Arming the right people can save lives

 




Everyone knows the terrible litany of gun violence: Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, the Cinemark movie theater in Colorado, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Sandy Hook Elementary School.
Here are some examples you may not have heard about: Pearl High School in Mississippi; Sullivan Central High School in Tennessee; Appalachian School of Law in Virginia; a middle-school dance in Edinboro, Pa.; Players Bar and Grill in Nevada; a Shoney's restaurant in Alabama; Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City; New Life Church in Colorado; Clackamas Mall in Oregon (three days before Sandy Hook), and Mayan Palace Theater in San Antonio (three days after Sandy Hook).
There's a reason that you never heard much about the places on the second list. The number of innocent people killed was much smaller -- sometimes, none. In each of them, the "active shooter" or potential shooter was confronted by an armed defender who happened to be at the scene when the attack commenced; the bad guy wasn't able to just keep going about his deadly business, as at Sandy Hook.
Sometimes the hero was an armed school guard (Sullivan Central High). Sometimes it was an off-duty police officer or mall security guard (Trolley Square; Mayan Theater; Clackamas Mall; and the Appalachian Law School, where two law students, one of them a police officer and the other a former sheriff's deputy, had guns in their cars). Or a restaurant owner (Edinboro). Or a church volunteer guard with a concealed-carry permit (Colorado). Or a diner with a concealed-carry permit (Alabama and Nevada). At Pearl High School, it was the vice principal who had a gun in his car and stopped a 16-year-old, who had killed his mother and two students, before he could drive away, perhaps headed for the junior high.
The experience of armed resistance shows the value of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre's call for armed security guards in every school. It was perhaps not a coincidence that in calling for school guards, LaPierre was endorsing an idea that has a higher level of public support, in post-Newtown polls, than any other proposed solution to school violence.


Arming the right people can save lives | StarTribune.com