Another school shooting.

[dalesql]

Information is sketchy as yet. Another mass shooting in a place where the victims are disarmed by law. How long before the gun control activists will be out there metaphorically dancing in the blood to show how this proves we need more laws against guns?

Comments

[tabbiewolf.livejournal.com]

Genuinely curious, so I hope I don't come off as condescending because I don't mean to at all: The general argument I hear about school shootings from those who are very strongly pro-guns is to arm the teachers/principal and possibly allow students to carry firearms as well. I don't know if this is your thought as well, but I AM curious as to why this thought pervades folks who heavily support the Second Amendment.

On the surface it makes some degree of sense; you can shoot back. However, if you were at a school/mall/public forum/whatever and a shooting broke out and everyone started shooting back, how would you know who was on whose side? How would you know the enemy?

Just wondering.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

LIke many things in the real world, it's complicated. In this particular case, unless one of the immediate victims was armed, (which would have violated all sorts of laws, being they were underage and in a school) it would not have made a difference. The slightly more information that has emerged on the case was that the elapsed time from the shooter revealing he had a gun and the shooter shooting himself in the head was less than a minute. So anyone who was responding from outside the room would not have gotten there before it was over. Was there even a single adult in that cafeteria when it happened? I don't know, but when I was in high school, the only adult presence was one of the cafeteria ladies coming out from the kitchen every so often to scold the people having food fights. One report I heard said that the shooter was involved in some sort of lovers triangle mess, which might be a motive. Another said he was a star on the football team, so the performance enhancing drugs angle has to be considered, especially the mental effects of them.

So, we have to go look at as many of the mass shooting incidents that we can, and do the tactical analysis on each one, and then go postulate various changes and make the best guesses we can how that might have changed the outcomes. This is harder than one thinks, as there is all kinds of propaganda out there that intentionally distorts what happened to prove that whatever political agenda is being pushed is validated by the incident.

Best sources are usually the detailed police investigations, but these are often not available for legal or policy reasons of the police department or local laws. So we have to go by the witness statements and whatever summary the press relations person of the police department releases to the media. And the police investigation also doesn't find out everything, especially when you get into the very murky area of motivations of the bad guy. If they are dead, then all one can really do is make informed speculation. Limiting the universe of study to school shootings makes the process a bit easier, as local laws make many options illegal.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

I did a light pass at this sort of analysis a few years ago. Nothing I have heard or read since has changed my mind. But these are what I found and the conclusions I drew. The school shootings fell into a couple of broad categories.

There was the cases like this one seems to be, which was the shooter had some specific grievance against one or a small group of people, and is unable to resolve the matter using the normal pathways for such in the school. The shooter plans the crime such that they will be able to get their enemies all in one place and take them all out at once. Then they usually suicide, or less commonly surrender, once they have completed their self-appointed mission. These incidents are typically all completed before the police dispatcher has finished making their initial radio call for response. Ability of anyone to react and stop the shooter before they have finished is pretty small, mostly because the very short duration of the active shooting period. Having armed school staff, unless they happen to be one of the targets, is not tactically significant, as they don't have time to interfere with the bad guy before completion.

then there are the cases where the bad guy has a larger group of targets, how large ranges from a particular gang up to everyone in the school. Possibly because of bullying, or they are just freaking crazy. These shootings tend to last longer, but it is still not that many minutes from initiation to completion of the shootings. Here, there is time for school staff, students, and police to learn of the situation, take action, and interfere with the bad guy. Actions that can be taken are many, but fall down to three basics. 1] Run away. For an unarmed person, often the best option. 2] Hide. If you can't run, then you hide and hope the bad guy can't find you. Hopefully you have a nice sturdy lockable door to close and nice thick walls between you and the bad guy. 3] Defend yourself. Using any available weapon, from your bare hands to a firearm. The more effective your weapon, the better chance you have to stop the bad guy before he gets you or another innocent victim. Praying is available under all of these options, but rarely has any visible beneficial effect.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

So now we get into analysis and then running what-ifs on the situations. Sometimes there is an armed person there in time to take action. One time it was an off duty police officer who happened to be there because of something to do with their kid at the school. A couple of times it was a school resource police officer that was in the building. Another time it was the principal who had the time to run out to his car and retrieve his pistol and then confront the bad guy. Other times there were adults who were possibly violating the law by having their concealed handgun on them in the school. One time the bad guy was tackled by a student football player. IN the cases where the bad guy was confronted by the good guy with gun, in all the cases I know of, except for one, the bad guy immediately stopped attacking, and either suicided or surrendered. The one other case the bad guy was able to shoot the good guy with a gun, wounding them enough that they were able to get away. I don't recall if the officer was killed or not.



