Opinion: There are things Congress and the Arizona Legislature can do now to address the gun violence occurring in far too many places.
Editorial board |The Republic | azcentral.com
A few days after the Uvalde, Texas, massacre, Sen. Ted Cruz told the National Rifle Association that “what stops armed bad guys is armed good guys.”
What Cruz didn’t say, but everyone in the room must have already known, is that 19 armed “good guys” stood in the hallway for nearly an hour while a gunman slaughtered 19 children and two teachers. The armed good guy in Buffalo, N.Y., couldn’t shoot through the attacker’s body armor. And the good guys in Laguna Woods, Calif., stopped the gunman with a chair.
In Texas, the armed “good guys” didn’t break into the classroom to stop the bad guy because, according to various reports, the commander at the scene made that call.
There’s no justifiable basis for that decision. None. Investigators must get to the bottom of the inaction of those officers piled up in the hallway and the police chief who directed the operation.
What the massacre tells us – once again – is that weapons like the AR-15 the gunman carried are so deadly they give even trained law-enforcement officers second thoughts.
It also tells us the notion that “what stops armed bad guys is armed good guys” is a false narrative. If weapons alone would make us safe, then America should be the safest country on the planet.
It’s not.
