The attack at Ohio State University was not an “active shooter” incident, but a probable terror attack that was stopped by a “good guy with a gun.” (Dave Workman photo)
By Dave Workman
Senior Editor
When gun prohibitionists moved swiftly to exploit the mayhem at Ohio State University, they blew it because their knee-jerk laments about “gun violence” were proven to be without foundation, and the only use of a gun was by a campus police officer who stopped the bloody car and knife attack almost immediately.
It was yet another case of a “good guy with a gun” intervening to stop an act of violence. In this case, the perpetrator had already injured nearly a dozen people, and was in the process of hurting more.
The attack was launched by a legal resident alien identified as Abdul Razak Ali Artan. He slammed a car into a crowd of OSU students, and then attacked them with a butcher knife. But he was stopped within a minute by a University police officer identified as Alan Horujko, according to The Lantern, the campus newspaper.
What is now known is that Horujko fired the only shots in the incident. Those shots may be responsible for the early alerts about an “active shooter” incident that raced across the news wires. Network and cable news organizations focused on the case as a campus mass shooting until it became clear that the only gun involved was that carried by the officer.
But that didn’t happen until after anti-gunners took to social media to make some soon-to-be-embarrassing statements about the need for more gun control.
For example, the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility released an e-mail that gasped, “We still don’t know all the details of what happened. But we do know this: The threat of gun violence constantly grips our nation. It has become the norm. And it will only continue unless clear steps are taken to keep weapons out of dangerous hands. All too often, dangerous individuals have easy access to guns — and 90 people die every day as a result.”
Anti-gun Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee reportedly tweeted, “Today is yet another was a sad day in our country because of a senseless shooting at an Ohio State University.”
In the aftermath of the attack, California Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, perhaps best summed things up. Quoted by news services and the Seattle Times, Schiff said the incident “bears all of the hallmarks of a terror attack carried out by someone who may have been self-radicalized.”
And he added this: “Here in the United States, our most immediate threat still comes from lone attackers that are not only capable of unleashing great harm but are also extremely difficult, and in some cases, virtually impossible to identify or interdict.”
According to NBC News and other news agencies, Artan was an 18-year-old Somali refugee “who became a legal permanent resident of the United States in 2014.”
According to Fox News, Ohio State Police Chief Craig Stone said the suspect “purposely drove over a curb and into pedestrians.” He said the attack was deliberate.
What happened at OSU was reminiscent of the summer attack in Nice, France when nearly 90 people were mowed down by a terrorist driving a large truck.
While OSU is a so-called “gun-free zone,” the attack demonstrated that mass violence does not require a firearm to accomplish. Had Artan not been immediately shot, his rampage may have continued, leaving more people injured or possibly dead.
It also reinforced the notion that such attacks can happen anywhere, in any public place.
By no small coincidence, Business Insider reported that the FBI’s National Instant Check System conducted 185,713 “Black Friday” background checks. While that does not equate to as many gun sales, it does provide a strong indicator.
