In stark contrast to the killings in Omaha is today’s tragic story from Colorado. A gunman entered a church and started shooting. He was killed by a member of the church’s security staff who was armed. Her actions saved a great many lives, without a doubt.
That’s how it should be done. If you don’t allow the public to carry firearms (and I don’t know for sure that the church prohibited that, but most churches tend to frown on armed worshipers), then you have a responsibility to the public. This church took that responsibility seriously. The folks who set the rules for the mall in Omaha clearly did not.
Update after the jump.
UPDATE: This changes things a bit. The woman who shot and killed the gunman was not, apparently, a member of the church’s security staff, as has been reported. She was a church with law enforcement experience who was carrying a weapon legally with the permission of the pastor. She apparently asked to do so after hearing about the first shooting. She saved, quite literally, dozens, if not hundreds, of lives.
I don’t have a ton of regard for these folks.
Jessie Gingrich, who had left New Life and was in the parking lot getting into her car, saw the gunman get a rifle from his trunk and open fire on a van with people inside. She cowered in her vehicle, fumbling with the ignition key.
“I was just expecting for the next gunshot to be coming through my car. Miraculously—by the grace of God—it did not,” she told ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday.
One wonders if she might have caught him unawares if she had managed to get her car started and tried to use it to stop him. It would have been risky, but still…
Ashley Gibbs was getting into a car with David Harris when they heard the gunshots—a sound like someone kicking ice from the side of a car, she said. Harris said he saw the gunman, and it looked like he knew how to handle a weapon.
“I was in the military for about three years, and the way he was holding the rifle looked just like the way we were taught to when I was in the military,” he told NBC’s “Today” show on Monday.
They stayed in the vehicle and prayed for the gunman.
“It was obvious that he was in some sort of pain and going through a lot,” Gibbs told “Today.” “I just prayed God would bring him peace.”
Which he did, thankfully, because someone not named Gibbs or Harris had the courage to do a bit more than pray. And this guy was in the military? Obviously his training didn’t sink in very far. Perhaps Gibbs would have been better off praying that someone else would stop the guy before he sent a lot of her fellow church members to meet God. The gunman’s peace could wait until he was done killing people.
Really. I know it was a tense scene and people do freeze up. But have we come so far that the brave woman who shot the gunman down was the only one who could summon the presence of mind to do anything to impede the killer? One out of seven thousand?
Maybe we really have become a nation of sheep. Great.
(via Instapundit)
