Armed school resource officer stops a mass shooting at a school in Maryland.

Police and media respond to the attack at Great Mills High School. Washington Post

Deputy Blaine Gaskill, an armed school resource officer, stopped a mass shooting at Great Mills High School in Maryland. Washington Post. Gaskill is a trained SWAT officer that had been assigned as a school resource officer. The 17 year old attacker shot a 16 year old girl and a 14 year old boy with a Glock but was engaged by the officer. Both exchanged fire but Gaskill was not hurt. It is unclear if Gaskill killed the attacker or if he killed himself. The difference in outcome between this case and the mass shooting in Florida is clear as the officer in that case did not confront the killer as he murdered 17 people. 

My Comment:

I'm honestly surprised how fair this Washington Post article was. It actually quoted pro-gun people, which is something that doesn't happen very often. It also basically said that the pro-gun people were right in this case. A good guy with a gun can stop a mass shooter. I don't like the Washington Post, but I will support good journalism when it happens. 

And it is very clear that the difference between this case and the shooting in Florida is the fact that the school resource officer actually did something besides standing around. Had officer Scot Peterson in Parkland, Florida actually confronted the shooter in that case some people probably still would have died, but there was a very good chance of him putting the killer down or at the least let the children escape. 

Before getting too much in the gun rights argument, I do want to point out that this looks like a copycat of the Parkland shooting. That event got way more media coverage than it deserved and we know that these kind of things spread via mememetics. I am guessing the attacker in this case saw that the whole world freaked out over what Nikolas Cruz did and figured he could do the same thing. It's possible he had other reasons for doing this, but my guess is he wanted to get famous in the same way Cruz is. 

Thankfully, he failed and died pretty quickly. I won't even mention his name since he doesn't deserve infamy. The kind of message we should send from this case and other school shootings is that you are very likely to die if you try it and everyone will make fun of you if you try. And that's the message I am sending. 

Still, these things are going to happen eventually but the best outcome is the outcome we had today, with an armed person killing the attacker before too many people are hurt. To that end we should have more well trained and armed police officers like Blaine Gaskill in the schools. Not enough schools have resource officers and those that do tend to only have one. 

Of course the example of Scot Peterson at Parkland shows the limitations of school resource officers. A good guy with a gun isn't a help when the guy isn't good and doesn't have the will to protect students. To prevent that, it is important to back up these officers with teachers and other school staff that choose to be armed. 

By increasing the number of school resource officers and arming teachers and other staff, we can greatly reduce the threat of school shooters. The problem now is that too many schools are soft targets where attackers know that they will have several minutes to shoot people uninterrupted. If we can change that we won't totally eliminate the threat but we can reduce it by several orders of magnitude. 

This attack also shows that a good guy with a gun works better at stopping school shootings than gun control ever could. Maryland already has very draconian gun laws and the attacker was already prohibited from buying a gun legally. He either stole the gun or was able to find an illegal seller. Neither of those things would have been prevented by further gun laws. And banning AR-15's wouldn't do anything since this attacker just used a handgun instead.

Hopefully this case will change some minds. Already it is getting more coverage than I would expect. The media for once is doing their job and covering the fact that a good guy with a gun stopped this attack. Why the media is actually doing their job in this case when they have consistently failed to do so in the past I do not know, but it is a refreshing change of pace. Hopefully it continues in the future.