Thanks for that link, it contained a comment from someone who referred to this incident:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson_College_shooting#section_1
Dawson College in Canada.
Some police officers happened to be there for an unrelated reason.
One officer shot and wounded the shooter, who then shot himself.
What woul have happened if good guys with guns hadn't been there?
Nobody will ever know, but it's pretty clear that the death toll would have been considerably higher.
Trouble is, these incidents are less newsworthy because they are stopped sooner, so they don't get the coverage that the more gruesome ones do.
It is possible to make a few observations however:
Mass killings are stopped by a bullet. The sooner armed opposition arrives in the scene, the lower the death toll.
School shooters are cowards. That's why they choose schools rather than, say, police stations, shooting ranges, gun shows.
Being shot in the shoulder took all of the fight out of this guy.
As soon as he met armed resistance, he shot himself.
The latter is the most important one. Most mass killers don't expect to survive. They kill as many people as they can before the cops or other armed resistance arrives and then allow themselves to be shot or commit suicide.
The reason that they choose schools is because they know that they can kill more people before help arrives.
If there were armed responders already inside school buildings, they would stop selecting schools as their targets.
Had Kimveer Gill known that there happened to be armed cops in Dawson College that day, would he still have gone there to shoot it up?
We can never know for sure, but given the fact that he turned the gun on himself as soon as things stopped going his way suggests that he would have thought twice if he had known that
people would be shooting back at him.
