Response To Aremd Response

I won't be sad to see this year end. There has been enough annoying, sad, gut-wrenching news that I will simply chalk it all up to the fact that this year ended with a thirteen. It wasn't a lucky year for most anybody. Except maybe for the folks at the National Rifle Association.
Yes, the folks at the NRA would like us to know, from their website where they offer "food, fun, fellowship and firearms," that the most recent school shooting had a silver lining. "Gun control laws didn't stop a possible massacre at Arapahoe High School," the NRA wrote in a letter to its members last Friday. "A good guy with a gun stopped the rampage and in doing so almost certainly prevented much greater harm. For that, we can all be thankful." It is the opinion of the friendly fellows with firearms that "much greater harm" was avoided because there was an armed response to the shooter at Arapahoe High. "The attacker's mission was stopped short by the quick response of an armed deputy sheriff who was working as a resource officer at the school," the letter continued. "Upon learning of the threat, the deputy ran from the cafeteria to the library, yelling for people to get down and identifying himself as a deputy sheriff.  The horrific incident lasted only a total of 80 seconds and ended with the shooter turning his gun on himself in the library as the deputy was closing in on him." I'm no expert here, and I won't be on the mailing list for any of these letters in the future, but it seems to me that what really put an end to the threat was a bad guy with a gun. When the shooter, armed with a shotgun, about one hundred twenty-five rounds of ammunition, three Molotov cocktails and a machete, blew his own head off, the threat was eliminated.
The rose-colored glasses at the NRA see it differently: "As bad as that was," they wrote, "things could have been much worse." Thank you for that perspective, friendly firearm folks. I'm pretty sure that neither of these views makes a difference to the family, friends of Claire Davis and the community of Arapahoe High. 

In an oddly related note, Mikhail Kalashnikov died Monday. The inventor of the AK-47, the most popular firearm in the world, has gone to his final rest. When asked how he felt about his contribution to bloodshed, he said, "I sleep well. It's the politicians who are to blame for failing to come to an agreement and resorting to violence." Didn't he get the letter?