Two Armed Strangers Stopped a Missouri Massacre—Chief Says So

Allen Prince, 27, faces first-degree murder, two counts of first-degree assault, and three counts of armed criminal action after police say he shot and killed 45-year-old Amy Coon of Strasburg and wounded a 16-year-old Price Chopper employee in the parking lot of the Pleasant Hill store.

Pleasant Hill Police Chief Tommy Wright didn't soften what happened next. Two armed men from the area closed on Prince after the first shots rang out. Prince then turned the gun on himself.

"I think that it's a good possibility that they prevented further bloodshed," Chief Wright said.

That's a police chief — not a gun-rights advocate, not a lobbyist — stating on the record that private citizens with firearms stopped a killer from running up a higher body count.

Court documents reported by The Kansas City Star add critical detail: witnesses told police Prince pulled the rifle from his own vehicle before opening fire. This was not a spontaneous brawl. It was a targeted, premeditated attack on people in a parking lot — the kind of soft-target ambush that continues until someone with a gun shows up to stop it.

Police were not on scene when the shooting started. They never are. The two armed men were.

Anti-gun politicians and Bloomberg-funded groups will spend this week telling you concealed carry doesn't work, that armed citizens make situations worse, and that only police should have firearms in public. Pleasant Hill just destroyed that argument in real time.

Amy Coon is dead. That tragedy is real. But without two law-abiding Missourians choosing to carry that day, the body count would almost certainly be higher — and every honest person on that scene knows it.

This is exactly what Missouri's constitutional carry law was built for. No permit required. No government permission slip. Just a citizen making the decision to be prepared — and standing in the right place when it mattered most.

**Carry every day. Every parking lot is a potential crime scene. The police will write the report — you need to survive long enough for them to arrive.**