Arizona state Senate candidate who fatally shot his mom says he wants more 'good guys' with guns

During a forum on gun control last week in Tucson, a Republican candidate for Arizona's Legislative District 2 stood up and said that he is proof of the importance of, in case of an attack, having a "good guy there with a gun."

Bobby Wilson said that when he was a teenager, he shot and killed a person who came into his room and wanted him dead, The Arizona Republic reports. "You can pass all the laws you want to in this world, and when you've got somebody out there that wants to harm somebody, they're going to do it if you don't stop them," he said.

The person he killed wasn't a burglar or a stranger, but rather his mother, Lavonne. Wilson was 18 and living in Hugo, Oklahoma, when the incident occurred. He said he woke up one morning "to find a rifle in my face," and he ended up having to dodge six bullets. He reached for the gun he kept under his bed, and used that to shoot his mom. The story doesn't end there, though. His younger sister, Judy, was also killed; Wilson said his mother swung her gun and accidentally hit her in the back of the head, killing the 17-year-old.

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Wilson told The Arizona Republic there were glass containers in his room filled with gasoline, and when the bullets started to fly, several shattered. When he went to turn on the light, a spark landed on the ground and the house went up in flames. He said it wasn't until he became a lawyer years later that he remembered all this, because he had amnesia after the shooting.

Newspaper reports from the time say Wilson confessed to shooting his mother, and when his sister ran at him, he crushed her skull with the rifle. He placed their bodies on a bed, then set the house on fire. He was tried on homicide charges, but after a jury agreed he had amnesia, the judge halted the trial until he could remember what happened. After seven years, Wilson asked for the charges to be dismissed, and a judge agreed. Read more about this bizarre tale at The Arizona Republic.