After a student opened fire at Atlanta's Price Middle School on Thursday afternoon, injuring one 14-year-old boy, an armed officer working at the school was able to disarm him, police told the Associated Press.
The armed officer was off-duty, the Associated Press reported, but police did not release details about him or whether he was regularly at the school. Ever since the December shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., many Americans have called for armed guards in schools.
In fact, the Newtown Board of Education voted Thursday night to approve a request to the Police Department for armed school resource officers (SROs) at each of the town's elementary schools, Bronxville-Eastchester Patch reported. With this measure, two officials - one armed and one unarmed - would be placed at each Newtown school, in an attempt to prevent a repeat tragedy like the Sandy Hook shooting.
But CNN host Piers Morgan, known for his anti-gun advocacy, boldly spoke out in the face of headlines stating that an armed guard "disarmed" the Atlanta school shooter.
He tweeted on Friday: "REVEALED: Armed guard was NOT able to stop Atlanta school shooting," probably because the shooter did hit one student before the guard disarmed him.
But others, like conservative media personality and political commentator Glenn Beck, said that the armed guard's ability to disarm the shooter proves that gun rights should be protected in the U.S. In his opinion, the media did not focus enough on the role of the armed guard.
"I think that the honest question is why is this not on the front page of every paper today?" he said, as quoted on his website. "Why is this not leading the news everywhere? Why is nobody talking about this one?"
Amid the debate over armed guards in schools, one question remains about the Atlanta shooting, according to Atlanta Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis.
"The obvious question is how did [the gun] get past a metal detector?" Davis asked in the Associated Press report. "That's something we do not know yet."
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