A Good Guy With a Gun Stopped a Shooting?

The big news yesterday was yet another possible school shooting. This time a 17-year-old brought a Glock handgun to Great Mills High school in Maryland. Fortunately, he only wounded two people. The ammosexuals have been fetishizing the incident because, supposedly a “good guy with a gun” stopped a shooting. Except, that is not what happened.

Here’s the CNN report:

The incident began in a school hallway at 7:55 a.m., just before classes started. Authorities say Austin Wyatt Rollins, armed with a handgun, shot a female and a male student. The shooter had a prior relationship with the female student, St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron said.

School resource officer Blaine Gaskill responded to the scene in less than a minute, the sheriff said. Gaskill fired a round at the shooter, and the shooter fired a round simultaneously, Cameron said.

So, a shooting wasn’t “stopped.” Three people were shot. Did the officer keep more people from being shot? Who knows. It does seem the young man may have had a specific target in mind, and the other student may have been involved, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even if he did intend to shoot more people, it would have been limited as he didn’t have a 60 or 100 round magazine (as he would have with an AR15).

The shooter was also shot and killed, and a Student Resource Officer (SRO), justified or not, will have to live with that. Not a random “good guy with a gun,” but a trained and experienced law enforcement officer.

Wayne LaPierre of the industry trade association, the National Rifle Association (NRA), is constantly making the claim, “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” The problem is, that rarely works. According to a report from the Violence Policy Center, for every 1 “justifiable” gun homicide in 2012 there were 34 criminal gun homicides, 78 gun suicides, and 2 accidental gun deaths.¹

At the end of the day, two school children were seriously wounded, one kid was killed, and an SRO has to live with having to shoot and kill a kid all because of a gun. A good guy with a gun didn’t prevent a shooting. You can deflect, blame, and disssemble all you want, but at the end of the day, because of a  gun, a school kid was killed and two were wounded…at school.

1. “Guns in America: For every criminal killed in self-defense, 34 innocent people die,” Wonkblog, Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham June 19, 2015.