Air Force veteran John Parker, who had a licensed concealed carry gun on his side, was was situated in a building about 200 yards away from where the shooting began at Umpqua Community College yesterday. Instead of taking down the active shooter, Parker was prevented by staff from intervening in the shooting in which ten people were killed.

“There were a few people in the vet center and then when we heard the shooting happened, we got up and we were gonna go out and see what we could do,” Parker told Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

“Immediately the school staff stopped us and told us to get inside of the building….essentially the staff wouldn’t let us go to assist,” he added.

While UCC does have a security guard, Joe Olson–the former president of Umpqua Community College–says the school only keeps one guard on shift at a time and that guard is unarmed.

Breitbart News previously reported that the Umpqua campus is a gun free zone, and former U.S. Marshal Art Roderick suggested the gunman chose the campus for that very reason. He said, “[The gunman] probably knew that the facility was a gun free facility, [which is] an easy target for these kinds of coward individuals. They know they’re not going to get any response unless they happen to run into security or a campus police officer.”

One student, Army veteran Chris Mintz, was in the classroom when the shooting started and charged the gunman in an attempt to stop the attack. Mintz was shot 7 times, but is expected to live. His his aunt Sheila Brown told NBC News in a telephone interview. “We were told he did heroic things to protect some people.”

The shooter, who was suspected to be an islamic sympathizer, targeted Christians in his rampage.

“[He started] asking people one by one what their religion was. ‘Are you a Christian?’ he would ask them, and if you’re a Christian stand up. And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you are going to see God in just about one second.’ And then he shot and killed them,” Stacy Boylen, whose daughter was wounded at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., told CNN.

“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” the gunman told the professor teaching the class. He shot the man point blank, Anastasia Boylan recounted. Boylan, 18, was hit in the back by a bullet that traveled down her spine. While she lay bleeding on the floor, the gunman called out to her, “Hey you, blond woman,” her mother said.

She played dead — and survived.

As Obama uses this tragedy to preach gun control, let’s all remember that gun free zones are not a safe haven and only serve to render people defenseless. If a gun free zone sign doesn’t stop criminals, it is ignorant to think another law in a book will.