If you’re someone who has the Parkland massacre in mind as the most recent school shooting, you’re mistaken but can’t really be called ignorant—an incident in which only two students were wounded before the shooting was put to an end by a not-so-mythical “good guy with a gun” isn’t sensational and doesn’t seem to push the right agendas. Instead, Joe Biden saying he would have beaten up Trump in high school is trending. If the would-be murderer had been successful, the story would be everywhere—but he was shut down before killing anyone, even his primary target.
That outcome, which is so often shouted down and dismissed as something that “never happens,” is exactly the one that a brief shooting Tuesday in Maryland arrived at, when school resource officer Blaine Gaskill was on hand in less than a minute to confront a student who wounded two others with a handgun before Gaskill fired on him with his own gun. The incident was ended almost immediately, and the worst of it (besides the end of the aggressor’s life) was a student who remains in critical condition.
There are many problems with the event itself, whether those are about the effectiveness of gun laws or the way a 17 year-old showed up with one or why he set off down that path in the first place, but perhaps the significant outcome overall is the way people reacted to it—or didn’t.
Our society’s gun control debate is generally a whirlwind of the loudest voices from the least reasonable people bashing into each other, focusing on too little and downplaying or ignoring too much that doesn’t align with the worldview that they seek to assert, rather than verify. After Parkland, we came back around to schools and how to prevent such horrors, and what’s probably the most relevant point of contention right now is the “good guy with a gun” argument.
“The blatantly simple end to that debate is yes, they do—or they can, when they haven’t been disarmed by laws that have exactly zero benefit for preserving life.”
The blatantly simple end to that debate is yes, they do—or they can, when they haven’t been disarmed by laws that have exactly zero benefit for preserving life. It’s maddening to see people making the argument that this isn’t a thing that happens—A, it does, and you can know the truth of this through an admittedly convoluted process that experts have termed “Googling it.”
B, obviously it’s not going to happen in settings where people are actively prevented from carrying a gun because they don’t want to go to jail. The choice they have is to be defenseless or break the law, and even when there’s someone who is ostensibly supposed to protect you there’s no guarantee that this person, with a legal monopoly on the use of force, isn’t going to plant roots and hide somewhere while somebody who doesn’t care about the signs murders people.
And C, consider the places where “good guys with guns” don’t have to worry about using them because would-be shooters know that they have no hope of actually accomplishing anything. Imagine that the White House was a gun-free zone—how long would Trump, or Obama before him, have been there before one of the legions of hate-filled partisans from the Other Side showed up to kill him? That doesn’t happen, due to the swarms of Secret Service agents that are present anywhere the president is or will soon be, presenting their capacity to decisively end any attempt on their charge’s life as a proven deterrent. Those “good guys with guns” are stopping assassination attempts 24/7 simply by existing.
The point here is not that people with the will and ability to stop mass shootings do so when they’re allowed the means. Rather, it’s the simple, logical point of order that the argument against them can’t hold water when we have clear evidence to the contrary.
