What happened
Colorado authorities said a gunman who killed four young people at a church and missionary center on Sunday planned to shoot many more people—but he was shot by a church security guard. Witnesses credited a Vietnam veteran with distracting the man, Michael Murray, 24, before the volunteer security guard, Jeanne Assam, shot him, and Murray killed himself. “God was with me,” Assam said. (The Washington Post, free registration)
What the commentators said
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“Schools. A university. A shopping mall,” said the Rocky Mountain News in an editorial. And now a church. This guy had an assault rifle, two handguns, and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and there were 7,000 people in and around the church. No wonder people feel “no place is safe these days from marauding killers.”
It’s hard to fathom the bloodbath that might have occurred had a “church security guard not been there to shoot back,” said Jessica Peck Corry in HumanEvents.com. Let the advocates for gun control explain themselves now. This tragedy clearly illustrates that the best way to stop “crazed killers” is to arm “decent people,” because sometimes even they have to “shoot to kill.”
People with an “ideological axes” to grind try to score points with every tragedy, said David Harsanyi in The Denver Post. But “this incident does nothing to instruct us about the need for more gun-control laws or, conversely, for more lax guns laws.” It’s a “waste of time” to try explaining the acts of every “deranged” killer. “Some things just are.”
“Senseless acts” like these shootings always spark a lot of debate, said The Denver Post in an editorial, “about gun control, the need to intervene when someone is acting dangerously and the harm of social isolation.” All we can hope is that by getting the nation’s attention, such a “monstrous act” will lead to “change for the better.”
