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John Parker is a military veteran and student at Umpqua Community College (UCC). He was on the campus Thursday when Christopher Harper Mercer began his murderous rampage that left ten dead and injured seven more. Parker was also carrying a handgun.

But Parker didn’t get involved or try to attack the shooter for a very simple reason: He knew police SWAT team members wouldn’t be able to tell him from the shooter if he was openly displaying a handgun.

Parker added that he does indeed carry a handgun in case “I’m in close proximity” to an incident where he can legitimately help another person, but he was also quick to say that he is not the kind of person who believes that:

“There’s always somebody out there behind your back ready to do something like this.”

The right wing gun nuts would like us all to believe that the reason the shooter in Oregon chose the campus of a college is because it’s “gun-free” zone and they also love to claim that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is by countering him with a “good guy” carrying a gun.

Even though he and other armed students had both the training and the firepower to rush into the scene and confront, Parker told MSNBC:

“Luckily we made the choice not to get involved. We were quite a distance away from the building where this was happening. And we could have opened ourselves up to be potential targets ourselves, and not knowing where SWAT was, their response time, they wouldn’t know who we were. And if we had our guns ready to shoot, they could think that we were bad guys.”

Yet the gun extremists from the NRA would have us all believe that if all of us were armed with a weapon, it would eliminate all crime and virtually guarantee horrible incidents like the one in Oregon never happened. But most of those people have never faced death or the prospect of having to take another person’s life. John Parker has, and he made the right decision. If only there were more rational gun owners like him in this country.

Watch John Parker On MSNBC

Featured Image Via Screenshot from MSNBC