There’s nothing wrong with having your gun ready and waiting in ambush…

Its called “good tactics.”

Playing devil’s advocate: Most of the readers here do IDPA, IPSC, FOF, etc… How many CCW’ers are out there that don’t do jack and would do no better than these pawns.

As many have said and continue to say: just having a gun isn’t enough.

Aready done
http://www.vcdl.org/pdf/Force-on-Force-Aug-Sept-07.pdf

And he was honest enough to point out that the make up of the class room was not realistic and helped in the success of stopping the active shooter.

Another interesting test might be to take one of those same college kids, give them some basic training in “yank and shank” prison style knife attacks and then have them go after the cop as well. It’s be even funnier if the cop’d never heard about the Tueller Drill.

Y’know, on second thought I think I feel a video of my own coming on.

Agreed. I know a guy in California whose dad rushed a shooter armed with two handguns that was intent on killing everyone in the restaurant. His dad wasn’t even armed, but he rushed the shooter, and in the process the distraction he created allowed 14 people to escape the restaurant saving their lives. Sadly his dad took four fatal rounds. Here is a quote from a news report about the incident:

“A videotape of the Pismo Beach shooting showed a diner, Harold L. Hatley, lunging at the gunman, giving others precious seconds to flee before Mr. Hatley was shot dead at close range, the police said.”

If an unarmed hero can disrupt a shooter to that extent, imagine what a trained person with a firearm can do when engaging a psycho with minimal experience who is armed. Typically most random shooters are not very good with their weapon. If you evaluate the number of rounds discharged vs the number of people killed or wounded in those incidents, it is easy to see that most are far below average in skills. If you disrupt their fantasy, they will most likely turn the gun on themselves. Diane Sawyer should stick to what she does best…baking brownies. ;)

Since you brought it up, this piece also employs the unobtainable training argument as well. The first scenario shown would not be mitigated by any amount of training. An honest experiment would have placed the expert in the seat, and given him the opportunity to defend his flank from an unexpected direction (while wearing a mask) against an attacker firing at point blank range–while not hitting innocent bystanders. Sorry, the probability of success is so incredibly incredibly slim, that it’s not even worth considering.

The preventative aspect of armed defenders is in the mind of a potential attacker. Once the firing starts, armed defenders will reduce the body counts of innocents, not entirely prevent them. That’s not a guarantee, but a statistical probability. The fact that further restrictions on weapons wouldn’t enhance security or survival is, of course, purposefully neglected in the piece.

Thanks for posting this. It makes me wonder if we are in for a new media push for gun control (I mean, more than the usual). Anyone else remember that made for TV movie from back back in the 80′s where everyone in this small town starts carrying handguns, which somehow makes them all morons and/or psychotic, and they proceed to shoot each other at an alarming rate? For some reason this reminded me of that movie.

On top of what has already been mentioned, how many times do you think they had those students practice drawing from concealment prior to the exercise? I’m betting that the number rhymes with the name of a famous Roman emperor.

One other thing: Either the desks in that classroom were made of sterner stuff than they appear, or Diane does not understand the difference between cover and concealment.