Thirty-two Shots In Fifteen Seconds

One troubled guy with a handgun and a big clip killed six people and wounded fourteen others.

I don’t want to hear any more from the NRA about defending our right to bear arms. I don’t want to hear Palin exhorting folks to reload or see any more of her ads with a target superimposed over her policital enemies (bet Sarah wishes she could take back the one with Congressperson Giffords under the crosshairs).  I don’t want to hear about having to pry guns from cold, dead hands.

I especially don’t want to hear the fantasy that handgun ownership has anything to do with self defense.  Just read the news. Look at the stats. Compare the number of suicides and murders to the number of crimes stopped by private citizens using handguns.

Presidents Kennedy and Reagan were both shot by unhinged loners while they were being protected by large numbers of the best trained and most heavily armed bodyguards in history. Sorry, but the self defense argument is just a non-starter with me.

I don’t want to hear the addled mantra that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  Yes, this person killed people because he was off his rocker. But he was able to kill and wound so many because he was able to pump out bullets as fast as he could pull the trigger. And he had a thirty-one round magazine that would have been illegal until 2004.

Three men took the shooter down and a sixty-one year old woman prevented him from reloading. In less than half  a minute, he’d been pinned to the ground and disarmed by untrained, unarmed, ordinary people who did not themselves hesitate before stepping up to stop this horrendous attack.

Bill Badger, Roger Sulzgeber, Joseph Zamudio and Patricia Maisch are all heroes. They did what we all hope we would do but can’t know until the time comes. Their time came and they didn’t hesitate.  

But for twenty of their fellow citizens, it was too late.

He’d already fired thirty-two shots in fifteen seconds.