Good Guy with a Gun #99: Fort Worth, TX
Original incident: February 7, 2024. A pack of dogs surrounded a man, biting him and forcing him onto the roof of a car. But the bark of a gun beats the bite of a dog.
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Dogs are man’s best friend. They’re so good that we fallen humans don’t deserve them; they’re a living symbol of the unconditional love of Eden. And they’re usually safe.
But when they’re not safe, the threat of dog bites is no joke.
Every day, almost 1,000 people are taken to the Emergency Department for non-fatal dog bites.
From 2019 to 2022, dog bites killed 50, 62, 81, and 98 people respectively.
A significant portion of the victims are young children: In 2019, 26% of the fatalities were in children aged nine or younger.
I know some people don’t like to hear this, but the dog’s breed apparently matters. So does the sex and neutering status.1
At any rate, so it is that, a little before lunch on a Wednesday morning, a pack of three dogs attacked and bit a man in Fort Worth, Texas. The police responded to a report of a man stranded on top of a car, surrounded by them.
The pack also threatened and attacked other bystanders, though apparently they never actually got a bite into them.
(There was a fourth dog who didn’t participate in the attacks. Who’s a good boy?)
A man passing by saw the attacks and shot one of the dogs dead.
The owners of the other two were cited by animal control, who took the dogs into quarantine. No one claimed the dead one. (Nobody says this, but the fact that they couldn’t identify the owner of the dead dog implies that it had no tags.)
Police did not expect charges to be filed against the shooter.
Sources
Only ABC 8 covered this story well. Nobody else mentioned the man being on the roof of the car — which is an amazing detail when it comes to visualizing what this attack must have been like for the victim — or the fourth dog.
Fox 4 KDFW and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram also both covered the story.
On the 2A specialist side, John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) included this story in a round-up of DGUs from February 2024.
Dogsbite.org is one of multiple sources where you can find similar information, and it appears to have studies or CDC data to back up its claims. I also sourced from this page.
I do wonder about its phrasing sometimes, and we have to be particularly careful about that for advocacy websites. “Approximately 4.5 million dog bites occur each year in the United States.” — so if a single dog attacks one person and bites him three times, is that three of those 4.5 million bites? Or are we talking about one attack for each of those 4.5 million? Regardless, it’s a non-trivial number.
An elderly gentleman was attacked, knocked down, and bitten by a pack of three dogs in our neighborhood a few months ago. His injuries weren't too bad, but he did have to be hospitalized for a day or two. Those dogs are gone now, but their owners appear to have gotten more . . . This is why I can't walk in my own neighborhood without my husband's protection. I love dogs, but not when they run together without discipline.