In Texas, two very American heroes

Bthe Texas church shooter encountered any police officers, he was run off a highway and dead. He had been shot and chased by two private citizens who took it upon themselves to respond to a heinous crime when no one with a badge was anywhere to be found.

The church shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, is another heartbreaking chapter in the country’s epidemic of mass shootings. Devin Patrick Kelley shot and killed 26 people and wounded another 20, accounting for nearly everyone in the small church. Dressed in black tactical gear, he killed the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter and eight members of one family, including a pregnant mom and three of her children.

The senseless cruelty is hard to fathom.

The response by the two bystanders who refused to stand by is something else entirely. It was a characteristically small-town American act of self-reliance that shows, no matter how tattered our civil society may be, it still produces people who will risk life and limb for others without hesitation, unbidden by anything other than their own sense of obligation.

When Stephen Willeford, 55, heard of the shooting, he left his house barefoot with his AR-15 and started exchanging fire with Kelley outside the church. An expert shot, Willeford hit Kelley and reportedly aimed for the gaps on his body armor. When Kelley got in an SUV and sped off, Willeford jumped in Johnnie Langendorff ’s truck and told him to give chase. Langendorff, 27, didn’t ask any questions. He followed Kelley at 95 mph down the highway, until the perpetrator ran off the road. Willeford jump out of the truck and rested his rifle on top of Langendorff ’s hood and shouted for Kelley to “get out.” The murderer apparently took his own life with a gunshot.

Willeford and Langendorff would have been justified in considering their work done when the shooter left the scene of his massacre. They would have been justified in considering it done when he crashed his vehicle. They instead were prepared for another gunfight in the cause of incapacitating him themselves. This showed an extraordinarily well-developed “sheepdog” instinct, to use the term from “American Sniper,” the movie about legendary Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, also a Texan.

In his interviews, Langendorff, with a scraggly beard and a tattoo of a bull skull on his neck, invariably wears a cowboy hat. He is polite and matter of fact (“He said, ‘Chase him’ and so that’s what I did — I just chased him”), implying that anyone would have done it. This isn’t true, although it is almost certainly more true in America’s out-of-the-way places. Self-help is imperative in these areas because the alternative is no help, at least not on a timely basis. Small towns might not even have a police department, and the police tend to be for after-the-fact investigations rather than real-time responses.

This gets to one of the root causes of America’s gun culture: In swaths of the country, a gun isn’t an optional extra layer of self-protection, but a necessary first defense. Rates of gun ownership are highest in remote, sparsely populated states such as Alaska, Idaho, West Virginia and North Dakota. In a poll of Texans a few years ago, nearly half of the people said they or a member of their family owned a gun.

Any gun-control measure that is sweeping enough to make a dent in the country’s gun stock and render gun ownership difficult enough to, at the margins, keep firearms out of the hands of psychopaths will inevitably affect law-abiding people as well. In places such as rural Texas, that would rightly be considered a serious imposition.

Without a gun, if something goes wrong, the only option is sitting and waiting for the authorities to show up.

And the likes of Stephen Willeford and Johnnie Langendorff, obviously, aren’t the waiting kind.

Contact Rich Lowry at comments. lowry@nationalreview.com.

Ba single mom is hard. Just ask Chappelle White. White has three children, but her middle child was the one having the hardest time in school.

“My daughter was 13,” said White, who didn’t want to share her daughter’s name. “One day in class, she raised her hand to ask her teacher. The teacher’s response to her question made her shut down. She came home crying and said she’s not going to talk again because she’s so embarrassed.”

As a parent, such an incident breaks your heart. For a parent who’s struggling to provide food and housing, however, such an incident can make you feel hopeless.

White, who is African-american, and her daughter wanted school choice. School choice is always available to affluent parents who already can afford private schools. White wasn’t one of those parents.

The Legislature’s passage of Education Savings Accounts in 2015 gave White’s daughter hope. ESAS allow parents to take a portion of the money the state spends on education and use it for private school tuition, home-based education, online schools or other school-related expenses.

ESAS were a lifeline. A lifeline the far-left Educate Nevada Now would take away through a court challenge. Nevada’s Supreme Court ruled that ESAS were constitutional, but that the mechanism lawmakers used to pay for the program was not.

Desperate, White took a job as a security guard at a maximum-security youth correctional facility. She used loans to pay for her daughter’s tuition to Word of Life Christian Academy. Her daughter thrived, but she needed help to avoid more debt.

In 2017, Senate Minority Leader Michael Roberson, R-henderson, led the efforts to fund ESAS but faced stout Democrat opposition. At the end of the session, Gov. Brian Sandoval undercut Republican efforts to ensure ESA funding.

“I’m still making payments on last year’s tuition,” said White. “When the ESAS failed, I was completely broken up about it.”

It looked hopeless for White, but legislative Republicans received unexpected leverage at the end of the session. They used that to secure $20 million more for Opportunity Scholarships, Nevada’s other schoolchoice program. White’s daughter now has an Opportunity Scholarship.

Democrat opposition to helping her and her daughter is starting to change her political perspective, too.

“You’re told that if you’re low-income that Democrat is the way to go,” said White, who volunteered for Hillary Clinton. “I’ve seen a lot of good that Republicans have done in support of ESAS. I’m not a Democrat anymore.”

White isn’t done pushing for

ESAS. Neither are groups such as the Nevada Policy Research Institute, my former employer, and the Nevada School Choice Coalition. On Saturday, the coalition is hosting an ESA event at Mountain View Christian School. They want to let parents know that, although ESAS lack funding, they are still in the law. They also want to educate people on which elected officials fought to give their families greater educational opportunities.

This isn’t an event for wealthy white folks. Far from it.

“I’m a Latina myself,” said Valeria Gurr, Nevada state director of the Nevada School Choice Coalition. “I was providing a lot of training for parents on how to apply to ESAS. No one was rich. Hundreds of low-income families were applying and were desperate to obtain ESAS, especially communities of color.”

If your elected official won’t vote to give your family better educational opportunities, you should vote out that elected official. The coalition’s efforts will help parents do just that.

Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Listen to him discuss his columns each Monday at 9 a.m. with Kevin Wall on 790

Talk Now. Contact him at vjoecks@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.