I’ve finally released my third novel, Safe From the War, as an ebook on Amazon. Print and audio versions to follow (hopefully soon). This book is the prequel to Line in the Valley, and explains what my protagonist Jerry Nunez experienced in Houston before he was sent to fight on the Texas border.

In one day it’s received a few five-star reviews. Not a bad start.

Short excerpt:

“Nunez approached the door, watching the window closely for shadows against the glass, eyes peering through blinds, anything. He saw and heard nothing. The door had no windows, and dirt was streaked across it at waist level.

Everything else was clean. Dirt on the door didn’t fit. Nunez pulled the flashlight from his belt and strobed the door with it.

I’m well aware of how horrible and tragic school shootings are. I’ve studied school shootings, trained as a cop on how to respond to school shootings, and trained other cops on how to respond to school shootings. As a father of two elementary-age children, one high schooler and one college student, and as the husband of a former teacher, son of a retired teacher and brother to a current teacher, I’m extremely concerned about the safety of school students and staff. I’m well aware that easy availability of guns is a significant factor in the seemingly endless stream of school and mass shootings. I’m aware that a lunatic pounding on a computer keyboard in his mother’s basement is a simple nuisance, but a lunatic with a grudge against the world and a gun is a guaranteed tragedy.

But I oppose new gun control laws.

The anti-gun side needs to understand something. Pro-2nd Amendment people like me aren’t pro-mass murder. I have a hard time imagining a bigger piece of human excrement than a man who would intentionally murder even one innocent, terrified, defenseless child. One of the hardest things I’ve ever read was a survivor’s account of a little boy’s last words at Sandy Hook: “Help me! I don’t want to be here!”, to which the shooter responded, “Well, you’re here,” before killing him. I can’t even imagine how I’d feel if my child had been in that school.

Unlike many fellow 2A supporters, I don’t blame parents of murdered children for demanding stricter gun laws. They’ve just lost a child, in one of the most horrible ways possible. They’re going to lash out. They’re going to pick the easiest and most obvious target for their rage, frustration and grief. I understand why those parents feel the way they do, and why they say the things they say.

But I still oppose new gun control laws.

Here’s a sad, crappy fact: laws don’t do anything by themselves. Actual humans are required to take actual actions to make people follow laws. For example, any legally-declared “gun free zone” (GFZ) can only be made gun-free if access is controlled by people, usually people with guns, who ensure anyone entering doesn’t have a gun (an airport, for example). But if we declare a school a GFZ, then don’t establish airport-like security, we’re not keeping guns out. We’re simply wishing them away. And no child will be protected by a Gun Free Wish.

Likewise, any suggestion for regulating gun sales, possessions or transfers from this point forward won’t magically eliminate the hundreds of millions of guns already in existence. If a lunatic has a gun today, and a law banning lunatics from having guns is passed tomorrow, the lunatic will still have the gun the day after tomorrow. Legislation doesn’t change the laws of physics. It doesn’t alter reality.

This isn’t just my opinion. Even Vice President Joe Biden, gun control champion, admitted it during the push for new gun laws after the Sandy Hook shooting.

If we’re going to make a real effort to stop mass shootings, let’s at least acknowledge reality. A man intent on mass murder and suicide isn’t going to be deterred by jail time, or signs on walls, or even locked doors (the Sandy Hook murderer easily shot his way through a plate glass window). The only thing that can prevent a mass murderer from entering a school is heavy security and people with guns; if we’re not going to make every school half prison and half airport (and we’re not), then any aspiring murderer who wants to bring in a gun can bring in a gun. If that murderer gets in, and starts shooting, the ONLY sure way to make them stop is the immediate application of overwhelming force.

At Sandy Hook, the shooter shot through this window to bypass the locked door

Police who arrive five minutes after shots are fired can’t apply that force quickly enough. SWAT teams who arrive thirty minutes later can’t do it. Only the intended victims, the people who are eye to eye with the murderer, can react in seconds and put the murderer down.

Antoinette Tuff talked Michael Brandon Hill out of committing mass murder at an Atlanta school in 2013. She was a hero, and Michael Hill was a pathetic loser who wasn’t committed to murder. He had a murder fantasy, found out the reality of facing terrified teachers and being shot at by police wasn’t as much fun as he expected, and gave up. Plenty of wishful idealists rightfully praised Tuff, but wrongfully concluded “you don’t need a gun to stop a mass murderer with an AK-47.” Anyone who thinks we should make a policy of “let’s talk the killer out of killing us”, to put it mildly, is an amazingly dedicated idiot.

Sometimes unarmed people have stopped mass killers, like at the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona. Amazingly dedicated idiots at Slate, Mother Jones, Addicting Info and other sites have repeatedly pointed out incidents where unarmed people took down mass shooters, and concluded victims are better off unarmed against a mass shooter. But untrained and unequipped people sometimes put out fires too. Untrained and unequipped people save lives in medical emergencies. That’s not because it’s better to be untrained and unequipped. It’s because sometimes trained and equipped people aren’t there, so people with no training or equipment have to do something. None of those situations are made better by the lack of firefighters or doctors, and no mass shooter incident was made better by the lack of armed good guys willing and able to immediately fight back.

Hero Chris Mintz, who was unarmed and tried to block the Oregon college shooter from entering a room. Mintz was shot seven times. Bravery is not enough.

The bottom line is that the only sure way to quickly stop a mass shooter is for the intended victims to draw, take careful aim, and engage until the shooter is no longer capable of committing murder. That’s it. Laws can’t do it. Signs on walls pronouncing “Gun Free Zone” are about as effective as signs that say “Mass Murder Followed by Suicide is Not Allowed on These Premises”. Policemen like me who arrive long after the murders commence can eventually stop a mass shooting, but not before many innocent lives are lost. The only sure way to quickly stop lunatics with guns from committing mass murder – the ONLY sure way – is to allow and expect the innocent to defend themselves.

I have an honest, reasonable message for the anti-gun side: I get your point. I understand what you’re trying to do. I want to prevent murders just as much as you. It sucks that innocent people, especially our children, might be targeted by an armed lunatic. It sucks to think average, decent people in schools, malls, churches and elsewhere need to carry guns to defend themselves and others from the unthinkable. It sucks, and life shouldn’t be that way.

You know what sucks worse? What sucks worse is to look back at a long history of mass shootings, realize that laws and passive measures failed to prevent them, and then demand more laws and passive measures that we already know won’t prevent the next one.

If we’re serious about stopping the next mass shooter, let’s make sure he knows he won’t face a room full of defenseless victims. Let’s not give him total control during the long police response time. Let’s make him fear his intended victims, instead of allowing him to feel godlike power over them. Let’s make sure any pathetic, cowardly loser who thinks he’ll “be somebody” by committing mass murder has to factor in the likelihood of being shot down like a rabid dog within seconds of drawing his gun.

Let’s allow and expect the innocent to carry a gun and protect themselves from a murderer. That’s the only way we can prevent another massacre.

Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).

http://www.amazon.com/Line-Valley-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00HW1MA2G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09XSSHABSWPC3FM8K6P4

http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7

Having said that, and I’m in no way detracting from their bravery or heroism, but they got lucky. Many factors gave them the opportunity to rush and take down the attacker. As a combat vet, former active shooter response instructor and longtime cop, when I heard about the attack and the Americans (and others) who stopped it, my reaction was, “Those guys are incredibly brave,” followed quickly by “And it’s a damn good thing they’re still alive, because they could have easily lost.”

I think most of us with a tactical background understand this was something of a fluke. Generally speaking, you don’t bring a nothing to a gunfight and expect to win. It can happen, but you don’t make “use your bare hands to take down a guy with an AK-47” your Plan A. I know this because I have training, experience, and a brain. The blithering idiots at Addicting Info, however, looked at this fluke, consulted fellow blithering idiots who know nothing about lethal force, and published an article titled Proving The Best Defense Is A Good Guy WITHOUT A Gun, Unarmed U.S. Soldiers Foil French Gunman.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2015/08/21/proving-the-best-defense-is-a-good-guy-without-a-gun-unarmed-u-s-soldiers-foil-french-gunman-video/

I’m pretty sure Addicting Info’s writers are literally the dumbest people on earth.

