What Columbine SHOULD have been
October 24th, 2005
IMAGINE!
(What Columbine COULD have been!!)
By Ann Coulter
08/13/1999
Remember this name: Thomas Glenn Terry. It won’t be bandied
quite as much as “Mark O. Barton” over the next few weeks,
but it should be. Two armed men burst into Shoney’s restaurant
in Anniston, Alabama and herded the patrons and employees into
a walk-in refrigerator, at gun point. The robbers kept the
manager behind for his assistance as they looted the
restaurant. One patron, however, also remained behind.
Thomas Glenn Terry had opted against being locked in a
refrigerator, and hid from the attackers under a table.
As one of the armed robbers ransacked the cash register,
another patroled the restaurant. When he came across
Mr. Terry, he pulled his gun.
But unlike the recent victims in Atlanta, this victim
was armed. Using his own legally concealed handgun,
Terry shot and killed the robber. The other armed robber,
who had had his gun trained on the manager, then opened
fire on Terry. Terry shot back, mortally wounding the
second robber. The two dozen hostages were released
unharmed. Only the criminals — who had been armed
with stolen guns by the way — didn’t make it out alive.
You probably hadn’t heard of the Shoney’s restaurant
incident. In the media’s boundless capacity to stultify
the public with sensational news stories, they have made
places like Littleton, Colorado household names. But
“Anniston, Alabama” doesn’t ring a bell.
A massacre is a story. Thwarting a massacre isn’t.
once you know about Anniston, and similar averted tragedies,
something will start to leap out at you as you read news
accounts of gunmen shooting scores of innocents. Massacre
stories always include a terrifying account of how the killers
proceeded from victim to victim, pausing to reload, and
shooting again. Mass murder requires that the victims be
unarmed.
Thomas Glenn Terry, though heroic, is not altogether
unique. Two years ago in Pearl, Mississippi a deranged
student shot and killed two of his classmates. Fortunately,
Joel Myrick, the assistant principal had a gun in his car.
He prevented the shooting from becoming a Littleton level
massacre by holding the student at gunpoint until the police
arrived.
A year later, in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, a 14-year-old boy
opened fire at an eighth-grade graduation dance, killing a
teacher and wounding three others. A single murder did not
become a mass murder only because a near-by restaurant owner,
James Strand, happened to be armed. As the shooter stopped
to reload, Strand immobilized the shooter, holding him for
over ten minutes, until the police appeared. A lot of killing
can be accomplished in ten minutes when none of your victims
is armed.
How long did it take the police to arrive in Atlanta?
Barton walked into one office building in Atlanta shot four
people dead, then left the building, ambled across the street,
entered another building, and killed at least five more people.
As in Littleton there are film clips of policemen scaling the
building’s walls to rescue terrified and completely defenseless
people inside.
Most striking in the news reports of Barton’s shooting
spree was this: Fully three hours after the shooting, some
people were still hiding in the building. Hiding. Waiting
like pigs before the slaughter. Because none of them was
armed. None but the madman.
But for some reason, the government’s response is always to
disarm more citizens. Not to disarm itself, by the way, but
to disarm people other than the police who show up 15 minutes
after the shooting has begun. This isn’t a complaint about the
police, they simply can’t be everywhere at once. It’s a plea
for more citizen guards. There may be bad citizens, but, let
me remind you, there are also bad police. Why are they the
only ones don’t have to hide in their offices when madmen
with guns show up?
More guns will not create more Mark Bartons. Guns can do a
lot of things, like protect you from lunatics, but they don’t
make you criminally insane. Consider Mr. Barton. The initial
reports have been that he killed his children because his stock
porfolio had declined. Well, that’s a rational response. Whether
it was his stocks or his wife or the weather — he killed his
children.
This is a madman. In the absence of a gun, he could
have used an axe, a bomb, or a machette. One of the most
efficient murder sprees this century was accomplished not with
guns, but with machettes. Madmen in Rwanda murdered almost
one million people in under four months, with machettes.
If only Thomas Glenn Terry had been there.
