How an Armed Assistant Principal Stopped a School Shooter

Luke Woodham, 16, school shooter

Dec. 17, 2012 - The nightmarish school shooting in Newtown, CT last week reminds us that lives could have been saved if some of the staff at Sandy Hook Elementary had been armed. One of them might have been able to take down killer Adam Lanza, thereby saving a dozen or more lives. Gun owners sometimes use their weapon to defend themselves or others but these stories rarely make it to the front page.

Sometimes a gun is used defensively against an animal. Sometimes it's used against a lunatic shooting at kids in a school, and sometimes the hero is a staffer of that school. Assistant principal Joel Myrick, for example, who undoubtedly prevented more killings by using his own hand gun to ruin a killer's day. Myrick used his own pistol to stop a shooting on October 1, 1997 at Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. Time Magazine reported the following:

At 8 a.m. on Oct. 1, Luke Woodham, 16, bookish, overweight, an atheist filled with hatred for God and his own existence, drove a white Chevy Corsica up to his high school. That was already a sign of trouble: the young man had poor vision and was driven to school every day by his mother.