Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had a school resource officer. He did just about nothing to help when the shooting started that horrible day.

Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX also had a school resource officer. He did his job.

The Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed a school police officer exchanged gunfire with the suspected shooter who unleashed fatal gunfire at Robb Elementary in Uvalde.

Texas DPS confirmed to Fox News that the school officer was injured by gunfire, which allowed suspect [name redacted] to run inside the school and barricade himself. Ramos dropped a bag of ammunition at the entrance of the school as a result of the shootout, according to DPS.

Three other officers were injured in the attack that left 20 people dead, 19 of which were children.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough.

Does this shatter the “good guy with a gun” narrative? Is that simply not enough to prevent these kinds of horrific events from happening?

That depends on how well you understand what we mean when we talk about a good guy with a gun being what stops this kind of thing.

Yes, what happened in Uvalde was horrible and the good guy with the gun–the school resource officer–wasn’t able to prevent it. However, as Matt Vespa outlines over at our sister site Townhall, there are a number of other examples where mass shootings simply didn’t happen because of school resource officers.

While 20 people lost their lives, we can never how things might have gone down had he not been there.

Look, most rational people understand that, as a good guy with a gun, you’re a speed bump. You’re a barrier that draws the bad guy’s attention. Yes, you may put him down permanently, but you also may not. Yet you still engage him because while he’s shooting back at you, he’s not shooting at someone else.

For me, that’s enough. All I want in this world is for my life to matter, and if I go out taking on an active shooter, I’ll say that’s a good enough way to go.

A lot of school resource officers are probably the same way.

What happened in Uvalde is the exception, not the rule. When there’s a good guy with a gun on the scene, it rarely becomes a mass shooting. That’s just how it goes and we can see that over and over again, as Matt pointed out quite well.

The good guy with a gun still works. It’s just not a guarantee.

“But gun control isn’t a guarantee, either,” someone will fire back, I’m sure, but there’s a difference. We’ve seen over and over that gun control doesn’t work. We can point to numerous mass shootings that take place in gun-controlled states as evidence it doesn’t. It’s not that it’s not guaranteed, it’s that it just flat out doesn’t work.

Good guys with guns do.

In this case, though, the good guy with a gun was shot and injured before he could end the threat. That’s a real shame and I hope he recovers in both body and mind. I can’t imagine the survivor’s guilt he’s feeling right now, but he shouldn’t. He did his job and possibly saved a lot of lives, even if he couldn’t save everyone.