I don’t know much about AI’s writers or editors. I haven’t seen their IQ test results. I’m sure they’re all educated, and probably know many things about important topics like white privilege or microaggressions. But anyone who believes you’re better off unarmed when someone tries to shoot you with an AK has to be dumber than Forrest Gump. You have to be pretty far down the intelligence scale to write drivel like this:

“The least surprising thing about Friday’s events in France is the fact that the shooter was stopped by unarmed good samaritans. The idea that the best weapon against a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun is pure NRA propaganda… It’s tough to imagine how things might have turned out differently if the two good samaritans were armed on that French train. Multiple guns would have just added to the chaos and potentially to the injury or body count.”

I guess if armed cops had been on that train, they would have been wrong to draw and fire. Since added chaos, more injured and dead, yada yada. Unassailable logic like that explains why police never ever use guns when they encounter mass murderers.

If this unarmed takedown of a mass murderer “proves” unarmed defense is best, then all the following unsuccessful mass-murderer takedown attempts prove unarmed defense actually isn’t the “best defense”:

• At the 1991 Killeen Luby’s massacre, unarmed restaurant patron Al Gratia charged mass murderer George Henard. Henard shot and killed him, then killed Gratia’s wife as she cradled her dead husband.
• At Columbine, a 15-year old named Daniel Mauser pushed a chair at Eric Harris after Harris shot and wounded him. He was the only Columbine victim to resist in any way. Harris responded by shooting Mauser in the face, killing him.
• At Sandy Hook Elementary, principal Dawn Hochsprung and school psychologist Mary Sherlach were unarmed and approached Adam Lanza, ordering him to stop. He killed them both, then murdered four more adults and twenty children.
• At the Santana High School shooting in California in 2001, an unarmed school security supervisor approached an armed 15-year old who had just murdered two students. The 15-year old shot the supervisor five times, then shot him again in the back when he turned and walked away.
• At a high school on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in 2005, a student killed five students, a teacher and an unarmed security guard. One student fought back inside a classroom and stabbed the shooter in the stomach with a pencil. The shooter shot him three times in the face and neck, then continued shooting other students.
• In 2006 at a high school in Cazenovia, Wisconsin, an unarmed principal and custodian wrestled a shotgun away from a student who walked into the school intent on committing murder. The student then pulled a pistol and shot the principal, who later died.
• During the 2009 Fort Hood Massacre, three unarmed soldiers tried separately to charge Hasan. Two were killed, one was badly wounded.

I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that being unarmed when an aspiring mass murderer is shooting at you kind of sucks. While there have been numerous incidents where unarmed people took down armed murderers (for example, at the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona), that wasn’t because “the best way to take down a mass murderer is by physically attacking him”. In some cases, as in the Giffords shooting, the shooter can be in such close proximity to you that even if you’re armed, the best option is to wrestle his weapon away rather than draw your own.

I’m a cop and I’ve always got a gun; if I’m minding my own business in a convenience store and a criminal with a pistol suddenly comes around the corner, and is within arm’s reach, the best thing to do is probably attempt to disarm him before he can shoot me. I’ll go for my gun eventually, but the first priority is to get control of the criminal’s gun. THAT DOESN’T MEAN IT’S ALWAYS BEST TO GO HAND-TO-HAND AGAINST A GUN. It just means that not every situation is the same, and sometimes you don’t have time to go for a weapon. In almost every incident where unarmed people took down an armed murderer, it was because they had no other options. It wasn’t because they were better off unarmed.

I also notice that Addicting Info’s writers – tactical masterminds that they are – chose to ignore an extremely pertinent piece of information about why the three Americans were able to take down the terrorist in France: the terrorist’s weapon had malfunctioned, and he didn’t know how to clear it. At the time the men tackled him, he was holding an inoperable weapon. That gave the three Americans time to rush, disarm and beat the man unconscious.

Spencer Stone, one of the men who took down the terrorist, said, “I turned around and I saw he had what looked to be an AK-47, and it looked like it was jammed or wasn’t working.” Alek Skartalos, the National Guardsman, added, “He clearly had no firearms training whatsoever. If he knew what he was doing, or even just got lucky… we would have all been in trouble and probably wouldn’t be here today — along with a lot of other people.”

http://time.com/4007527/france-train-terrorist-attack/

The failed French train attacker was like many mass murderers: untrained, unskilled, able to operate a weapon and kill defenseless victims but incapable of actually fighting. When his weapon malfunctioned, which semi- or fully-automatic weapons often do, he was clueless (this also happened with James Holmes during the Aurora theater shooting and with the Clackamas Mall shooter in Oregon). The aspiring terrorist’s complete lack of training and ability allowed three young, strong men, two of whom had military training and one of whom was an Afghanistan veteran, to take him down. As far as terrorist attacks go, it was nearly perfect. An incompetent idiot wanted to be a terrorist but sucked at it, and just happened to be near heroic men who didn’t hesitate to beat him senseless.

Do the morons at Addicting Info expect this in every attack? Do they think this perfect storm will happen every time? Or do they hate guns so much, and hate anyone who doesn’t hate guns so much, that they literally believe it’s better to be slaughtered in a terrorist attack than commit the evil act of returning fire? Are they too idiotic to realize this attack failed because the terrorist had about as much skill with a weapon as the entire staff of Addicting Info combined?

I’m really looking forward to Addicting Info’s next series of articles:

“Man with no seat belt survives fiery crash, proving you shouldn’t wear a seat belt!”

“My grandma is 100 years old and smokes every day, proving cigarettes make you live longer!”

“Unvaccinated child doesn’t get whooping cough, proving vaccines are unnecessary!”

“High school dropout becomes millionaire, proving all kids should drop out of school!”

“I had sex without birth control once and didn’t get pregnant, proving nobody needs birth control!”

Addicting Info writers, here’s a sincere invitation: meet me in Texas, and I’ll explain the realities of mass shootings. I’ll take you to the range. I’ll put you through scenario training. I’ll teach you about survival stress reactions. I’m serious about this. Come down, and I’ll open your eyes.

I know you’re actually intelligent people. But your ideological beliefs have so blinded you, you’re not willing to see objective reality even when it’s right in front of you. You’re choosing to be stupid about this. So please, either get some actual training and experience, or stop writing amazingly idiotic articles that only “prove” you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).

http://www.amazon.com/Line-Valley-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00HW1MA2G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09XSSHABSWPC3FM8K6P4

http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7

So here’s an interesting development. Tim McGraw is putting on a concert to support an organization called Sandy Hook Promise. Sandy Hook Promise supports laws and efforts to protect children from gun violence (I realize this concert is somewhat controversial, but that’s not the point of this essay.) McGraw is doing this partly because his longtime fiddle player, Dean Brown, has a close friend named Mark Barden. Barden is also a musician, and lost a child in the Sandy Hook Massacre.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/timmcgraw.asp

Recap:

1) Mark Barden lost a child at Sandy Hook;
2) Mark Barden is a musician and good friend of Dean Brown;
3) Dean Brown is Tim McGraw’s fiddle player and has been for 22 years; so
4) Tim McGraw will perform at a concert to support a Sandy Hook-affiliated organization.

Why is this interesting? Because the Sandy Hook Massacre never happened! It was faked by the government! The school was closed years before the fake massacre! No children were killed! The “parents” were all actors! [Insert whatever other ridiculously moronic claim you feel is appropriate].

The inescapable conclusion is that Tim McGraw is part of the Sandy Hook conspiracy. Honest!

A fellow writer, Maya Bonhoff, pointed something out in a comment on another post yesterday: if there was no massacre and no children were killed, Dean Brown either doesn’t know his longtime friend Mark Barden is a government shill or Brown is part of the conspiracy. Likewise, McGraw either doesn’t know his fiddle player of two decades is a government shill, or McGraw is part of the conspiracy.

Maya explains this better than I can:

“How do the CHFF (Conspiracy/Hoax/False Flag) advocates propose that this connection has not resulted in the whole deal being blown? Does Dean Brown not realize that Mark Barden is 1) a crisis actor paid to pretend to have had a son, 2) a citizen of Newtown who never had a son, but has been hired by the government to pretend he did, 3) has a son who is still alive but in hiding somewhere, 4) had a son who was killed by the government, but is accepting money to pretend that Adam Lanza really did the deed?

My point is that this connection between a Sandy Hook parent and a high profile friend, who is frequently in the limelight and who travels extensively, is just one out of thousands that would have to have been carefully researched and accounted for in the plan with contingency plans for every one of them.”

