The shooting at Annunciation Catholic School wasn't quite like other school shootings. The killer never set foot inside the building, for one. He just shot through the windows.
But that's only part of what we need to know about this incident. It also shatters anti-gun myths.
Let's start by recognizing this happened in Minnesota, which is slowly becoming more and more anti-gun by the legislative session, or so it seems from here. They don't have an assault weapon ban, though I expect they'll pass one in the next session after this. They do, however, have gun-free zones and red flag laws, among other things.
And over at Ammoland, Sean Maloney talked about how it undermines the gun control argument.
These areas are not free of guns; they are free of the guns of law-abiding citizens. To a murderer, a “gun-free zone” is not a deterrent—it is a target. It is an advertisement announcing that every person inside is completely disarmed and unable to fight back. In the horrifying minutes of the Annunciation Church shooting, the victims were left utterly defenseless. Their reliance on a promise of safety that the law could not deliver left them as helpless targets.
...
The attack was over in a matter of minutes. The shooter fired 116 rounds, killing two children and wounding 21 others, including 18 children and three elderly adults.
In less than 240 seconds, two young lives were viciously taken, and a score of others were changed forever. This is the horrifying reality of a “gun-free zone”: in a crisis, every second counts. On average, a mass shooting can result in a new casualty every 2-3 seconds. In the Annunciation Church attack, the rate of carnage was even faster. There was no time for law enforcement to arrive and stop the killing. The only thing that could have stopped the killing was an immediate, effective, and armed response from a good person within the church itself.
Furthermore, the notion that magazine limits or bans on certain firearms would have prevented this tragedy is a fantasy. A determined killer is not going to be stopped by a 10-round magazine limit. They will simply carry more magazines, and the pauses to reload will be measured in seconds—not enough time for victims to flee or for police to arrive. These measures do not stop evil; they merely inconvenience the good. They are a form of virtue signaling that accomplishes nothing but making it more difficult for a person to defend themselves when confronted with a violent threat.
Bingo.
When seconds count, police are just minutes away.
Don't get me wrong, they want to be there. The vast majority of police officers would do anything to be there at that moment to stop something that awful from happening. The fact of the matter is that they can't.
If they'd been at that church on that day, I suspect the killer would have gone to a secondary target and attacked there. Or he'd have waited for another day and attacked then.
Or he'd have killed the officer first, before he had time to react, assuming he was aware.
The truth, though, is that the anti-gun mythology is that gun-free zones somehow work, that telling people they can't carry firearms at churches or schools yields some real results, but it doesn't. It never has.
What it does is make everyone there vulnerable.
We already know the killer chose his target in part based on it being a gun-free zone. The fact that just about every mass killer does the same--and those who don't tend not to live long enough to come close to that title--should be a big red flag to everyone.
It's not.
Then we have the fact that absolutely no one in this killer's life felt he was a danger to anyone and took advantage of the state's red flag law. This is a law we were specifically told would disarm people like him. It didn't, and it's not the first time we've seen that, either.
All around, the mythology of gun control--that these measures work to keep people safe--was shattered.
The problem is that most in the media and the anti-gun side are doubling down, saying the problem is that we didn't have enough of what failed, all while ignoring the facts.
Unfortunately, this is what we're dealing with these days.
