It’s any parent’s worst nightmare: knowing that your child is at a school where a gunman is or is about to actively shoot children.
I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
That’s the situation that a father in Oregon recently found himself in, and thankfully, he was carrying that day because who knows how many lives that he saved? (You can read up on that incident here.)
And here’s where we get to today’s story which is the part that tends to get glossed over in discussions of self-defense shootings.
Yes, people are now starting to talk about the legal aftermath of a self-defense shooting, even for the person who was in the right in that incident.
What is, too often, not talked about is the emotional aftermath of the shooting. Russ Bynum writes,
The Oregon man who fatally shot a teenage gunman to end a deadly rampage at an elementary school last week says he was the children’s “last line of defense” and that he regrets not arriving soon enough to save them all.
Kaylub Giamanco, whose two daughters attend Silver Rail Elementary, where the Oct. 15 attack occurred, said he feels like he failed the families of those who died.
“I want to apologize for not saving their babies, that’s probably the biggest thing for me right now,” Giamanco told Oregon Public Broadcasting in an interview published Friday. “The gratitude for saving people’s children is awesome. But there were ones that I didn’t save.”
I understand where this guy is coming from. I don’t carry a firearm because I want to get into a gunfight. I don’t carry because I’m looking to be a hero in anyone else’s eyes. I carry because I want to protect the innocent, the vulnerable, the defenseless.
And people with that kind of motivation for carrying will often struggle after the fact, feeling like they should have been able to do more, that there should have been another life that they could have saved.
Because those of us who think of themselves as protectors, as sheepdogs, we always push ourselves to be the best that we can be to give as many as we can the best possible chance at life.