Maya is an accomplished author, and discusses the logical and logistical problems inherent to conspiracy theories from a writer’s perspective in this post: http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2014/05/14/truthers-vs-writers-time-freeze-frames-connections-and-back-story/

Maya very politely asks Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists to address this connection between Tim McGraw and a [fake] Sandy Hook parent. I’d also like them to address it, but my request is far less polite.

Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists are a bunch of brain-dead morons. The kindest thing I can say about them is maybe they’re mentally ill or suffering from Alzheimer’s, rather than simply being window-licking stupid. Please, conspiracy theorists, explain why Tim McGraw is putting on this concert. Does McGraw know the massacre never happened? Is he part of the conspiracy? Is he innocent and being manipulated by his evil fiddle player Dean Brown, who actually is part of the conspiracy? Or are both McGraw and Brown being tricked by Mark Barden, who conned his longtime friend Brown into believing his son was murdered?

Please come up with some plausible explanation. I’ll hang out here until you do. In over two years you haven’t come up with even one actual piece of evidence to support your stupid “theory”, so I won’t hold my breath waiting for you to actually say something logical.

Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com and Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).

http://www.amazon.com/Line-Valley-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B00HW1MA2G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=09XSSHABSWPC3FM8K6P4
http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7

http://kxan.com/2014/12/01/chief-on-austin-gunman-hate-was-in-his-heart/

Unfortunately, that type of incident isn’t uncommon. The active shooter was a forty-nine year old man who was apparently angry at the government. That’s not uncommon either. Fortunately, before he managed to murder anyone he was killed by Austin police Sergeant Adam Johnson. That’s great, but it’s not exactly the most noteworthy aspect of this incident.

What really caught my attention was how the suspect was killed. Sergeant Johnson shot him from 104 yards away, with one shot from a pistol, firing one handed, while holding the reins of two horses.

A few comments I’ve read online suggested the 104-yard pistol shot was an Austin PD conspiracy, because such a shot is impossible. I’ve also heard people say Johnson must be lying or exaggerating. You just can’t shoot someone with one shot, one handed with a pistol from over a hundred yards away.

My own experience and training leads me to a different conclusion. That shot would be amazingly difficult, but not impossible.

My first experience with a long-distance shot

Most police officers never train to shoot past twenty five yards. I’ve worked for three departments, plus served as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo, and I can’t recall ever shooting a pistol at long range during police training. But I’ve taken a few pistol courses from private training companies. One of them was at Tiger Valley, near Waco, Texas.

The owner/instructor, TJ Pilling, lined us up on the pistol range one day and said we were going to have a competition. He told us to fire one shot at our targets, which were half-size steel silhouettes. We were at twenty-five yards, and we all hit. He backed us up to thirty-five yards and told us to fire again. We all hit. Forty-five yards. A few missed. Fifty-five yards. Only I and one other officer hit. Sixty-five. I was firing a .40 Glock 22, and aimed just over the top of the target’s head. I missed. The other officer hit.

TJ asked me if I aimed high. I told him I did. He said, “Aim center mass.” I did, and shocked the hell out of myself by hitting the target.

TJ walked us to a bay with a full-size silhouette target at 110 yards, and said, “If you have a 9mm, aim center mass. If it’s a .40, aim at the neck.”

The guys with 9mms started pinging the crap out of the target. I fired several shots standing and couldn’t get a hit, so I went prone and tried again. Eventually, after a spotter helped me walk the rounds in like a mortar, I made repeated hits.

I was, to put it mildly, surprised. I’d been a cop for twelve years at that point, and all my training had focused on shooting twenty-five yards and closer. I’d been in the military seventeen years but received almost no pistol training from either the Marines or Army. Conventional wisdom taught me pistols were last-ditch, close-in weapons, and shooting at someone even twenty-five yards away was stretching it. I had struggled to make accurate hits at twenty-five, had missed a target at that range more than once, and had seen cops and soldiers miss numerous shots even closer than that.

So how the hell was I hitting a target at 110 yards?

Tiger Valley’s training course taught me that my duty pistol was capable of far better accuracy than I thought. But I figured if I ever got into a real shooting on duty factors like movement, incoming rounds and reduced lighting would reduce my accuracy by about half. If I had a smaller off-duty pistol, the results would be even worse.

Then I went to a Graham Combat class

Last June I attended a Graham Combat class in Virginia. The instructor, Matt Graham, asked if we had ever fired a pistol at 100 yards. I told him about my experience having to lay prone and walk rounds in. He smiled and said, “We’ll fix that.”

At that class I was firing a 9mm Beretta Nano, more or less a pocket pistol. It’s a tiny gun, with a tiny barrel, and there was no way I’d make long-distance hits with it. Everyone else in the class was firing full-size Glocks and Colt .45s, and I figured they’d way outshoot me at any distance.

My Nano and me at the Graham Combat class. The pistol was accurate and ergonomic, but malfunctioned so often I stopped carrying it.

After we fired several hundred rounds during numerous drills, Matt lined us up at twenty-five yards and started the distance drill. As we backed up I found myself surprised again; I was hitting steel well past what I thought my pistol’s max effective range was. I didn’t start missing until we got to around seventy-five yards, but even then I was able to make adjustments and get back on target (the further we got, the further low and left I had to aim). We kept backing up, and I kept managing to put rounds on target. Some students quit, but a few of us kept shooting.

Eventually we were at 130 yards, the max we could do on that range. An officer with a Colt .45 went first, and made a hit with her first shot. Nobody else wanted to do it. I stepped up.

The Nano has a double-action-only trigger; every time you shoot, it’s like firing a revolver with the hammer forward. A trigger pull that long and heavy causes muscle strain that makes the shooter’s hands tremble, which decreases accuracy. That, along with the fact that at seventy-five yards I was aiming way off the target, convinced me I’d have to fire at least several shots before I managed to make a hit (if I was able to hit at all). I picked an imaginary spot in the dirt about three feet low and five feet left, focused on the front sight, and started to squeeze.

My hands were shaking badly. The trigger squeeze took forever. My front sight seemed to bounce all around my imaginary aiming point. The weapon fired. What felt like a long silence followed.

Then we heard a loud “ping!” as my round hit the target.

Surprised exclamations erupted from the other students. I probably yelled something like “holy S**t!” Then I looked around. We had two professional photographers with us. Neither had recorded the shot. Damn my luck. There was no way in hell I was going to try the shot again. Now I’d have to listen to my buddies accuse me of being full of crap, because I had no proof I had done it.

But I had again learned a valuable lesson about my weapon’s capabilities. Contrary to conventional wisdom and my own prior beliefs, even a small concealed carry pistol is good at distances past 100 meters. A good pistol plus good training equals a shooter capable of making hits at much longer distances than most people think possible. Graham told us he’s had students make pistol hits at 230 yards during his classes.

But training classes are far from the only proof that decent shooters can make long-distance shots with pistols.

An Airman’s long, lucky shot

On June 20th, 1994, an Airman provided proof of a pistol’s effectiveness. That day, another Airman about to be discharged from the Air Force against his will walked into a building on Fairchild Air Force Base, in the state of Washington, with an AK-type rifle. He killed a psychiatrist and psychologist who had recommended him for discharge, went on to kill two random victims, and also shot twenty-two others.

As the shooter walked outside, twenty-five year old Airman Andrew Brown, a military police officer, approached him on a bicycle. Brown jumped off his bike, drew his Beretta M9 and ordered the shooter to drop his weapon (for future reference, if someone is wandering around with an AK murdering people, there’s no reason to order him to drop his weapon before you engage). Brown was approximately seventy yards away when he shouted the order.

The shooter opened fire on Brown. Brown crouched low and fired four rounds. Two missed, one hit the shooter in the shoulder, and one hit him right between the eyes. The shooter fell dead. Airman Brown had made an amazing shot, killed an active shooter and undoubtedly saved numerous lives.

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=8767

Trick shooters and freaks of nature

Then there are guys like “Instructor Zero”, a former Italian Army soldier known for unreal weapons skills. Zero has a YouTube video where he makes several 300 meter hits with a pistol.

Crazier than that is this video, where champion shooter Jerry Miculek hits a balloon at 1000 yards with a revolver.

There seems to be no question that highly skilled and experienced pistol shooters can outshoot most rifle shooters.

“The police must be lying about that pistol shot.”

