The Aurora, Colorado Shooting You Didn't Hear About...

... Because it was stopped before it had a chance to start by a man with a concealed handgun.

On April 22, 2012 in Aurora, CO, Kiarron Parker, 29, who was supposed to be serving a prison sentence in Oklahoma from December 2009-December 2021, but was released in November 2011 after completing education and substance abuse programs, sped into the parking lot of the New Destiny Center Church, crashing into a car. Upon hearing the commotion, the mother of one of the pastors, Josephine Echols, a nurse, rushed outside to provide medical assistance. That's what Parker shot her five times, killing her, before advancing toward the church and attempting to enter. Antonio Milow, an off-duty police officer carrying a concealed handgun, shot him before he was able to make it inside, ending the shooting spree before it had a chance to begin.

Mother Jones published a horribly-biased article by Mark Follman trying to correlate the increase in guns against a perceived increase in mass shootings. One of the mistakes he makes in his methodology is limiting his definition of mass shootings to four or more people killed, without looking at instances where the potential was much higher, and then concluding that in none of those instances did an armed citizen put an end to the shooting. What Follman fails to grasp is that all of those shootings in which four or more people have been killed, since 1950, have been in places where the average armed citizen is not permitted to carry a concealed weapon, even if legally permitted to carry in other places. John Lott Jr. does an outstanding job refuting Follman's argument here.

What's important to note here is that this is exactly the type of case that Follman ignores in his analysis; this is a potential mass shooting that never had enough casualties for it to be defined as a mass shooting. And the only thing that prevented it was a responsibly armed citizen. The fact that he was an off-duty police officer is moot; unless you'd like to legislate police officers to work in civilian clothes and continue to do their jobs even while off-duty (and pay them for it)--an impossible task--the only alternative method of stopping mass shootings is to allow responsibly armed citizens to protect themselves and others.