The Tucson people were good at stopping a shooting spree that might have gone on much longer.

Remember the Virginia Tech shooting, in which the shooter was allowed to reload several times and roam from room to room until he'd shot 32 persons to death and wounded many others?

The culture in Arizona is different:

In my district and in my state, we have a very strong gun culture. I own a gun, members of my family own guns.

Those are the words of Gabrielle Gifford, interviewed in May 2010.

"Packed into cubicles with 5-foot-high dividers, the 300 unarmed soldiers were sitting ducks."

Details of the Fort Hood massacre.

Around 1:30 p.m., witnesses say a man later identified as Hasan jumped up on a desk and shouted the words "Allahu Akbar!"—Arabic for "God is great!" He was armed with two pistols, one a semiautomatic capable of firing up to 20 rounds without reloading....

Those who weren't hit by direct fire were struck by rounds ricocheting off the desks and tile floor.

I've been trying to understand why all those soldiers — I know they were unarmed — were not able to stop Hasan, how minutes passed, and it took the arrival of the civilian police to end the carnage. I thought that after the Virginia Tech shooting, it was well-known that the shooting would go on and on and that waiting was not a good strategy. Police Sgt. Kimberly Munley, the police officer who did take Hasan down, "had trained on 'active shooter' scenarios after the April 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech University." Why weren't the 300 soldiers also able to respond? How could our soldiers be set up as "sitting ducks" — arrayed and accessible to a man who had made it known that he wanted to kill them?

***

The headline of the story is "But for heroes, bloodbath could have been worse."

Pfc. Amber Bahr, 19, of Random Lake, Wis., tore up her blouse and used it as a tourniquet on a wounded comrade. It was only later that she realized she'd been shot in the back, the bullet exiting her abdomen.

Great. I'm impressed. But I'm not distracted. The bloodbath could have been worse. Noted. But couldn't it also have been less bad?