Probably not. Sure, any one cop can lie about what he did on a scene. But on a shooting scene, you have multiple entities crosschecking evidence. Patrol officers and supervisors make the initial assessment, secure the scene and any evidence they can see. Then homicide investigators arrive, usually with a Crime Scene Unit. Then investigators from the Medical Examiner’s office conduct their own investigation. In this case the FBI investigated as well.

Even if the patrol supervisors, Homicide investigators and CSU simply accepted Sergeant Johnson’s version of events (they wouldn’t), the Medical Examiner’s people and FBI wouldn’t. Distances are measured by each investigative division, the angle of the round’s impact is analyzed to determine what direction it came from, and the location of spent shells is recorded (shells are usually what’s under the little plastic markers you see in crime scene photos and videos). Everything about the shooting is documented and recorded. Each agency reaches its own conclusions about how the shooting unfolded. My educated guess here is that Austin PD chief Art Acevedo didn’t make his announcement about the 104-yard shot until after the Medical Examiner and FBI corroborated Austin PD’s conclusion.

But let’s assume Johnson shot the suspect from much closer, then lied about where he shot from. He would have had to shoot, then pick up the spent shell, then drop it at a different location further away. And he’d have to do it while a flurry of activity was going on around him, since a mass shooting in downtown Austin is kind of a big deal and brings out lots of witnesses. And Johnson would know tons of potential witnesses were around who could say, “Wait a minute, I was looking out the window during the shooting and saw the cop in a totally different spot than he claimed.” This was a high-profile shooting, investigated by multiple agencies. The chances of pulling off a whopper of a lie like “I shot the suspect from 104 yards away”, when the real distance was only 10.4 yards, would be next to impossible.

I don’t see how Johnson could lie about this one and get away with it.

But could Sergeant Johnson really make a 104 yard shot one handed?

That’s a fair question. Yes I made hits at over 100 yards, Instructor Zero did it at 300 meters, Jerry Miculek did it at 1000 yards, and Airman Andrew Brown made two shots at seventy yards when it really counted. But all of those were with a good two-handed grip against mostly stationary targets. How could Johnson make that shot one handed, probably against a moving target, while holding the reins of two horses that were also probably moving?

The answer is, he was extremely lucky. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have pistol skills; without significant training and experience, he would have hit nowhere near the suspect. But with so many factors involved, luck played a huge role. Maybe the suspect moved six inches in the half-second it took the bullet to leave the pistol and hit him, and that six inches caused the round to hit his heart instead of a non-vital area. Maybe the suspect stopped in front of a brick wall with nobody else around, and Sergeant Johnson was under less stress because had no concerns about hitting innocent people. Maybe the suspect had no idea Johnson was there (he was reportedly under pressure from other officers advancing on him), and that gave Johnson plenty of time to aim in and slowly squeeze the trigger rather than rush the shot. Whatever the factors were, they must have all come together perfectly to help Johnson hit him from that distance.

As far as I can tell, Sergeant Adam Johnson made an amazing and lucky shot, when the city of Austin really needed him to. I hope I get to shake his hand someday.

Chris Hernandez is a 20 year police officer, former Marine and currently serving National Guard soldier with over 25 years of military service. He is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and also served 18 months as a United Nations police officer in Kosovo. He writes for BreachBangClear.com, Iron Mike magazine and has published two military fiction novels, Proof of Our Resolve and Line in the Valley, through Tactical16 Publishing. He can be reached at [email protected] or on his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ProofofOurResolve).

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http://www.amazon.com/Proof-Our-Resolve-Chris-Hernandez-ebook/dp/B0099XMR1E/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0S6AGHBTJZ6JH99D56X7

I need to address a persistent myth. I’ve seen this myth written in editorials and heard a well-known news commentator repeat it. I’ve had friends repeat it to me during polite conversations.

This myth is blatantly ridiculous. Numerous news articles about the debate surrounding this myth have been published in the last few days. These articles show that this myth is…wait for it…a myth. Yet many people still cling to it. So I’m going to try to kill this myth. It’s not going to work, but I’m going to try it anyway.

Myth: soldiers on military bases in America carry loaded weapons all the time.

Reality: SOLDIERS ON MILITARY BASES IN AMERICA DO NOT WALK AROUND EVERYWHERE WITH LOADED WEAPONS.

This myth leads some people to an objectively wrong conclusion. They believe that despite all those armed soldiers everywhere on Fort Hood, Nidal Hasan and Ivan Lopez couldn’t be stopped. Gosh darn it, they were just so powerful and terrifying, resistance was futile. They consider the Fort Hood shootings proof that not even highly trained and armed soldiers, much less armed citizens, can stop an active shooter.

Thursday an LA Times editorialist wrote, “Oh sure, Fort Hood may beef up security. Maybe even adhere to the National Rifle Assn.’s mantra, which is that if everyone is armed, everyone is safer. Though it seems to me that that is already the case on a military base, much as it was at the Washington Navy Yard in September, when crazed gunman Aaron Alexis fatally shot 12 people. So maybe arming all the people all the time isn’t the answer?”

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-ft-hood-shooting-ivan-lopez-gun-violence-20140403,0,7203981.story#ixzz2xybwPdcT

Last year during a debate between Piers Morgan and Gun Owners of America head Larry Pratt, Morgan said, referring to the 2009 Fort Hood massacre, “Even when you have a mass of well-trained people and a mass of firearms, you can still have a massacre.” (The relevant part of the discussion begins around 3:30.)

Thursday night I had a long conversation about gun control with a very intelligent, well-educated, liberal friend of mine. The discussion turned to Fort Hood. My friend, who is not an unreasonable man, thought soldiers “keep their issued weapons in their desks or something”.

Friday the LA Times editorialist posted a halfhearted retraction, wherein he admitted he was wrong (but then claimed his point was that Fort Hood was heavily guarded but the shooting still happened, so there’s still no point in trying to defend yourself). Morgan was fired, although we don’t know if he ever learned how wrong he was about military bases. My friend’s incorrect belief was quickly corrected.

But what about the rest of the country? Not all of it, but the part that says, “Having a gun doesn’t help. All those soldiers had guns, but they couldn’t protect themselves. They had to wait for the police to save them.” They’re wrong, but they don’t know it. They don’t want to know it. So I’m writing this for them. Please spread the word.

Soldiers can’t carry weapons everywhere on post. Their issue weapons are only removed from the arms room for training. If the soldiers are going to fire those weapons, the ammunition is taken directly from the ammo storage facility to the range, and whatever isn’t fired is taken back to storage. Soldiers don’t carry issued weapons and ammo everywhere on post.

And soldiers can’t carry personally owned weapons on post either. They have to be registered and secured. If a soldier has a concealed carry permit and legally carries off post, he still can’t carry on post.

The only people authorized to carry weapons on post are Military Police and Department of Defense Police. MPs have to turn in their weapons at the end of their shift. They don’t take their weapons home like civilian police do.

Do you get it yet? Military bases are “Gun Free Zones” (which don’t really exist, since the only way to enforce a Gun Free Zone is to have guys with guns search everyone). The strange, twisted ideas you have about masses of highly trained, experienced and ARMED soldiers being totally defenseless against a murderous psychiatrist or mentally unstable truck driver are fantasies.

And they’re not just fantasies. They’re convenient fantasies. They’re blatantly untrue and can be dispelled with the most basic research. But they reinforce your belief that carrying a gun for self-defense is pointless. They “prove” to you that being armed does no good anyway (“Look at what happened at Fort Hood! All those soldiers with guns couldn’t protect themselves!”).

You’re wrong. You’re blatantly, embarrassingly wrong. If you have other, reasonable arguments against armed self-defense, fine. Use those. But stop citing the Fort Hood shootings to support your stance. Those shootings don’t prove armed self-defense is pointless. But they do expose the ridiculous stupidity of requiring otherwise-capable citizens to be helpless victims of violent criminals.

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Of course, not everyone who opposes allowing teachers to carry does so for the same reasons. I don’t accuse them all of being stupid or unreasonable. But I do see these trends:

1) they tend to view the active shooter as so highly trained and skilled, resistance against them is futile;

2) they tend to view armed citizens as so untrained and unskilled they’re absolutely unable to perform even a task as simple as covering a door from six feet away, and emptying a magazine at an active shooter as soon as he enters;

3) they tend to have no tactical training, experience, knowledge or understanding (which doesn’t stop some of them from very arrogantly preaching tactical “truth” to people who actually do know what they’re talking about);

4) they tend to think the active shooter will enjoy every advantage, while the armed citizen will suffer every possible misfortune (i.e., police will immediately shoot the armed citizen on sight); and

5) they seem to think police can’t differentiate between an armed good guy who is being cautious and targeting one person, and a mass murderer who is targeting everybody.

