A must-read piece at The Daily Beast by Michael Daly:

The dead take no selfies.

So there might well never have been the remarkable selfie that 16-year-old Nate Scimio took after his heroism at Franklin Regional High School if he had faced a gun rather than two knives on Wednesday morning.... As of the end of the day, none of the 21 victims had died. Scimio had managed to escape serious injury even as he shielded several students from the attacker and took a moment to pull a fire alarm to alert everyone else. A fellow student named Trinity McCool credited him on Twitter with saving her and a friend. “Without Nate, me and Lindsay would’ve been injured and there’s not enough words to describe how much of a hero he is,” McCool tweeted.

Scimio survived to take a picture of himself in Children’s Hospital. The photo that might never have been shows him holding up his camera with his right hand while he points with his left to the bandaged wound on his right forearm. “Chillin’ at Childrens,” he captioned the selfie he posted on Instagram. Nobody could have outrun a bullet if the suspect had been armed with a gun, but anybody who managed to stay outside the reach of the blades escaped injury.

Scimio most likely had instinctively thrown up that now wounded arm to ward off the attacker’s blade. The impulse would have done nothing to deflect a bullet, which would likely have torn through his arm and into him. He then might have been quite literally chillin’ at the morgue.

Go read the whole thing.