Hero students stopped school shooting in Colorado.

Kendrick Castillo died while helping subdue one of the shooters. NBC News/Facebook.

Multiple students helped tackle and subdue two school shooters in Colorado. NBC News. Two suspects, a male 18 year old named Devon Erickson and an underage female-to-male transgender attacked STEM School at Highlands Ranch, a Denver area school. Kendrick Castillo, an 18 year old student, lunged at the attacker but was fatally shot. The action gave time for other students to escape or fight back. One of the students that fought back was a Marine recruit Brenden Bialy. In addition to Castillo's death, eight other students were wounded. School security helped subdue the other shooter. 

Some information has come out about the attackers. The 2nd attacker has been identified as Maya/Alec McKinney. Both McKinney and Erickson were both members of the LGBT community. Erickson is a registered Democrat who praised Barack Obama and criticized President Donald Trump. He also said he hated Christianity for perceived bias against the LGBT community. It is unclear what the motive for the attack was. 

My Comment:

I was originally not going to cover this story for the usual reason. I don't like giving these kinds of attackers attention because it is so obvious that is what they want. My general rule is not to cover mass shootings unless there is a good reason to do so. In this case I think that is now true. 

First of all, it's clear that the fact that there were people willing to fight back at this school is the reason only one person died. Not only did the school have adequate security, they also had several students who decided to fight back. Resistance is probably the most important factor in the number of deaths a mass shooting has and in this case there was a lot of it. 

I have nothing but praise for the students that attacked the shooters. Though the first student, Kendrick Castillo wasn't able to stop the shooter himself, he did buy time for others to do so or escape. The Marine recruit, Brenden Bialy, deserves credit as well. They both risked their lives and Castillo paid with his life to save his fellow students. 

I think that the action of these boys/men is one that should be emulated. It shows how important fighting back is and how many lives it can save. If they hadn't acted two people with handguns at a school could have killed double digit numbers of people. Having a competent police and security response certainly helped but having the kids fight back saved many lives. 

As for the suspects, they are pretty much the most pathetic shooters since Elliot "supreme gentleman" Rodger. Despite being armed with two handguns and having two shooters at once, they pretty much completely failed. Plus both of them were weak, tiny people that deservedly got their asses kicked. They had stupid interests and the whole thing seemed like an attempt to be edgy. They were a couple of losers and would have amounted to nothing had they not done this. They will probably spend the rest of their lives in prison and I doubt they will do well there. 

It's very unclear what the attackers motives were. It seemed both of them were edgy teenagers who wanted attention but it's unclear if they had a specific point to make or if they were just being typical nihilistic idiots. It's possible that this was politically motivated, Erickson was politically active at least, but I don't want to speculate too much on motive. 

I do fear that this attack will be memory-holed. Both of the attackers are LGBT, I think. It's very unclear how these things work since Erickson was dating McKinny, who is biologically female but identifies and is transitioning to a male. That presumably means that Erikson is gay, but who knows how these things work. 

Either way, an attack carried out by LGBT members is not something that is politically correct. Attacks by minorities tend to be downplayed and the fact that this attack generally failed will probably mean that this shooting will be gone from the news soon. Given how these shootings spread memetically, that's probably for the best, but you know if these were a couple of straight Trump supporters it would be national news for weeks...