The mass shooting that didn’t happen in Colorado

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Last week, a crazed socialist student named Karl Pierson took a shotgun to his high school in Centennial, Colorado, to kill. The student (whom other students called a “Communist”), may have been looking for his debate team coach.

Pierson was armed with a shotgun (legal), a bandolier of ammunition and three molotov cocktails. On his way to find his coach, he shot another student apparently at random. He fired a shot down a hallway and set off one of his molotov cocktails. Then, something different happened:

The rampage might have resulted in many more casualties had it not been for the quick response of a deputy sheriff who was working as a school resource officer at the school, Robinson said.
Once he learned of the threat, he ran — accompanied by an unarmed school security officer and two administrators — from the cafeteria to the library, Robinson said. “It’s a fairly long hallway, but the deputy sheriff got there very quickly.”
The deputy was yelling for people to get down and identified himself as a county deputy sheriff, Robinson said. “We know for a fact that the shooter knew that the deputy was in the immediate area and, while the deputy was containing the shooter, the shooter took his own life.”
He praised the deputy’s response as “a critical element to the shooter’s decision” to kill himself, and lauded his response to hearing gunshots. “He went to the thunder,” he said. “He heard the noise of gunshot and, when many would run away from it, he ran toward it to make other people safe.”

Thanks to the armed deputy sheriff, the shooting was over in 80 seconds. How many lives were saved? We will never know, but the gunman’s behavior indicates he was willing to kill many people.

As usual, acts in real life destroy the narrative of the anti-gun crowd. Consider:

*Once again, a gunman was attracted to a gun free zone.

*But this time, it was another armed person who stopped the shooting. Can we agree that guns save lives?

*Shotguns are legal and are not the target of most gun control laws, including the new laws passed in Colorado.

*There do not appear to be any reasonable laws that could have prevented this shooting. The shooter was weird but not violent before this act, and he legally bought a shotgun (the preferred weapon of choice of VP Joe Biden).

*Can we agree that if the shooter had been a “tea party Republican” instead of a socialist or Communist we would be discussing how the tea party makes you violent? Do left-wing politics make you violent? Well, 100 million people killed in the 20th century definitely think so, whereas tea party politics mostly make you curse John McCain, which we can all agree is a good thing.

To sum up, guns don’t kill people, crazy socialists do. And good people with guns keep them from killing more people.

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About Geoff B.

Geoff B graduated from Stanford University (class of 1985) and worked in journalism for several years until about 1992, when he took up his second career in telecommunications sales. He has held many callings in the Church, but his favorite calling is father and husband. Geoff is active in martial arts and loves hiking and skiing. Geoff has five children and lives in Colorado.

14 thoughts on “The mass shooting that didn’t happen in Colorado”

  1. I’m glad the sheriff’s deputy ran towards the shooter, instead of setting up a perimeter outside and calling for help and controlling the crowd and everything else that seems to happen in these cases.

  2. How “socialist” can a person be who owns a gun? Socialists are against private gun ownership. How “socialist” can one be who engages in individual acts of anarchy? Socialists believe in committed and unified class struggle which can become terrorism in far left-wing socialists, (like Ayers). But how “socialist” can one be who doesn’t seem align his “revolutionary” efforts with any kind of class struggle whatsoever?

  3. Nate, I think we can agree that this was a young man, like many young people, who did not understand socialist ideology to any meaningful extent. It is kind of like the people who wear Che Guevara or Mao t-shirts without any understanding that the people they have on their t-shirts were cold-blooded murderers. I would point out, however, that there are plenty of socialists who are in favor of private gun ownership — as long as they have the guns. People like me have guns, in part, to protect ourselves from these socialists (and other bad guys).

  5. So, he was a socialist with a vendetta against his freedom-loving debate coach?

    And while American socialists discuss the benefits of a gun-free society, the Marxists of the world overthrew Russia, China, and other places with guns they either smuggled in illegally or purchased legally.

  6. Note: I’m not using the shooter’s name anywhere in this post, as requested by the local sheriff, seems like a good idea to me.

    Actually if you read the quotes from his fellow students on the news, what was said was that HE (the shooter) thought that America (the US) had *BECOME* a communist country where the government was trying to control everything.
    For example: Junior Daylon Stutz said: “I did think he was a little weird, but I didn’t think he was, like, bad weird,” Stutz added. “He always kind of talked about how America was a communist country, how the government was, like, trying to take us over and stuff. I don’t know, just some weird stuff that I didn’t really pay close attention to, but nothing that alarmed me.
    “He was definitely kind to me. I never saw him mean to anybody. He wasn’t condescending to anyone,” he said.
    So the shooter in question *wasn’t* a socialist, rather he was an *over-the-top* supporter of gun rights and excessive freedoms (to the extent that he felt others had no inherent value, or right to live). He was upset that the US wasn’t the totally free country he wanted it to be. Pretty much the opposite of what you’ve written.

    I can certainly agree with the “crazed” and “weird” aspects of your description, but unfortunately the shooter seems the picture post card description of a paranoid Second Amendment nut – i.e., meaning someone who has gone over-the-edge to far too the “right” rather than the “left” – although those terms have little meaning when dealing with fanatics who are willing to kill indiscriminately.

  7. Good try John Swenson Harvey, but, no, you are wrong.

    Thomas Conrad, who had an economics class with the gunman, described him as a very opinionated Socialist.
    “He was exuberant I guess,” Conrad said. “A lot of people picked on him, but it didn’t seem to bother him.”

    http://www.mediaite.com/online/denver-post-stealth-edits-out-socialist-from-profile-of-arapahoe-school-shooter/

    Angie Mock, another fellow student, said:

    “He was friendly enough. Very proud of being a socialist. He was very outspoken on his political views,” student Angie Mock said. “To him, it just meant economic — more economic equality.”

    http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/millennialstar-worth-reading/~3/8p0vL_eiZm8/student_on_arapahoe_school_shooter_very_proud_of_being_a_socialist.html

    We can agree that Karl Pierson (who was an 18-year-old adult btw, so stop the holier-than-thou attempt not to use his name), was probably politically immature. But to claim that he is NOT a Socialist is simply wrong.

  9. ClaireM, that is fine and makes more sense, but it is a bit difficult for us to expunge from history the names of these crazy/bad guys.

  10. True, we can’t un-name history’s bad guys. Though I must say I can’t think of the name of any of these mass shooters except for the Aussie guy Martin Bryant. Perhaps notoriety is a factor in future mass shootings. I wonder if school shootings are like suicide clusters?

  11. From CBS This Morning news program:

    “[The shooter] wrote on his Facebook page, “The Republican Party: health care – let them die. Gun violence – let them die. Is this really the side you want to be on?” Said to be very opinionated….”

    Anti-gun socialist, no-less.

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