A version of this story appeared in the Higher Ground newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Higher Ground delivered directly to your inbox each Sunday.
Within mere seconds of almost every mass shooting, a clarion call for more gun control instantaneously breaks out on social media and reverberates throughout political circles.
This immediate, visceral reaction may be understandable, as a horrified populace seeks to find a solution to stop an unimaginable evil that repeatedly rears its ugly head.
The images of small children, high schoolers, church congregants and other innocents fleeing for their lives on our TV screens — and the endless stream of media coverage detailing every dreadful moment — are too much to bear.
And so we demand a solution — any solution — in an attempt to eradicate these lethal events. But while many survivors, activists and politicians see firearms restrictions as the path forward to stopping such occurrences, there are some surprising dissenters to this familiar line of thinking.
“It’s maddening that we go straight to a gun control debate,” Evan Todd, a survivor of the notorious 1999 Columbine High School shooting, told me on this week’s episode of “Higher Ground With Billy Hallowell” podcast (subscribe here). “Because, in the end, that will not solve the problem.”
Listen to Mr. Todd detail what he sees as the real solutions to gun violence:
Mr. Todd knows firsthand what true depravity and wickedness look like. He was inside the library at his school in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999, when two student gunmen slaughtered 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
Not only was Mr. Todd shot during the ordeal, but he was also the last person to speak with the gunmen, somehow convincing them not to take his life.
Since the shooting, however, Mr. Todd has emerged as a vocal proponent of the Second Amendment, departing from comments and proclamations made by other mass shooting survivors who have vociferously pushed politicians for stricter gun control measures.
For Mr. Todd, the answers to our gun violence woes are more rooted in school safety than in cracking down on constitutional freedoms.
“The first thing that we should be saying as parents is [that] we need to secure and protect our schools,” Mr. Todd said. “That is the first step we should be taking.”
When it comes to new laws — something many turn to in hopes of halting these mass killings — Mr. Todd affirmed a reality that’s often overlooked in the emotional debates that follow these heartbreaking events: Lawless individuals don’t have much regard for rules and regulations.
“More laws are not going to stop a mass shooter,” Mr. Todd said. “The two murderers at Columbine broke more than 29, 30 laws. When [someone is] intent on murdering other individuals, they don’t care about the law. The law doesn’t matter, whether it’s a gun law or any other law — they will break them.”
He argued tougher gun laws actually do a disservice to law-abiding Americans trying to protect themselves and their families, disarming them or, at the least, making it more difficult for them to exercise their constitutionally protected rights.
Rather than going after guns, Mr. Todd wants to see armed responses more prepared to confront the threats in schools and other localities.
“The solution is to physically stop them,” he said. “If you look at every single one of these that has happened over the last 25 years since Columbine, and even before then, they are stopped when someone confronts the shooter, and a vast majority at the time that’s an armed person.”
Mr. Todd continued, “Whether it’s an armed citizen who has taken it upon themselves to get trained, or an armed teacher, or a security guard — or eventually even a law enforcement officer — these things stop every single time when [the shooters] are finally confronted by somebody, and that’s what we need to do.”
He reflected on his own experience inside the Columbine library on that fateful day, recalling how the two killers “joked about putting their guns aside … and starting to knife people to death,” as they openly acknowledged there was no one at the school who could stop their rampage.
“They were so comfortable with not being pursued or stopped at that moment that they just moved nonchalantly and were murdering people,” Mr. Todd said.
It’s for these reasons Mr. Todd has also been an outspoken advocate of training and arming teachers and staff at schools, especially when funds aren’t available to pay school resource officers or enact other costly security measures.
“There should be an armed presence at every single school, on every single campus, and every single minute of every single day,” Mr. Todd passionately proclaimed. “Our children are in school and that’s something that parents need to demand from their local school districts.”
In a world where gun control dominates the narrative, he wants to see more parents step up to the plate and demand robust security measures.
The uncomfortable reality, he said, is that police officers — whom he admires deeply — often arrive after much of the carnage has unfolded; with no one on-site and no force to push back against evil, the stakes are quite high.
While some might take issue with Mr. Todd’s ardent pro-Second Amendment stance, his position isn’t often heard amid the flurry of post-atrocity diatribes. Yet his call for increased security and his position on a neutralizing force should be seen as common sense and be embraced by all sides of the aisle.
Without a doubt, it is the most actionable and impactful way for schools, churches and institutions to quickly shut down a would-be mass shooter. Gun control debates have their place in the broader discussion, but the knee-jerk demand for such measures after these events unfold misses the mark and wastes the precious time needed to ensure our children are safe.
Listen to the full conversation with Mr. Todd on “Higher Ground” here.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.