Inconvenient Events

A school shooting incident in Maryland splashed across the national news this morning. As is now the norm, it got reported across many platforms in near-real-time, with vague early information eventually giving way to concrete facts. At the time of this writing, it appears that a student shot two other students, wounding both (one critically), before being confronted and shot dead by an armed “school resource officer.”

This incident overlays the national debate on what to do about school shootings, a debate sparked by the recent incident at Parkland High School. That debate became a major political football, with unchecked vilification of the NRA and derision aimed at gun rights supporters. The preferred narrative, that more gun restrictions (and outright bans of AR-15s and similar rifles) are necessary, and that the alternative ideas (e.g. armed teachers and/or armed security in the schools) were wrong-headed, dangerous, and absurd.

How terribly inconvenient.

Not only does this good-guy-with-a-gun story undermine the Left’s straw man arguments against protecting schoolchildren with an armed presence, it casts light on the fact that we already have armed guards in some schools!

How terribly, terribly inconvenient.

So, now, in addition to the reports and video evidence that law enforcement totally blew it with regard to the Parkland shooters, we have demonstrable proof that an armed presence in a school can mitigate an active shooter situation.

Of course, good-guy-with-a-gun was not a myth even before today’s event. I catalog a couple dozen cases of armed citizens stopping mass shooters in Gun Rights Lesson #488, and the broader subject of defensive gun uses in Gun Rights Lesson #109.

The past is something, unfortunately, that people with preordained and dogmatic agendas will ignore when it’s inconvenient. No matter how often we bring up the horrors inflicted on societies after they’ve been disarmed, or of big, socialistic government in general, the past-tense aspect enables those who insist that they’re right despite all that history to simply close their eyes, plug their ears, and pretend things are different this time.

But, when a debate is in full-tilt, and one side of that debate insists that Solution X is untenable, a blatant example of X happening in the moment is quite a bucket of cold water to the face.

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised when the anti-gun crusaders ignore this incident. But, they’re of insufficient numbers in and of themselves to change things. They need to convince others of their points, and when the news went national with this story, their job suddenly became that much harder.

This is me, not shedding a single tear for the inconvenient situation the gun-grabbers now find themselves in.

Emotion-driven anecdotes are often advanced instead of real data to advance agendas. Protestations about how anecdotes are not data tend to be conveniently ignored, even when the data is massively contradictory to the anecdote. Rahm Emanuel famously quipped “never let a crisis go to waste,” reinforcing the idea that a high profile, heart-tugging event can be used to achieve what a mountain of dispassionate evidence and cold analysis cannot. But, he who lives by the anecdote can also die by the anecdote, and when we witness a good-guy-with-a-gun story at a (in)convenient time during a debate, we would be remiss in not leveraging it.

Especially when it’s one of many good-guy-with-a-gun stories.

Yes, armed security works. Ask the President. Ask any major public figure. Ask any celerity. There are bad people in the world, and trying to make them less dangerous by taking good people’s tools away is just stupid. Today’s incident, while sad and tragic, may very well have been much worse (both shot students are still alive) had the “no guns in schools” crowd had its way.

---

As an addendum, some facts regarding the Maryland shooting:

The shooter was 17, and therefore we can presume he did not purchase his gun legally.

The shooter used a Glock pistol, not one of those vilified AR-15s that, we are told, must be banned. In doing so, he matched the large majority (75%+) of school shooters.

AR-15s and equivalent modern sporting rifle “assault weapons” have been used in fewer than 1/4 of mass shootings. The number of homicides committed with these hated weapons amounts to barely 1% of the total number of homicides committed in America each year.

So, neither the proposed assault weapons ban nor the increase in gun purchase age for rifles would have made a hill-of-beans difference in this incident.

And, beyond that, we have the reality that Maryland already has very strict gun laws.

More laws won’t stop bad people.