From the
Nevada shooting:
Credit to this guy for being both willing and prepared to help. He had the right tool to have a chance to make a difference there. But the bottom line is that if he hadn't had the weapon then he wouldn't have been able to even try anything and there would've been one less death. Let's separate respect for his willingness to risk his life to help from acknowledgment of the ultimate effect--one additional casualty. The NRA is pushing a "good guy with a gun" fantasy that rarely plays out that way in real life, except for LEOs. You'd
need a firearm (or other ranged weapon) to have a chance to do something in this situation, barring very fortuitous positioning, but that doesn't mean it
will help--what helped is a large number of well-equipped, well-trained, well-coordinated LEOs.
There's just no telling what will work when. As I always tell my students when they're very impressed by a technique: "Nothing is magic." Nothing works every time.