An unarmed teacher stops a school shooting

Last week’s shooting at a California high school—in which one student was seriously injured but no one was killed—offers an important corrective to a couple of the more toxic arguments that have been floated since the Connecticut shooting.

A teacher—already grazed in the head by a shotgun pellet—ended the California incident with relatively little bloodshed by intervening with the shooter. But, while this brave teacher happens to be male, his actions didn’t quite line up with Charlotte Allen’s lament that, if only there had been more men at the school in Connecticut, maybe they could have tackled the shooter or beat him down or otherwise used their manly manliness to stop him.

Ryan Heber, the California teacher, reacted to the shooting in a different way—one that proved quite effective. He stood between the shooter and his students. Then he talked the shooter into putting down his gun.