A Denver woman was shot in the head by her husband on Monday night.  What makes this so much more awful is that she was on the phone to 911, waiting for the police to come help her.  She waited for 13 minutes, and the last sound the operator heard was that of a gunshot.  Help didn’t come in time; when the police arrived, they found Kristine Kirk dead on the floor.  The incident leaves three children with a dead mother—one of whom witnessed her death—and a father charged with first degree murder.

This story is awful on so many levels, but it underlines some very basic points that gun control advocates love to ignore.

1) If someone is intent on committing violence, they will commit that violence whether they have a gun or not, whether it’s locked up or not, whether it’s loaded or not.  When Kirk first called 911, she said her husband was hallucinating and asking her to shoot him; their gun was locked in a safe at that time.  During what must have seemed like an eternally long phone call to Kirstine Kirk, her husband got the gun out of the safe and shot her in the head with it.   In short, having the gun in a safe didn’t stop her from dying.  Would she be dead if the Kirks didn’t own a firearm?  The short answer is yes, she probably would be—just by a different method.

2) You cannot assume that the police will come, or even that they’ll help you when they show up.  Kristine Kirk waited for 13 minutes, and that waiting cost her life.  What if she would have had a gun of her own?  What if there was a pistol in her purse?  What if she had had a way to defend herself?  She might still be alive.  Instead, she “stayed on the line” and died for it in front of her child.

The police were sent to the home at 2132.  They walked in and found her dead at 2158.

“Anytime a person dies while communicating with Denver’s emergency services, we examine the circumstances to ensure that the incident was handled properly and we look for areas to improve upon,” police spokesman Sonny Jackson said.

Nice words.  Too bad they won’t help Kristine Kirk or her children.