This “Don’t even try to fight back” mindset has become so strong on the left that writers on liberal sites actually argue against anyone without a badge resisting an active shooter. Bob Cesca, in an opinion piece which also reaches ridiculously illogical conclusions about specific shooting incidents (http://thedailybanter.com/2013/02/good-guys-with-guns-will-not-stop-bad-guys-with-guns/), said “No. I don’t want some other dude with a gun in the room. Generally speaking, the addition of a second gun has effectively doubled my chances of being killed by one of the gunmen, intentionally or not.”

Somehow the anti-gun side of the argument seems to equate a coward trying to murder everyone, with an armed, trained good citizen who is trying to stop the killing.

As you read the comment below and my response to it, please look for the mindset I’ve described above. Correct me if I’m wrong, but all I see in this argument is, “Don’t even bother trying to fight. Just give up and die. It’s the best way to save lives.”

————————————————————

Reader “ivyfree2″‘s comment:

Agree with much of what you said, but not all. The shooter could easily have been wearing bulletproof armor (like the Aurora theater shooter). In which case, shooting him first would have been completely ineffective. Second, it’s not easy to shoot a human being. It takes training. It takes reflexes. Even then, it’s hard to do. We are socialized not to attack others. Yes, that can be overcome with training. I doubt very much if university teaching programs will start courses on “shooting a crazed teenager.” Seeing somebody come in with a gun and start loading it after verbalizing his intentions? Okay, MAYBE somebody would have had time to shoot him first. That person would have had to be either carrying a loaded weapon on his person (while at a school) or have to unlock a drawer or shelf to get the gun, making himself a target. Even if you shoot at a human, can you hit him? Most people who use guns practice with paper targets. Hitting a moving target is different. Going deer-hunting or whatever, that’s also different. Killing a human crosses a line that most people can’t do.

But suppose you’re special. You have a loaded gun on your person. You comprehend the situation as soon as the impending criminal (who hasn’t done anything illegal yet) announces that he’s going to kill and pulls out a gun. You grab your gun and you shoot. Maybe you have great aim and hit him, and maybe he’s dumb and hasn’t bought a bulletproof vest off the internet. Maybe you shoot several times and he (the person who has still, at that point, done nothing illegal) is dead. At that point, anyone who has heard your gunfire has grabbed their cell phone and called 911, reporting gunfire at a school. You hear the sirens approaching and police in armor storm the building, looking for the man with the gun. Bang: you’re dead.

My response:

Ivy,

First, thank you for your comment. Despite the fact that I am about to tear your opinions to shreds, I do honestly appreciate your willingness to speak up here. As I’ve said before, I don’t want this site to become an echo chamber, where I write opinions to an audience that parrots them right back to me. Dissenting opinions from reasonable, intelligent people are extremely valuable to national-level debates, and to me personally as a way to ensure my views don’t contain logical fallacies.

Second, your post leads me to these conclusions: you have zero tactical training, knowledge or experience. None. Nada. Zilch. And you probably only discuss topics like this with like-minded people who never challenge your blatantly ridiculous assumptions.

I’ll start with this: “The shooter could easily have been wearing bulletproof armor (like the Aurora theater shooter). In which case, shooting him first would have been completely ineffective.”

This statement alone is enough to prove that you have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve been wearing body armor on a regular basis for almost 20 years. As a cop I wear soft concealable armor, and as a soldier overseas I wore either a military issue IBA vest with protective plates, or a plate carrier with no soft armor. I know the capabilities and limitations of body armor very well. “Bulletproof” vests leave significant areas of the upper body exposed (head, neck, abdomen, etc). They have seams that rounds can penetrate. Soft armor does not stop all calibers. I find it hard to believe that you’ve never heard of a single incident where a police officer was shot and killed, even though he was wearing body armor. It happens at least dozens of times every year. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of a soldier being killed by small arms fire, even though he’s wearing heavy body armor. As a cop wearing body armor, do I no longer have to worry about being shot? I know officers who were shot and wounded, and one who was killed, while wearing body armor. No, bullets don’t become “completely ineffective” if the suspect is wearing body armor.

Next: “…it’s not easy to shoot a human being. It takes training. It takes reflexes. Even then, it’s hard to do.”

As a longtime cop and two time combat vet, I’m aware that becoming proficient with a weapon takes training. I’ve actually had quite a bit of it. However, I’m also aware that we have about 20,000 gun homicides every year. Based on media reports and just about every gun-related murder scene I’ve ever been on, it’s pretty damn easy to shoot a human being. I don’t think the kids who killed the Australian student recently were weapon experts. Neither was the young mother in Georgia who repeatedly shot a burglar last year. Because actually, it’s pretty easy to shoot someone if you have the will. Weapons are designed to be ergonomic, easy to use with a minimum of training. The weapon I carry is extremely easy to operate, with no external controls [correction: it actually has one, not none]. You just draw, point it at your target and pull the trigger. With a few hours of training on the range and the correct mindset, just about anyone is capable of shooting a human being with it.

“Seeing somebody come in with a gun and start loading it after verbalizing his intentions? Okay, MAYBE somebody would have had time to shoot him first. That person would have had to be either carrying a loaded weapon on his person (while at a school) or have to unlock a drawer or shelf to get the gun, making himself a target.”

The entire point of allowing teachers to carry at school is to have them carrying at school. Yes, they should have the weapons on their person. With reasonable training, someone can draw and engage within a couple of seconds. Do you think an active shooter is an eagle-eyed, sharp-witted genius who sees all movements made by everyone in view? Why do you assume that drawing the weapon would automatically make the teacher a target? And what about situations like Columbine or Virginia Tech, where some teachers heard shots outside their classrooms for several minutes before they saw the shooters? Is it possible those teachers could have drawn their weapons long before the shooters were in view?

Your perspective is extremely common among many anti-carry people I’ve debated. You assume the shooter is a tactical genius, all-seeing and unstoppable, while the average good-guy with a gun is so outclassed that he might as well just give up and die rather than fight back. You are objectively wrong about this. Most mass shooters have been untrained, unskilled cowards who folded as soon as they were threatened by good guys with guns. George Hennard stopped shooting people at Luby’s as soon as he heard an officer fire a round into the ceiling. Cho at Virginia Tech shot himself as soon as he heard officers breach a door with a shotgun. Adam Lanza shot himself as soon as he heard police sirens outside. These guys are not SEAL ninja Delta Force Rangers. They are cowards, usually with no tactical training or even awareness, who are only enabled to commit murderous rampages by people like you who view them as mythical, omnipotent gods.

“Even if you shoot at a human, can you hit him? Most people who use guns practice with paper targets. Hitting a moving target is different. Going deer-hunting or whatever, that’s also different.”

You need training and a good understanding of your and your weapon’s capabilities to hit a human. At close, defensive pistol range, the average shooter can hit a human. We’re not expecting an armed teacher to take an active shooter out at 100 yards with her Beretta .380. We’re talking about shots fired within about 10 feet, within a classroom or office. Again, untrained criminals do it all the time. And trained people perform better with a weapon than untrained criminals.

“Killing a human crosses a line that most people can’t do.”

Standing there and doing nothing before someone kills you crosses a line. Taking no action at all as a murder massacres children crosses a line. You think the resistance to killing another human is so great, people would literally rather watch someone murder dozens of children than take action to stop them?

“But suppose you’re special. You have a loaded gun on your person.”

How is that special? Hundreds of thousands of Americans (and that may be a low number) carry a weapon on their person every day. That isn’t special. I’ve carried a weapon on my person daily for almost 20 years. Strangers have no idea I’m armed. Having a weapon doesn’t make anyone special and isn’t some far-fetched idea.

“You comprehend the situation as soon as the impending criminal (who hasn’t done anything illegal yet) announces that he’s going to kill and pulls out a gun. You grab your gun and you shoot. Maybe you have great aim and hit him, and maybe he’s dumb and hasn’t bought a bulletproof vest off the internet. Maybe you shoot several times and he (the person who has still, at that point, done nothing illegal) is dead.”

