You can find Ritch talking about his Doha delays on Instagram.
Local and national news
Fox 10 Phoenix provides a good summary of the article.
The Independent also covered this story.
Specialist media
Normally this is the category for 2A media, but in this case we’re able to feature MMA Fighting. Go figure.
If you’d like to hear more from the man himself to get a sense of how he is, you might want to check out his interviews at Free Range American.us and The Fighter’s Voice.com.