It's their job. Plain and simply. It's not your job or Mr. Joe Blow's to deal with armed criminals, or homicidal maniacs. It's an unfortunate necessarily that we (as a nation) need guns to defend ourselves, but we can limit who has access and to them, and our Government has done this via limiting it to our Police force, the Military and certain private sectors.
Australia did and still does have a limited private gun own ship. Before 1996 you could get just about any firearm you wanted, till a man in Tasmania killed 35 people and wounded dozens more with a semi-automatic assault rifle.
After that fully and semi automatic rifles were outlawed.
Then later a student at my University (before I attended) shot several people with a handgun. Why pistols weren't outlawed with semi-automatic rifles, I don't know, but you can bet they were afterwards.
Single shot rifles are still legal, as Australia has a large farming population, but there really is no need to semi-automatic weaponry, you fire once and every animal in sight bolts.
