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The History of Mass Shootings Tells Us That “Good Guys With Guns” Aren’t Enough
Even when cops respond quickly to mass shooters, they can do incredible damage.
In the week since the Uvalde shooting, a great deal of attention has understandably been paid to the inexcusably bad performance of Uvalde policemen. Despite arriving at Robb Elementary within a few minutes of the shooter, cops nonetheless waited more than a hour outside the classroom where the shooter had barricaded himself (and where at least some of the young kids in the class were still alive), before a Border Patrol tactical unit finally breached the door and killed the shooter. As Mike Baker of The New York Times has documented, the Uvalde cops violated every one of their own department’s guidelines in how to deal with school shooters, even though calls for help were coming from the classroom while they were waiting. So they deserve all the blame they get.
At the same time, it would be a mistake to conclude from the cops’ failure in Uvalde that a quicker police response is all you need to keep mass shootings from taking a devastating toll, because history tells us that even when cops are present at a shooting, they rarely make enough of a difference. In fact, in a surprising number of the high-profile mass shootings we’ve seen in recent years, cops…
