Carolyn Righeimer asks us to contrast the recent murders at Sandy Hook with four previous shooting incidents where, she claims, “an armed civilian or off-duty policeman took out the gunman before there was a mass killing” [More guns will make us safer, Viewpoints, Jan. 16]. Anyone who cares to spend five minutes with Google can confirm the following summaries of these incidents, only one of which remotely supports her claim:
Appalachian School of Law, 2002. A student at the school shot and killed three people and wounded three others, then left the building where the shooting took place. He was eventually subdued by two off-duty law enforcement officers and several unarmed students, one of whom said the shooter set down his gun before he saw the two men with weapons.
Santee, Calif., 2001. After killing two students and wounding 13 others, the shooter was found by police, kneeling on a bathroom floor, wanting but unable to kill himself.
Pearl High School, 1997. After stabbing his mother to death, the gunman killed two students and injured seven others at his high school. As the shooter tried to escape in his mother’s car, he was detained by the school’s assistant principal, who had retrieved a pistol from his truck.
Winnemucca, Nev., 2008. A man entered a bar and fatally shot two members of what is to be described in news reports as “a rival family” before being shot and killed by a patron of the bar.
This is the only one of four incidents cited by Ms. Righeimer in which an armed bystander may have saved others, though the investigators believe the victims may have been specifically targeted as part of a feud between local families.
All other First World countries have much stricter firearms laws and dramatically lower gun homicide rates. A person who keeps a gun in the house has statistically a much greater probability of being a victim of gun violence than someone who doesn’t. In 2010, over 11,000 people in the U.S. were murdered with guns, and nearly 20,000 more used a gun to commit suicide. Does the occasional successful vigilante effort really offset all these deaths?
Ellen Hildner
River Forest
