A would-be middle school shooter was thwarted after an unnamed tipster notified police. Following a gunfight with police, the shooter turned his gun on himself.

After a tipster reported a “potential violent act” that might occur at an Indiana middle school, officers confronted a 14-year-old gunman, who killed himself but didn’t harm any others, according to police.

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When the tipster called police around 8 a.m. Thursday to report potential violence at Dennis Intermediate School in Richmond, the school was locked down and officers were sent to the scene, the Indiana State Police said.

After officers confronted the teen outside the school, the gunman “reportedly shot out the glass of a locked entry door” and ran inside the building, police said.

The teen, who was not a student at the school but lived in the area, exchanged gunfire with the officers as they followed him, police said.

The 14-year-old died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. It’s not clear if the suspect was wounded by officers, police added.

No students were injured in the confrontation.

Honestly, this is still tragic, but not as tragic as it could have been. The ideal situation would have been to get this young man some help before he reached this stage.

That said, I can live with this outcome. While a perfect world wouldn’t have these kinds of things happen, we don’t have a perfect world. We have this one. In this one, someone knew something was going to happen, made a phone call, and the only person who is dead is the potential maniac who would have claimed any number of innocent lives.

Right now, I’m writing about a kid who killed himself, not another school shooting.

I sincerely pray we get these stories far more often than ones where innocent children are gunned down by maniacs, regardless of the maniac’s age. The fact that this kid was only 14 compounds the tragedy, but it doesn’t absolve him of anything with regard to his intentions.

What I want to know is when will academia, made up of a large number of people who claim to support gun control to stop these kinds of things from happening, going to step up and study the minds of people like this. Or do they really not give a damn about stopping mass shootings?

At this time, there’s still a lot we don’t know. We don’t know what kind of firearm the student used or where he obtained it. We can speculate, but that’s not overly productive at this time.

All we know is that a 14-year-old kid, someone far too young to own a firearm, was armed and got into a gunfight with police after they stopped him from committing a massacre. As a result, he took his own life, which may well have been part of his plan from the start.

What matters here is that no innocent lives were lost.

That’s a big win, no matter who you are.

The real heroes in this are not just the police, but the tipster.