Good Guy with a Gun #41: Albuquerque, NM
Original incident: December 19, 2023. As so often happens, there's almost no detail about this story. What we know is that a caregiver for some elderly people shot an intruder in self-defense.
This is the kind of content featured in the 2026 Good Guy with a Gun one-page-per-day desk calendar.
Almost all of the information for this story can be drawn from a single source: the Albuquerque Police Department’s post about it. There’s literally nothing else to be seen. And this is for an incident in which a man died — consider how often there’s a defensive gun use (DGU) that never gets written up at all.
Salazar Court SE is a cul-de-sac; apparently, one of the homes there has one or more elderly people living in it, and a caregiver helps out there.
Around 8:30 PM, the caretaker saw someone entering the backyard of the home. While the man was in the yard, the caretaker shot him.
Police were called to Alamo Avenue, which is only a hundred yards away, to investigate a suspicious person in the area. We can guess that this was the shooter calling 911 — he would have called 911, right? — and telling them which direction the prowler went.
By the time they got there, the man had died in the street.
There’s a lot we don’t know here, obviously. To what extent did the prowler appear to be a threat? Was it really the right thing to shoot him? Were any weapons recovered at the scene? We don’t even know the man’s name.
But we know that detectives were investigating the shooting as a possible case of self-defense, and there’s no follow-up suggesting that it was anything but.
Sources
Here’s the Albuquerque PD report.
KOAT 7 and KOB 4 both gave a report; KOAT 7 produced a brief TV segment while the victim was still in custody and the police had not yet said that they were looking at it as a self-defense shooting.
I didn’t see any write-ups from 2A-focused sources on this one.
That thing that never happens, happens every day.
Like the idea of a Good Guy with a Gun story every single day? Get the 2026 calendar! All 365 pages feature a news story from 2024.
In addition, this Substack will feature Good Guy with a Gun stories every day of the year, all taken from news stories so you can verify them yourself and share them around. They’ll generally be from about two years prior, which gives time to make sure there aren’t any legal or fraud issues to worry about.
Starting in 2026, we’ll open up paid subscriptions, and all paid subscribers will get seven posts per week. (People who bought a calendar will be eligible for a free full subscription.) Unpaid subscribers will still get two GGWAG stories every week.