This is one of the more astounding parts of your post. So a guy walks into a school with a gun, announces he’s going to kill people and draws the gun, and you make the point, twice, that “he hasn’t done anything illegal”? In Texas he has, as well as any other state that doesn’t allow weapons in schools. Besides that, he’s presented an imminent threat to everyone in the area. The only reasonable response is the threat or use of lethal force. If you draw your weapon, he sees it and drops his, then no need to fire. If you draw your weapon and he’s still armed, engage and keep engaging until he’s no longer a threat. If you think the armed teacher has now committed a crime, you need to brush up on criminal law.

And the vast majority of active shooters and criminals in general are “dumb”. Do you think criminals always wear body armor? How many active shooters wore body armor? Can you think of any besides Holmes in Colorado?

“At that point, anyone who has heard your gunfire has grabbed their cell phone and called 911, reporting gunfire at a school. You hear the sirens approaching and police in armor storm the building, looking for the man with the gun. Bang: you’re dead.”

And here’s another beloved fallacy of the anti-defense side: don’t fight back, because the police will immediately kill you. Unfortunately, a police response takes time. At Newtown, police arrived in about three minutes. At Virginia Tech two fully geared-up SWAT teams were on campus when the shooting started. They still took several minutes to reach and enter Norris Hall. Chances are, if you encounter an active shooter at a school you’ll have several minutes before police show up.

And police today are trained NOT to shoot someone just because they have a weapon. We know many people can be legally armed at a shooting; teachers in some districts, off-duty cops, plainclothes cops, parents with concealed handgun licenses, etc. Simply having a weapon does not mean the police instantly shoot you.

And in your scenario, the armed teacher kills the bad guy, hears police sirens and hears the police “storm” the building (which is something else we don’t do; again, please take some time to learn something about this subject), but is still holding the weapon when police reach her? She couldn’t put the weapon back in the holster or simply drop it during the several minutes it takes them to arrive?

I hope you understood my point. Your views on this subject are devoid of actual experience or knowledge, riddled with fallacies, formed by unrealistic myths, and probably supported by legions of others with fallacious, unrealistic beliefs who tell you that you’re right.

What amazes me is that so many of you who oppose armed defense lack even basic knowledge on the subject, yet still feel justified making sweeping pronouncements about it. How does that happen? There are subjects I refuse to debate because I don’t know anything about them. I have opinions on them, but no actual knowledge or experience. So I stay quiet about those subjects because I know my uninformed opinion adds nothing to the debate and just makes me look stupid. I might ask questions, I might say, “I don’t know anything about this, but what about…” and ask a question. But I would never tell a doctor he’s wrong about medicine. I would never tell an economist he’s wrong about the economy. I’d never tell a pilot how to fly.

But many people who are anti-gun and have zero knowledge, training or experience with guns feel completely justified telling me, a longtime cop and combat vet, the “real truth” about armed defense. More often than not they say it’s futile to even try to fight back against an active shooter (as you did). Active shooters are just so amazingly skilled, nobody could possibly win against them. It’s better to just give up and die. It’s better to just let them walk into a school and mow down masses of children. “For god’s sake, please don’t make the situation worse by shooting the worthless, unskilled, untrained, cowardly piece of crap who’s massacring helpless people.” So help me, I can’t think of a more pathetic mindset than that.

————————————–

Am I off base, guys? Your thoughts?

Before I tell you about the brave woman who talked a school shooter into surrendering in Georgia last week, let me tell you a quick cop story.

Back in the mid-90’s I worked for a small police department in Southeast Texas. One of the officers there, “Rick”, was known for two things: being a smart-aleck, and having no concept of officer safety. One afternoon Rick received a call about shots being fired on a residential street. When he drove onto the street he saw residents standing in their yards looking toward the other end of the block. He drove further down the street until he saw a man and woman standing together in their front yard. So he pulled over, got out of his car and walked into their yard to ask if they had seen anything.

Around the time he stepped onto their grass, Rick noticed a couple of things: the woman was crying and hunched protectively over an infant. The man looked furious, almost out of control. He was behind the woman, had one arm wrapped tightly around her like he was holding her there. And in his other hand, he held a pistol in the air.

At this point, Rick should have recognized the horrible situation he had put himself in; the man could have opened fire at Rick, who wouldn’t have been able to return fire without hitting the woman and child. The irrational man could easily have killed Rick, his wife and the child. Rick should have drawn his weapon as he backpedaled to the cover of his patrol car. He should have ordered the man to drop the weapon. He should have gotten on the radio to call for backup.

Instead, Rick simply walked up to the man and said, “Give me the gun.” The man didn’t respond. Rick reached up and took the gun out of his hand, went back to the patrol car and locked it in the trunk. Then he walked back to the man and handcuffed him.

When I heard about this incident, I thought, That was the stupidest way any cop could ever have handled a shooting call. Later I found Rick at the station and asked him, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Rick dismissively answered, “I knew he wasn’t going to do anything. I already know I’m going to die in a plane crash some day, so I wasn’t worried about that guy.”

I couldn’t believe that Rick, or any cop for that matter, could have that mindset. I guess he figured, “It all turned out okay, so I must have done the right thing.” Rick later left the department to pursue a new career. In aviation.

What lessons did I learn from how Rick handled that shooting call? I learned not to drive into a call with my head up my [censored]. I learned to keep an eye out for the nearest cover. I learned that sometimes an officer can be an idiot, get lucky, and the situation still turns out alright. But I definitely didn’t learn from Rick how to handle a shooting call.

This week, much of America needs to learn something similar. Just because something turned out well, doesn’t mean it was handled well.

On August 20th, an unarmed bookkeeper named Antoinette Tuff stopped a school shooter by talking to him. The shooter, 20 year old Michael Hill, walked into a Georgia elementary school office with an AK and several hundred rounds, took Tuff and others hostage, and exchanged fire with police officers. Tuff talked to the shooter, expressed sympathy, gave critical information to the 911 operator while Hill fired at officers, and eventually convinced Hill to drop his weapon and surrender.

Over 800 students were in the school when Hill, apparently intent on mass murder, walked in. According to an article in the Huffington Post, Hill announced his intentions to the office staff and loaded his weapon in front of them. Yet, in the end, nobody was killed, nobody was wounded. Antoinette Tuff is being recognized as a hero. In my opinion, she absolutely is. When faced with what appeared to be a madman intent on mass murder, she had a choice: run and hide, or risk her life to engage the shooter in a sympathetic conversation. She chose to risk her life and talk to him. And it worked. She deserves all the praise she can get.

But no, that doesn’t mean all active shooter situations should be handled with unarmed empathy instead of armed self-defense.

Surprisingly, the Huffington Post’s story about the incident (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/22/antoinette-tuff_n_3792683.html) didn’t seem to have a “See? We don’t need armed teachers!” angle. Some comments to the story, on the other hand, are just what I expect from typical HP readers, and by extension much of the left.

Here’s a small sample of comments from HP:

“Interestingly, the usually vociferous gun advocates don’t seem to have much to say about a terrible situation averted using intelligence versus firepower.”

“A true hero. So much for Rush Limbaugh’s and the NRA’s childish and over-simplified contention that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

“Note to NRA……What stopped a bad guy with a gun was a good WOMAN WITH A HEART! What a concept…”

“I guess a little bit of love and understanding is more powerful than bullets.”

“How highly unAmerican. We shoot first and ask questions later round these parts.”

“Too bad SHE didn’t have a gun too, then this could have all been prevent…oh, wait.”

“Hey NRA how do you deal with a BAD guy with an assault weapon? With a GOOD person who is compassionate and has a brain.”

Get it? If you’re intelligent, you don’t need a weapon. Armed defense, even defense of children, is only for us dummies.

As an almost 20 year police officer and former active shooter instructor, I’d like to make a few points for anyone who believes Ms. Tuff showed us the “right” way to handle active shooters. To do this, I have to ask them to please put aside the desire to simply throw out a snide remark, and actually engage in critical thinking instead.

First, I’ll say this: Hill should have been shot as soon as he walked into that school. This may sound harsh, especially considering what we’ve discovered in hindsight. According to Hill’s family, he suffers from bipolar disorder and ADD. His words and actions to Ms. Tuff indicate to me that he wasn’t a violent sociopath hell-bent on mass murder, he was a troubled young man desperate for attention and sympathy (which Ms. Tuff provided). Hill was the kind of man who was receptive to dialogue, not the kind of guy who would only stop killing if he was killed himself.

