The more time passes in the wake of the terrible mass murder in Uvalde, the more damning details emerge that enrage everyday Americans.
You may have heard that a desperate mother was restrained by police outside the school, or that a father tried to rally support for charging in while the authorities stayed outside as the shots continued to ring out. But possibly the worst story emerged earlier this week.
We learned that a local man witnessed the Uvalde shooter crash his car, and when he stepped out to check on him in the aftermath, he was quickly met with gunfire. After escaping to safety unharmed, the man retrieved his own firearm and returned to the scene prepared to fight. Instead, he was met by a police officer outside the school and ordered “to stay back and shut up.”
This disturbing story is an example of the failure of gun control policy, where the government strips a good person of the ability to defend himself, or in this case, to defend young innocent school children.
In contrast to what we saw in Texas and to what the mainstream media and Democrat politicians would have you believe, good people armed with their own weapons can and do make a difference all the time. Just last week, a West Virginia woman carrying a concealed weapon shot a man who had begun firing his AR-15 style rifle into a crowd at a party. Miraculously, no one was hurt, except for the bad guy who was fatally shot by the concealed carrier. Now imagine if someone at the scene had tried to obstruct this good gal with a gun that night. Dozens could have been hurt or killed.
That would-be killer acquired his gun illegally. So, laws like what we’re seeing proposed won’t actually prevent lawbreakers from getting guns and attempting to commit heinous crimes. They’re not paying much attention to the law in the first place; they’re criminals. But good people would be prevented from using their firearms to stop them.
Gun Owners of America spokesman, Stephen Willeford, grabbed his AR-15 and ran outside barefoot to confront the Sutherland Springs church shooter five years ago. Instead of continuing his bloody rampage, the gunman was struck multiple times and forced to flee. None of the people whose lives were saved would want Stephen to have been disarmed and told to “to stay back and shut up.”
Sadly, these are not isolated incidents. Imagine if good people with guns hadn’t been there to pin down the University of Texas shooter in 1966, or if the Assistant Principal in Pearl, Mississippi hadn’t been able to grab his handgun from his car to stop a school shooter in 1997.
To date, not one of the horrifying mass murders in a school has occurred where teachers or staff could be armed. Think about that. By enforcing Gun-Free School Zones and advertising this fact to all, we have created the largest array of soft targets imaginable for a deranged madman to prey on. And we have bragged about having done “something” when what we’ve really done is attract these monsters to target our children.
We must repeal the Gun-Free School Zones Act, in order to allow parents or another passersby to carry weapons on school property, like the man who first encountered the Uvalde killer, before he went on to murder those precious children. In addition, we should arm willing teachers and staff, a solution supported by 81% of police.
We need to empower people to be their own first responders, because when seconds count, the police can be minutes away – or in the case of Uvalde or Parkland, nearly an hour away. In those crucial moments, lives are lost.
The stories from Uvalde should be a call to action. The fact that the police prohibited good people from exercising their Second Amendment rights in defense of innocent life – like has been demonstrated successfully on countless occasions – is atrocious and a natural result of the anti-gun Left’s wrong-headed policies.
We cannot just “do something.” We have to do something that works -- such as letting good people protect good people. Ironically, the would-be armed citizen in Uvalde was an employee at a funeral home, and he helped to bury five of the victims, including a cousin. Imagine the tears he sheds for all those innocent souls he wasn’t allowed to save.
Erich Pratt is the Senior Vice President for Gun Owners of America, a national gun rights lobby representing more than two million gun owners.