There Were Heroes Who Helped At Risk Of Their Lives

SEE HERE In the rush to assign some kind of blame to remote causative factors in the Tucson shootings the heroes who stopped the killing from being even worse than it was have gone largely unnoticed. There were heroes in the crowd. I always remember the news story about the shooter in Israel who opened up with an AK-47 on a busload of Israeli school children. A stranger stepped out of a crowd that was scattering and shot the shooter with a handgun and faded back into the crowd and at the time of the newstory at least was unidentified. (this was quite a few years ago now) At the time I thought it was an eloquent testimony to the effect of an armed citizenry. Had that unknown man not done that there would likely have been scores of dead children and bystanders. My father, who lettered in pistol and rifle at the Naval Academy and who never had fewer than forty or so guns scattered around the house and maintained a shooting range in the basement used to say: "An armed citizenry is a polite citizenry." We could use a bit more politeness these days.