But nobody knew that at the time. All anyone knew was that a man walked into a school with an AK and announced his desire to kill. If we as a nation allowed teachers to carry, or mandated armed police or security in schools, a good person with a weapon could have immediately engaged, and kept engaging until Hill was incapable of pulling a trigger.

In any potential active shooter situation, the suspect should be disabled through the use of lethal force as soon as the threat is recognized. No, that doesn’t mean we dump a magazine on anyone we think might do something dangerous. It does mean that if a 20 year old walks into an elementary school with an AK, we ask ourselves a few questions. Is there a good reason a 20 year should be in an elementary school with a rifle? Does the school have an AK marksmanship class this man teaches? Is there some school-sanctioned AK-47 event going on that day? Is there some reasonable, rational explanation for a troubled-looking (based on his booking picture and description) man to walk into a school with an AK? If the answer to those questions is no, then someone needs to make a reasonable, rational decision to respond with force.

In this case, Hill made the decision even easier by announcing his intention to kill and loading his weapon in front of the staff. If even one of the staff members had been armed, they could have drawn on Hill and engaged him before he loaded the rifle. But what happened instead? Hill was allowed to load the weapon and fire at will. Had he decided to do so, he could have killed a lot of people. The entire outcome was left in his hands, he had total control of the situation. The fact that he decided not to kill any students or staff, and failed to kill the police officers he shot at, doesn’t mean this incident is proof that teachers or staff shouldn’t be armed. It means he failed to carry out what he intended to do. It was the school shooting equivalent of the man who tried to blow up an airplane with an underwear bomb but only managed to set his genitals on fire. It’s objectively NOT a lesson on how to prevent school shootings in the future. As far as handling future active shooters, maybe we shouldn’t make plans that require the cooperation of the guy who’s trying to murder people.

Anyone who insists that this incident was solved by unarmed empathy alone needs a reality check. One aspect of this incident that keeps being ignored, or at least hasn’t gotten the attention it deserved in the press, is that police officers had closed distance on Hill and engaged him with gunfire. Hill was under pressure and facing death when he surrendered. If Hill was like the “typical” active shooter, once the threat of his death appeared (and not death at his own hands, which he would control), suddenly the fantasy was over. It wasn’t fun anymore. The police officers who fired at him may have pushed Hill to listen to Ms. Tuff’s voice of reason.

Finally – and this is a big one – we should consider the big picture. Rather than listening to rather immature voices crowing over the alleged victory of an unarmed woman over an active shooter, we should ask ourselves this: why, eight months after Newtown, was a mentally ill man able to walk unopposed into an elementary school with an AK? Why have we as a nation chosen to follow the same paths and policies that enabled the Newtown massacre?

Despite the anguished, indignant handwringing from the political left about gun control, even the strongest proponents of “tougher” gun laws acknowledged they wouldn’t work (witness VP Biden’s impromptu speech to supporters in the White House). We know that new gun control measures, even if they were implemented perfectly, would take years before having an effect. So why have huge portions of the government and public chosen to throw time and money behind symbolic efforts which, even if they had been passed, still wouldn’t have prevented Michael Hill from carrying an AK into a Georgia elementary school?

The answer to that is, of course, “blowing in the wind”. It’s all about the show, with no more impact than words from an old folk song. I don’t have a clue why someone would choose to make a statement rather than actually handle a problem. But I do know this: no law stopped Michael Hill from murdering people last week. A sympathetic woman, police officers with guns and Hill’s own failure of will did. Our children’s defense shouldn’t consist of the faint hope that a murderer will respond to kindness, any more than a police officer should expect an angry moron firing a pistol in the air beside his wife and child to peacefully give up his gun.

Those who point to last week’s incident as proof that homicidal violence can be defeated with kindness need more than just a proverbial hard slap across the face. They need to be ignored and their ridiculous words disregarded by rational people. The next time some pathetic aspiring mass murderer walks into a school with a rifle, he should be met by armed, trained staff who are willing to defend children with immediate lethal action. He shouldn’t be met by unarmed, hopeful leftists who truly believe their kind words can protect my children from a murderer’s gunfire.

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“Private citizens or teachers shouldn’t be allowed to carry weapons and respond to an active shooter. If they do, when police arrive they’ll see a bunch of people with guns and won’t know who the bad guy is. How are the police supposed to do their jobs if everyone’s carrying a gun?”

I don’t have a clue how the hell anyone could possibly think this. Something needs to be set straight here. In a situation where dozens of innocent people are being murdered, consideration number one shouldn’t be “The police must be able to easily do their jobs”. Making my life as a cop easier isn’t the goal. The goal is to stop the killing as quickly as possible.

I’ll put it this way, to make sure nobody misunderstands:

ANY POLICY DESIGNED TO MAKE LIFE EASIER FOR COPS, AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PEOPLE WE’RE SUPPOSED TO PROTECT, IS AN AUTOMATIC FAILURE.

When I took the oath to become a police officer, it wasn’t to make my life easier. I knew I was taking on more responsibility, long hours, crappy shifts, time away from family, and most importantly, more danger. Being a cop doesn’t mean society puts itself in more danger to make me safer. We’re here to keep the public safe, not the other way around.

Is a police officer’s ability to identify the bad guy an important concern? Absolutely. Will armed citizens make it harder for police to quickly identify the bad guy? Maybe. So is it better to let the killer keep murdering people until police show up? No. Hell no.

Let’s revisit the hypothetical situation I described in my post Cowards, Mass Murders and the American Public. If you haven’t read it, it’s a fictional (but painfully plausible) mass shooting scenario, where you the reader are hiding under a table with your family in a mall food court as an active shooter approaches. If you’re in the food court, hiding and hoping you don’t get shot, watching innocent people being mowed down by a murderous coward, what is the most important thing on your mind?

Is it:
1) Stopping the shooter from killing you and your family? Or
2) Ensuring the first police officers on the scene can easily identify the bad guy?

My vote is, “Stopping the shooter from killing me and my family”. The only way to do that, short of miraculously having a police officer right there when the shooting starts, is for armed citizens to shoot the bad guy as quickly as possible.

Here’s a sad truth. In many active shooter situations, the bad guy was extremely easy for the police to identify. He was the corpse with the self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, holding a weapon, lying among all the murdered innocents. In other words, it was over by the time police arrived.

What about the situations where the shooter or shooters were still killing when police showed up? At the Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas, George Hennard was armed with two pistols and was shooting at everyone; a good guy with a gun would likely be armed with only one weapon, and would definitely be much more deliberate with his gunfire. Even if he or she panicked and emptied a magazine, it would be in one direction. There is a good chance responding officers would have been able to tell the good guys from the bad guy.

The shooters at Columbine were carrying long guns and wearing pseudo-tactical gear. They were also shooting in multiple directions. Would they have been hard to differentiate from an armed teacher, who would be wearing normal clothes and carefully firing in one direction with a pistol? I doubt it.

Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, had two pistols and a backpack full of ammo. He was forcing his way into classrooms (read my earlier post about unarmed teachers for details) and shooting in multiple directions. Would police be able to tell the difference between Cho, who was murdering everyone he could, and a teacher covering the door with a pistol in a classroom? I think so.

Good guys with guns don’t act like bad guys with guns. I think cops, and people in general, can tell the difference between a regular guy holding a pistol trying to protect people, and a brutal coward trying to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. A murderer does not behave the same way as a protector, even if they’re both holding weapons.

I’d like to ask a question of those who don’t think citizens should respond to active shooters: do you also think an off-duty cop shouldn’t respond? If I’m at a restaurant with my wife and someone opens fire, should I not take action? After all, just like an armed citizen, I’ve got a concealed weapon, regular clothes, no radio, no body armor, and other than a small badge don’t look any different than Regular Joe. Being a cop doesn’t mean I have a force field that protects me from friendly fire. I’ve got training and experience, which is extremely important, but I don’t have any more guarantee of safety than an armed citizen. And when the on-duty police arrive, they’ll see me and not immediately know I’m a good guy.

So by the logic of those who oppose armed citizen response, if I find myself in the middle of a mass shooting as an off-duty cop I shouldn’t shoot back. I shouldn’t draw my weapon. I shouldn’t take action because it would make the on-duty police officers’ jobs harder.

