Good Guy with a Gun #69: Oklahoma City, OK (Free post)
Original incident: January 8, 2024. Another don’t-bring-a-knife-to-a-gunfight story? Yes, indeed. Sometimes clichés work, I guess.
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. If you bought or received a calendar, contact me for a complementary subscription. Today’s post is somewhat updated from the calendar version.
The record’s not stuck: We have another story of a man bringing a gun to a knife fight.
55-year-old Marvin Lee Thomas started a fight with someone in a business, and then he swung the knife at the store owner.
It wasn’t a robbery, as you might reasonably expect, but a dispute over a business deal. (Google Maps has a February 2024 street view with used car dealerships in that spot.)
The business owner settled the knife-wielder’s dispute with his gun.
The Oklahoma City Police Department released a statement saying that it looked like the shooting was self-defense.
Sometimes it seems like nothing is safe, unless you make it that way. A sad cost of doing business.
Also, my hobby-horse: There’s a shooting, a guy is dead, and we know almost nothing about it. The Good Guy with a Gun isn’t a myth, he’s just under-documented.
Sources
The Oklahoma City Police Department’s report is, of course, the canonical version of the story.
The two sources that covered this story, KOCO News 5 and the Oklahoma City Free Press, got things a little bit garbled. Not horribly so, but enough to notice.
The location in the police report is listed as “1624 SW 29th St.” KOCO said, “along Southwest 29th Street near South Kentucky Avenue.” The address is between S Pennsylvania and S Virginia Avenues; you have to go a full extra block east to get to S Kentucky Ave.
The aggressor is named in the police report as “Thomas, Marvin Lee (B/M – 11/06/1968),” and there’s a line that says, “Officers arrived to find 55-year-old Marvin Thomas had been shot.” The OKC Free Press called him “Marvin Lee, 56.”
Not for nothing, as they say in New Jersey, but I’m not going to cast the first stone: The shooting was on January 8, not January 9 as is printed in the calendar.