AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File

When you look at statistics, mass shootings are extraordinarily rare. The odds that you’ll be impacted are slim. Think about it. How many of you have had any ties to a victim or survivor of a mass shooting? Most don’t.

However, they happen often enough that it’s damn hard to convince most people of that fact.

Yesterday, another such shooting took place, this time at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Two people were killed and four others injured after a campus shooting Tuesday at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, officials said.

[Name redacted], 22, was charged with two counts of murder and four counts of attempted murder, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said early Wednesday.

Police were called late Tuesday afternoon after a gunman shot several students. A suspect was arrested inside an on-campus building, university police Chief Jeffrey A. Baker said.

“I can’t tell you the sadness of the entire community to know that a situation like this has occurred on our campus,” Baker said late Tuesday. “We are all pretty much devastated.”

Three of the injured are in critical condition, according to Baker.

[The alleged shooter] was also charged with four counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, possession of a firearm on educational property and discharging a firearm on educational property, police said. No one else is being sought.

I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t worried about any of those laws when he brought a firearm on campus with the intent to kill people.

Before the usual suspects start going on about red flag laws, it doesn’t look like this would have helped in this case.

Baker said that “one officer immediately went to the suspect to take him down.”

“He said nothing,” Baker said, referring to the suspect. “Our officers’ actions definitely saved lives, there’s no doubt about that.”

Baker referred to the suspect as “not somebody that is on our radar.”

That suggests that there would be no reason to initiate a red flag order in the first place.

However, it does look like a good guy with a gun stepped in and reacted. While the anti-gunners are likely to point out that this was a campus police officer, not a private citizen, we’ve never pretended that the exclusive domain of “good guy with a gun” was the private citizen. Yes, we count police in that same camp.

We’re realistic enough to understand that a campus police officer may not be in a position to react.

Regardless, at least this time one was.

At this time, we know remarkably little. We don’t know what kind of firearm was used in the attack, how the shooter got his weapon or much of anything else. We do know that age limits had no impact since he was 22-years-old. Did he use a handgun or a long gun? Maybe he used a shotgun. We don’t know anything at this point.

What we do know is that he started the attack fairly late in the afternoon, which may have helped keep the number of casualties down.

It’s a horrible thing to write about. No one wants to see these attacks happen. Unfortunately, they do, and despite anti-gunners most fervent wishes, they’re not going to go away with a new law, either.