gun safety

“I’d rather you regard me as James, you know, just a regular person,” he said in an interview on Monday afternoon. “Because I feel like everybody can do pretty much what I did.”

Only a few hours earlier he had slipped into Vanderbilt’s trauma unit, visiting two women who survived the shooting. He spoke to them softly and stayed perhaps two or three minutes in each room, deflecting any talk of his bravery…

Through their quiet tears, it seemed, the patients could only whisper back. As the father of a 4-year-old girl, Mr. Shaw said the morning’s most striking exchange was his tearful embrace with the young woman’s father.

“We had a father moment when we saw each other,” Mr. Shaw said afterward in the lobby, where one woman approached him for a selfie. “If you can imagine, actually, your child being there and meeting the person who saved their child, it was very touching.”

On Monday, Mr. Shaw, who suffered a graze wound from a gunshot and a second-degree burn on his right hand when he grabbed the barrel of the rifle, was taking incremental steps toward his own recovery. His hand was throbbing with a large blister, and he had to see a doctor…

“I acted in a blink of a second,” Mr. Shaw said. “When he reloaded his clip, that felt like 30 minutes. I looked at him, and he wasn’t looking at me. He just had the barrel down. It was like, ‘Do it now. Go now.’ I just took off.”

He scuffled with the man, whom the police later identified as Travis Reinking, a 29-year-old construction worker with a history of brushes with authorities. Mr. Shaw managed to seize the rifle and hurled it over a countertop. Mr. Reinking, he recalled, began cursing him.

“He was mad at me,” he said. “I was just trying to live. I wasn’t trying to get no money from him, I wasn’t trying to do anything from his standpoint. I just wanted to live, and he was, like, astonished, that I wanted to live.”

Mr. Shaw said it did not occur to him to chase Mr. Reinking, who would be arrested more than 24 hours later in a wooded area near his apartment complex. Only when Mr. Shaw tried to leave the restaurant did he realize that he was among the wounded. His truck was bloodied, his right arm dripping and painful.

Since then, he has insisted he did not act for the common good. The shooting played out too quickly to contemplate acts of heroism, he said. “I know I saved other people. I have a 4-year-old daughter: I didn’t even think about her. In the midst of it, I was just trying to save myself.”…

If the president won't honor James Shaw Jr., we will. And if you want to thank him for his heroism and heart, donate to this gofundme page here: https://t.co/QvdwwlMqjp pic.twitter.com/fXY7pzy2BL

— Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) April 26, 2018