Stephen Dinan and Seth McLaughlin
at the Washington Times offer a piece on the police ‘Thin Blue Line’ that stopped the gunman from killing people on the Alexandria, Virginia baseball field.
The rifle shots came from the
fence over the third base line, shattering the June morning, wounding one
congressman and several staffers, and terrifying the two dozen lawmakers and
staffers who were also on the field.
Then came gunshots from the
other side of the field.
Three U.S. Capitol Police
officers, who were at the field as part of their duty to protect a senior
Republican lawmaker, were returning fire. They turned the murderous assault by
a left-wing fanatic into a raging gunbattle that kept the man off balance and
outside the ballfield fence, giving lawmakers and staffers a chance to run for
their lives.
The agents then kept the
gunman from getting a bead into the concrete dugout where more than a dozen
lawmakers and staffers were huddled.
“If he’d gotten in the fence,
there would have been a bloodbath,” said Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican
and manager of the team, which was practicing for the annual Congressional
Baseball Game on Thursday.
In a day full of very human
moments and emotions, the agents who were part of House Majority Whip Steve
Scalise’s security detail were hailed as absolute heroes, taking on a man with
a rifle while armed only with handguns and averting what those on the field
said would have been a certain massacre.
“The thin blue line held
today,” said Rep. Roger Williams, a coach on the team who injured his ankle
diving to the floor of the dugout to get out of the line of fire.
It was, lawmakers said, a
classic example of good people with guns stopping a bad man with a gun.
“We were sitting ducks. We
had nothing to fight back with but bats, if it came to that,” Mr. Williams told
reporters. He said there could have been as many as 25 deaths had the armed
officers not been present.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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