Gone In 30 Seconds

One important fact about the Dayton shooting is that it demonstrates how silly the “one good man with a gun” strategy for stopping mass killings is:

It took about 30 seconds to bring down the gunman who killed nine people and injured 27 others in a crowded section of downtown Dayton, Ohio, early on Sunday morning — just hours after another scene of violence ravaged the Texas city of El Paso.

But figuring out why the alleged shooter, Connor Betts, who lived with his family in a sleepy suburban Midwestern community, descended on scores of innocent people — including his younger sister and a friend — is a question that will take much longer to solve, said Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl in a press conference Sunday afternoon.

What officials have offered is a timeline of the deadly events that ended in dozens of lives upended almost instantly. On duty officers first heard shots at 1:05 a.m. as they patrolled what is normally a safe and lively part of the city just before local bars shut down. Within approximately 20 seconds, six officers were running toward the hail of bullets pouring from the shooter’s .223-caliber high capacity rifle with 100-round drum magazines.

Multiple police officers were able to stop Betts with near-miraculous speed, and yet 9 people were killed and many more injured. The obvious lesson here is that there is no possible reason for civilians to have either the rifle or magazine that Betts possessed, and nothing in the Constitution prevents either from being banned.

The other lesson is that misogyny is rarely absent where these killers are concerned:

Another former classmate, who asked not to be identified out of concerns for his privacy, also recalled being summoned to a school administrator’s office and being told he was “number one” on the list of students Betts wanted to kill. He said the list was separated into two columns: a “kill list” for boys and a “rape list” for girls. A third person, who also asked not to be named for privacy reasons, told CNN that Betts sent messages about the list to one of his classmates, who told her mother. Her mother then notified the police, who came to the school and interviewed people on the list individually in the school’s office. “Personally, it freaked me out,” said the classmate who was told she was on the list. “I started having panic attacks in the school building.”A fourth person, who also asked not to be named for privacy reasons, said, “All I know is there was a list of violent actions and a list of names including mine.”

She said some of the names were female students who, like her, turned him down for dates. She said Betts often simulated shooting other students and threatened to kill himself and others on several occasions.”He loved to look at you and pretend to shoot with guns, guns with his hands,” she said.

Allowing woman-haters with violent fantasies about killing classmates easy access to military-grade weaponry — what could possibly go wrong, really?