{"id":3960,"date":"2016-11-26T11:58:33","date_gmt":"2016-11-26T15:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=3960"},"modified":"2016-11-26T11:58:33","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T15:58:33","slug":"warnings-unheeded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/warnings-unheeded\/","title":{"rendered":"WARNINGS UNHEEDED"},"content":{"rendered":"

A book about people being killed seems \"warnings\"<\/a>incongruous with the holiday season. Yet a book about saving human lives is a natural part of a celebration of human spirit. \u201cWarning Unheeded\u201d by Andy Brown lands squarely in the latter category.<\/p>\n

In 1994 at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, a former Airman turned mad dog killer ran wild with an AK47 clone until he was put down by a courageous Air Police officer. Under fire from the crazed rifleman at a distance of 70 yards, Andy Brown coolly dropped him with two 9mm hits from his Beretta M9 pistol, and stopped the murders. In retrospect, many believed that the slain gunman\u2019s growing psychosis had gone without timely treatment or institutionalization, despite accumulated warning signs.<\/p>\n

In a close timeframe, a senior pilot with an increasing reputation for recklessness crashed while attempting aerobatics with a B52, killing himself and other USAF personnel. Once again, obvious signals had not been acted upon by those in authority, with tragedy resulting\u2026thus, the title of \u201cWarnings Unheeded.\u201d<\/p>\n

In juxtaposing and documenting these two tragic events, Andy downplays his own courage. He presents a dispassionate and even sometimes sympathetic portrait of the men responsible for the deaths of the innocent.\u00a0 In macrocosm, \u201cWarnings Unheeded\u201d teaches us all graphic, object life lessons.\u00a0 It is in microcosm, however, that the gun element comes into things.<\/p>\n

From President Obama down, anti-gun people have publicly scoffed at the idea of a single armed \u201cgood guy or gal\u201d stopping a mass murder, sometimes flatly (and falsely) saying it has never happened.\u00a0 Au contraire. <\/em>\u201cWarnings Unheeded\u201d is to my knowledge the fourth book written by someone who shot down a mass murderer and ended the slaughter. Two armed citizens have done so. Read \u201cGod, the Gunman, and Me\u201d by Jeanne Assam, the volunteer church security person who cut down the mass killer at a Colorado church, or \u201cShooting Back: the Right and Duty of Self-Defense\u201d by Charl van Wyk, who alone with his 5-shot .38 revolver ended the mass machine gun and grenade attack on a church by a squad of guerrillas. And don\u2019t forget \u201cThey Call Me Ranger Ray\u201d by Ramiro Martinez. He was one of the cops who killed Charles Whiteman atop the Texas Tower in 1966, led to the top of the tower by armed citizen Allen Crum. Martinez states flatly in the book that it was return fire from citizens with rifles on the ground who pinned Whitman down and stopped the killings until he and brother officer Houston McCoy could ascend the tower and fatally shoot the gunman.\u00a0 \u201cWarnings Unheeded\u201d joins these classic first person accounts of heroism prevailing over mass murderers.<\/p>\n

I was deeply honored when Andy asked me to write the foreword for this book. I think you will be moved by it, and educated by it, as much as I was, and so will anyone to whom you give this book for Christmas. \u201cWarnings Unheeded\u201d by Andy Brown is available on Amazon<\/a>.
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