There are a lot of questions being raised now about the police response to the Uvalde mass shooter. Even Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is saying he was misled by the police about the timeline of what occurred, that they hadn’t told him that they had waited for an hour-and-15-minutes from the time an officer first arrived on the scene until they killed the shooter.

You did have heroic people, like CBP agent Jacob Albarado, who raced into the school with some other agents and helped to get out not only his own daughter but dozens of other children. Albarado urged people to allow teachers to be trained and carry, to be able to defend themselves and their students. It’s not hard to think of how different things might have been had that been the case.

Indeed, we can look to a case that just happened in Charleston, West Virginia, on Wednesday night.

Dennis Butler, 37, was warned about speeding near a party where children were present in an apartment complex. Then Butler reportedly returned with an AR-15 and began shooting. It was a recipe for a disaster; there were dozens of people at the party and a lot of people could have been hurt or killed. But a woman who was a guest at the party was lawfully carrying a pistol. She pulled it, fired, and took down Butler. He sustained multiple gunshot wounds and later died.

“Instead of running from the threat, she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night,” Charleston Police Lieutenant Tony Hazelett confirmed. “She was lawfully carrying a firearm and stopped a threat. There was a graduation party and a party with kids so obviously someone just graduated high school and we could have had a casualty shooting.”

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— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) May 28, 2022

It turns out that Butler also had a long criminal history. Because of the woman’s actions, no one was hurt. Hazelett said there would be no charges against her, given the situation.

That was likely the difference between multiple people living and multiple people being wounded or dying. We can see the difference that time makes — between having a gun to defend yourself or having to wait for the police to respond, as in Uvalde. That’s a window of time that can make all the difference in the world. The shooter in Charleston had an AR-15, and the woman had a pistol, but she was still able to take him out.

There are things that you can do to help prevent mass shootings and people being trained to respond appropriately is one of them. This is just one of the many instances. We’ve also seen cases like Sutherland Springs, where Stephen Williford, a former NRA instructor came running on his bare feet with his rifle to take on a man who was shooting up a church. His shooting of the killer stopped the man from killing more people.