School shooting hero against arming teachers
Principal who used rifle to detain 1997 shooter suggests hiring security
Even before a gunman opened fire at a Florida school last week, killing17, a national effort had been underway to arm and train teachers and staff to defend against mass shootings.
That effort has gained momentum in recent days. Legislators have moved to permit concealed weapons in schools. Sheriff’s offices have offered to train school staff members in armed response.
But one assistant high school principal who survived a school shooting — after loading his Colt .45 pistol, then chasing and detaining the suspect at gunpoint — says the idea is misguided.
“Teachers have to teach and that’s what they should be doing,” said Joel Myrick, the former assistant principal at a high school in Mississippi. “It doesn’t matter what a pistolero you are, or think you are, you don’t need to be in school in charge of protecting children.”
Before Columbine, Sandy Hook or Stoneman Douglas — indeed, before school shootings became devastatingly routine — there was Pearl High School, near Jackson, Miss.
Myrick, 56, remembers the day clearly — Oct. 1, 1997 — as well as the exact time the first shot rang out, 8:06 a.m., but it is still a tough topic for him to discuss. He had acute stress for about six months afterward. Nightmares. Misery, he said.
“That’s one of the first things I thought about when I heard about Florida. Thousands of people whose life will never be the same,” said Myrick, a longtime educator who now teaches polymer science at a technical high school in Hancock County, Miss. “It kind of exhausts me to talk about it.”
At Pearl High, the gunman was Luke Woodham, a 16-year-old student who woke up, stabbed his mother to death, then came to campus carrying a .30-30 lever-action rifle, traditionally used for killing deer.
Myrick was crossing a school commons when he heard the first shot, immediately recognizing it as gunfire. When Woodham shot a student in the gut, then turned to reload his gun, Myrick ran to his truck, where he kept a pistol.
“I’ve always carried one since I started driving,” Myrick said. “I always kept a gun or pistol of some kind in my truck. Unloaded, stowed away. Not ready to fire.”
He loaded and took aim at Woodham, but did not fire out of fear of hitting someone in the background. “I knew not to shoot because the backstop was not safe,” he said. “I didn’t just go blasting away.”
After seeing Myrick pointing his gun, Woodham retreated from campus, got in his car and began to drive away. As Myrick ran after him on foot, the car spun out and came to a stop 20 steps away from Myrick. He had his gun trained on Woodham when the police arrived.
Two students, including Woodham’s former girlfriend, were killed and seven others injured. Woodham is serving a life sentence at the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
Despite Myrick’s firm stance against arming faculty members, he has long advocated placing trained personnel, possibly retired law enforcement officers, in every school, as a deterrent. “We protect our banks that way,” he said. “We protect things we love. America protects things it loves. We don’t care if it’s expensive.”
Myrick said he was not a member of the National Rifle Association. “And not because I don’t think the Second Amendment is important, but there’s got to be some common sense,” he said.