The Yellowstone National Park rangers who shot and killed an armed man in Canyon Village on July 4 should be commended for almost certainly saving many lives.

As more details of the incident emerge, it’s become even more clear that rangers likely stopped a mass shooting. The latest park update last week included new information on the incident and actions of park concessionaire employee Samson “Lucas” Fussner, 28, of Milton, Florida, who was shot and killed by rangers, one of whom was wounded in the shootout.

Fussner was firing a semi automatic rifle toward a dining facility at Canyon Village, in the center of one of the nation’s busiest parks at about the busiest time of the year, when rangers intercepted him. Roughly 200 people were in the dining rooms at the time.

The incident just shows that the notion of “it can’t happen here” is dangerous. A mass shooting, what Fussner clearly intended to carry out, almost occurred right here in Park County. That’s scary.

It’s why shooting drills remain so important and why we should be grateful organizations like Northwest College and its criminal justice program have stayed at the forefront of practicing responses to such an event. The campus hosted a mass shooter drill this spring, a year after hosting a mass casualty drill along with many other agencies last fall.

Our local schools still hold these types of drills too, and while I wish we lived in a world where my two boys didn’t have to worry about a shooting while in their Powell classrooms, we all need to be prepared.

The park incident also makes me grateful the school district said it’s going to look into the possibility of a program, like Cody has, of allowing trained and qualified teachers to be armed in the schools.

At Canyon Village, it was armed rangers on site who responded. Had they not been there already, even if they were able to respond quickly, who knows how much more tragic of an incident this could have been.