Nearly Every Mass Shooting Has Been Stopped by a Gun

Glenn Reynolds, law professor at the University of Tennessee and blogger at Instapundit, writes a response opinion piece to all those calling for more gun control after the Virginia Tech shooting. It's appropriately titled: People don't stop killers. People with guns do.

On Monday, as the news of the Virginia Tech shootings was unfolding, I went into my advanced constitutional law seminar to find one of my students upset. My student, Tara Wyllie, has a permit to carry a gun in Tennessee, but she isn't allowed to have a weapon on campus. That left her feeling unsafe. "Why couldn't we meet off campus today?" she asked.

Virginia Tech graduate student Bradford Wiles also has a permit to carry a gun, in Virginia. But on the day of the shootings, he would have been unarmed for the same reason: Like the University of Tennessee, where I teach, Virginia Tech bans guns on campus.

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Virginia Tech doesn't have that kind of trust in its students (or its faculty, for that matter). Neither does the University of Tennessee. Both think that by making their campuses "gun-free," they'll make people safer, when in fact they're only disarming the people who follow rules, law-abiding people who are no danger at all.

This merely ensures that the murderers have a free hand. If there were more responsible, armed people on campuses, mass murder would be harder.

In fact, some mass shootings have been stopped by armed citizens. Though press accounts downplayed it, the 2002 shooting at Appalachian Law School was stopped when a student retrieved a gun from his car and confronted the shooter. Likewise, Pearl, Miss., school shooter Luke Woodham was stopped when the school's vice principal took a .45 fromhis truck and ran to the scene. In February's Utah mall shooting, it was an off-duty police officer who happened to be on the scene and carrying a gun.

Police can't be everywhere, and as incidents from Columbine to Virginia Tech demonstrate, by the time they show up at a mass shooting, it's usually too late. On the other hand, one group of people is, by definition, always on the scene: the victims. Only if they're armed, they may wind up not being victims at all.

"Gun-free zones" are premised on a fantasy: That murderers will follow rules, and that people like my student, or Bradford Wiles, are a greater danger to those around them than crazed killers like Cho Seung-hui. That's an insult. Sometimes, it's a deadly one.

Reynolds didn't have room to mention that in the Pearl, MS shooting, the assistant principal had to run nearly a 1/2 mile to retrieve his weapon because federal law prohibits guns within 1000 feet of schools. He couldn't park his car at the school with a gun in it. He had to park it well down the street with lengthened his response time significantly (and might have cost lives).

The reality is, just about every mass shooting incident that I can think of has been stopped with a gun. Either the shooter did himself in as police closed in, as in the case in Virginia Tech or Columbine, or somebody else stepped in with a weapon and stopped the incident. There haven't been too many where the shooter simply gave up or was tackled into submission. It usually took a weapon or the threat of one.