If anything positive came out of Columbine, it may be this: police began to realize they couldn’t simply “wait out” an active shooter situation, and hope to reason with the killers. Stopping a massacre means taking action, not waiting outside the door.
Today, most police departments are better equipped and trained to deal with an active shooter. Unfortunately, too many of them are still able to kill large numbers of people before the cops arrive. That’s one reason we need civilians who are armed and capable of fighting back—many of the shooters/terrorists still look for localities and events where their victims won’t be able to fight back.
Back in the 1970s, Palestinian terrorists targeted Israeli schools, knowing that the students and their teachers represented a soft target. When the IDF told the education establishment they didn’t have enough soldiers to guard all the schools, the educators decided to arm their teachers. There hasn’t been a major attack on an Israeli public school in more than 35 years, and that’s no accident.
One of the first officers to respond to last year’s terrorist attack in Paris was a deputy commissioner for the city’s police department. He went in alone, with only a handgun, and shot one of the terrorists. He only pulled back after SWAT teams arrived on scene and entered the theater.
Too bad ordinary Parisians didn’t have the same option to shoot back.