Tuesday's terrifyingly close call at an Atlanta-area elementary school ended about as well as anyone could have ever hoped: No injuries to students, staff, police or even the 20-year-old gunman. Officials are still piecing together exactly what prompted Michael Brandon Hill to allegedly show up at Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy dressed in black and armed with an AK-47, but it appears as though one major reason the nation isn't mourning another Newtown today is the level-headed reaction of a school clerk who spent an hour talking the gunman down after he arrived in the school office.

"I just started talking to him … and let him know what was going on with me and that it would be OK," the clerk, Antoinette Tuff, told Atlanta's Channel 2 Action News during a lengthy sit-down interview. In a subsequent interview with ABC News, Tuff described Hill as "a young man that was ready to kill anybody that he could."