Well, get this. If I ever do wind up off-duty in an active shooter situation, I’M GOING TO TAKE ACTION. If I quit being a cop and am carrying as a private citizen, I’M GOING TO TAKE ACTION. I’m going to draw my weapon. I’m going to close the distance to the bad guy. I’m going to open fire if it’s at all possible. I’m going to trust that responding police can tell good guys from bad guys. I’ve already accepted that I might get shot by a good guy. If that happens, I’ll try not to be too upset about it. If I stop the killing and then get shot by a cop, that’s still better than standing by and doing nothing as a murderous coward kills everyone around me.

I would hope armed citizens make the same pledge, because if they don’t take action, more innocent people will be killed. Yes, without question, armed citizens can complicate things for police. But in the end, this debate isn’t about making life easier for cops. It’s about defending the innocent.

But at least there were no armed teachers there to “add to the carnage”. Who knows how much worse those tragedies would have been if a teacher had shot back? Thank God, nobody resisted. When a murderous coward is shooting dozens of innocent children, the best thing to do is to let him keep doing it until police arrive. ALLOWING TWENTY-SIX CHILDREN AND TEACHERS TO BE BRUTALLY MURDERED IS BETTER THAN LETTING EVEN ONE TEACHER SHOOT BACK.

In case you didn’t catch it, I’m being sarcastic.

Let’s make something clear. NOBODY is proposing that we “arm teachers” against their will. This was obvious from day one of the debate, but the narrative seemed to be “those pro-gun idiots want to force teachers to carry weapons in schools”. Whether this “misunderstanding” of the proposal was an honest mistake, or an intentional effort to (again) discredit and smear gun rights advocates, is anyone’s guess.

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, in an article titled Teacher Union President: plan to arm teachers ‘dangerous, irresponsible’, said, “. . . the NRA is rushing to arm teachers and rushing to arm schools. . . We actually need to make kids safer. We actually need to take guns away from kids.”

This is an amazing statement from someone who should know better. Rather than “rushing to arm teachers”, the NRA wants armed guards in schools, which isn’t the best option but is still better than nothing. And their plan would in fact make kids safer. Laws that already ban murderers from carrying guns into schools obviously aren’t working.

What has been proposed is allowing teachers to carry weapons in schools if they choose, are eligible and pass required qualification courses. A school that allows teachers to carry wouldn’t look any different than others, except for maybe having a sign advertising “Teachers in this school may be armed”. Just as potential airplane hijackers have to factor in the possibility of being shot by a Federal Air Marshal, an aspiring mass murderer would have to factor in the possibility of encountering multiple armed teachers.

Allowing teachers to carry isn’t an amazing or revolutionary idea. Nor is it the lunacy that some people, many of whom probably have little to no experience with guns and violence, claim it to be. As a longtime cop and former Active Shooter instructor who trained officers how to respond to mass shootings, I’m pretty familiar with the school shooting problem. As far as I’m concerned, armed teachers are the only realistic solution.

As I mentioned before, some have proposed putting armed guards or more police officers on campus, and that’s definitely better than nothing. But we’d still face the problem of not enough guards, not in the right place, not at the right time. Many modern high schools are about the size of an Afghan village, with ten times the population. The likelihood that an armed guard would happen to be right where a shooter begins his attack are pretty low. Most school shooters weren’t stupid; they would probably have selected an area without visible armed security anyway.

The high school my daughter attended is huge, with several buildings, activities halls and athletic fields. The student population is around 4000. If I and another police officer were in the main parking lot and received a call that an active shooter was inside, there would still be a built-in response time. If he was in an easily accessible, known location like the cafeteria, we could probably get there in a minute or two; but if he was, for example, “near classroom A217, second floor of the east wing of building C, heading north to the stairwell”, who knows how long it would take us to reach him and stop the killing.

Uniformed police or armed security guards can’t be everywhere. An attack that begins in an area without an armed guard present can go on for several minutes before police arrive. Believe me, “several minutes” is a long time when someone’s shooting at you. Even in the best case scenario, if my partner and I take only a minute to find and neutralize the shooter, he still has sixty seconds to spray helpless students with gunfire. This doesn’t sound acceptable to me.

Teacher Federation President Weingarten also said, in the same interview, “In Columbine there was an armed guard, it didn’t help. In Virginia Tech there were armed guards across the campus, it didn’t help”. On these points, she was right (thank you for making my point for me, Ms. Weingarten). A school resource officer was on the Columbine High School campus when the shooting started, and did briefly exchange gunfire with one shooter outside the school.

However, when the shooter fled into the school, the officer didn’t follow. This wasn’t because the officer experienced a failure of will; rather, previous training dictated that he should “back off, set up a perimeter and call SWAT”. The officer followed that training, which hindsight showed was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Once the shooters entered the school, they were completely unopposed. They had free rein to do whatever they wished, with no worry whatsoever about armed resistance. They even took water breaks. Had armed teachers been inside Columbine High School, circumstances would have been very different.

At Virginia Tech, numerous police officers from two agencies were already on campus when the massacre began. They were there because Seung-Hui Cho, the murderer, first killed two students about two hours before the killing spree at Norris Hall. With police already on campus, and a response time of three minutes to reach Norris Hall, Cho still managed to kill thirty students and teachers before police entered the building (I should point out that I also support concealed carry on college campuses). So Weingarten was correct, armed security or police on campus may not be able to stop a massacre.

However, armed teachers CAN stop a massacre. This isn’t because teachers are tactical geniuses with years of gunfighting experience; it’s because armed teachers would be there, when the killing starts, with means and motivation to do something about it. There is no built-in lag time for a teacher response, as there is for police response. Teachers are, at worst, yards away. And even if a teacher would never hurt a fly in self-defense, I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t act to defend their students.

This isn’t to say a teacher (or cop, or firearms instructor, or Navy SEAL) would have an easy time stopping an active shooter. A mass school shooting is just about the worst nightmare scenario any of us could ever face, and handling it properly wouldn’t be easy. Because of this reality, reasonable people often say, “in a situation like that, with innocent people running in panic everywhere, a teacher would just shoot the wrong person”.

Maybe so. But in an active shooter situation, a murderer is killing innocent people. A teacher might kill an innocent person. It’s not better to just let the murderer keep shooting people. And while a teacher may encounter mass chaos that nobody could effectively respond to, I’d like you to consider this more likely situation:

Teacher is in his/her classroom. Teacher hears shots. Teacher looks into the hall and sees students fleeing in terror, with a man firing a weapon behind them. Teacher closes door and orders students into the safest part of the room. Teacher draws a weapon from under his/her jacket and covers the door from ten feet away. Shooter opens door. Teacher empties a magazine into shooter from close range. Massacre has been stopped.

Before anyone accuses me of engineering a hypothetical just to prove my point, please read about Professor Liviu Librescu. He was shot and killed while holding his classroom door closed in Norris Hall, trying to keep Seung-Hui Cho out. And read about a teacher named Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. She and a student died while trying, and failing, to barricade a door that Cho eventually forced his way through. And read about the two teachers in the Columbine High School library. They had plenty of advance warning, but could do nothing except hide and call the police as the two shooters entered. Imagine how differently the two massacres might have ended if those teachers had stood by the doors with weapons to defend their students.

Those who oppose armed teachers seem to have apocalyptic visions of untrained educators firing blindly at hulking, armored, machine-gun-toting monsters surrounded by innocent children. They don’t imagine a teacher carefully returning fire at a childish coward who has no skill or training, which is what most mass shooters truly are. They imagine armed teachers to be a group of old, overweight wanna-be’s who look more like Keystone Kops than Special Forces. But they don’t imagine a teacher locking down her classroom just like an unarmed teacher would, but now resolutely standing by the door, ready to fire on the shooter if he enters. They don’t picture the brave assistant principal in Pearl, Mississippi who confronted and detained a mass shooter, without firing even one round. Apparently, opponents of armed teachers don’t picture anything that doesn’t support their viewpoint.

This so-called “debate” about allowing teachers to carry should be over already. We have, for decades, had laws that prohibit weapons in schools. Those laws worked fine until suicidal, murderous cowards decided they didn’t care about almighty words on paper. Since the Columbine attack, which ushered in the current era of mass school shootings, the prohibition on armed teachers has done nothing but help murderers cause repeated, needless tragedies.

We’ve tried having unarmed teachers; that policy has failed, and failed miserably, in every single instance it’s been tested. Let’s kick our national addiction to failure. Let’s stop doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. From this point on, let’s do what’s right for our children. Let’s allow armed teachers to defend them.