In the media's boundless capacity to stultify the public with sensational news stories, they have made places like Littleton, Colorado household names. A massacre is a story. Thwarting a massacre isn't. But once you know about Anniston, and similar averted tragedies, something will start to leap out at you as you read news accounts of gunmen shooting scores of innocents. Massacre stories always include a terrifying account of how the killers proceeded from victim to victim, pausing to reload, and shooting again.
Mass murder requires that the victims be unarmed.
Thomas Glenn Terry, though heroic, is not altogether unique. Two years ago in Pearl, Mississippi a deranged student shot and killed two of his classmates. Fortunately, Joel Myrick, the assistant principal had a gun in his car. He prevented the shooting from becoming a Littleton level massacre by holding the student at gunpoint until the police arrived. A single murder did not become a mass murder only because a near-by restaurant owner, James Strand, happened to be armed.