Now the what-ifs. ONe of the conclusions drawn from the Columbine shooting analysis was that the police responding acted according to their training and followed their rules by establishing a perimeter around the school and whistling up the swat team. But this gave the shooters plenty of time to wander around the school killing kids more or less at their leisure. So police doctrines changed to have the first responding officers enter into the building as soon as they had two or three officers to enter and disrupt the bad guys shooting spree. This was followed in the Sandy Hook shooting, some of officers entered the school and confronted the bad guy, who suicided more or less immediately after being confronted. The assumption was that this kept him from shooting even more kids.
There are other things to try that don't involve arming school staff. Mostly this is the concept of lockdown. You keep the bad guy from getting at more victims by locking them out of the victim tanks, I mean the classrooms. That means sturdy lockable doors, windows that are too small for the bad guy to shoot through or clamber through, and some form of alarm system to put the whole school into lockdown. The disadvantage of this is that you are locking the bad guy in with some unknown number of kids, staff and visitors, and there is small chance of escape for them. Hopefully the exterior doors are sturdy and locked, and the bad guy is detected by alert staff who lock the bad guy outside for the police to deal with.
You can install surveillance camera systems, but these have little utility in preventing shootings. But they are darn useful to the police afterwards for completing the investigation. Too bad the kids died and the tape got leaked to the media to boost their ratings. Alarm systems to call the police are nifty, but in this age of ubiquitous cell phones, the police will usually be swamped with calls about the situation before the alarm company calls it in.

I'm getting tired here, so I'll sum it up. In the cases where the bad guy can be interfered with by a good guy with a gun, they need to be there as soon as possible. LIke the saying goes, When seconds count, the police are minutes away. OUt in the rural areas, where police response can be halfway across the county and will take half an hour to get there, the need is even more dire.
Now I am not advocating requiring any school staffer be forced to carry a gun. But for any school staffer who is willing to take up that additional responsibility of carrying a firearm in a school should be supported in that, and given the appropriate training. Everyone today working in a school has already passed a background check of some kind. So I don't expect getting a license from their state will be an issue.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

As a related issue, I think all students should be given age appropriate training in minimal firearms safety. In the younger years, it boils down to "Stop, don't touch, call an adult.", and in older years, enough firearm training to instill some respect for the deadly force it represents, and to demystify it enough that there is no longer the "forbidden fruit" temptation to handle one that they may find. A firearm is a dangerous tool and should be handled with the respect it deserves. It should not be the talisman of power that hollywood media and the gun control groups have created in the minds of american children.

Running into length limits per post.

[tabbiewolf.livejournal.com]

So, because I like poking wasps' nests, I have to ask: How is requiring training of the entirety of humanity in gun safety more reliable than, say, removing guns from the market entirely?

And please do not bring up the "Well, cars kill people too, and everyone gets trained in those," argument. Cars are not designed to kill people. Guns are. A gun's only use is to kill things. I'd say "only intended use" but I honestly can't think of another thing that guns are useful for. Hunting? That's killing. Defending your country? Also killing. I guess maybe "threatening/scaring everyone" might be a use, but that's not really USING the gun.

Keep in mind: I know gun owners. I know gun owners who carry, and I know people who hunt as well. If removing their guns saves a classroom of elementary/middle/high (geezus, how sad is it that I can say ALL of those have had shootings) school students, church goers, shoppers at malls, etc., from therapy for the rest of their lives -- or, in the case of far too many kids, LIVING the rest of their lives -- frankly? I'm totally okay with that.

The Second Amendment wasn't written with modern day guns in mind. You'd have to try REALLY HARD to kill someone with a gun in 1776.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

And the first amendment wasn't written with the internet and the Heaven's Gate cult in mind either.

Well, until someone invents a magic wand that can be waved to turn all the guns in the world into salt water taffy, your first question is a false choice. Guns are being smuggled into prisons, which have far more stringent measures against smuggling than we would ever voluntarily tolerate. So creating a gun free world is an impossibility. Removing guns from legal trade just drives that to the black market. Guns in the hands of ordinary private citizens in mexico has been largely illegal during it's entire history as a nation, and prior to that as a colony. Doesn't seem to have worked there either.
Here in america, we have a bunch of different sub-societies in the country. Out in rural areas, guns are in pretty much every home, and shooting skills are taught as one of the necessary skills of life. Protecting ones crops and livestock from wild animals, be it deer eating the corn crop, to a mountain lion killing one's cattle, is needful. Not to mentions defending oneself from dangerous critters coming after you.

In the urban areas, you have the concentration of criminals that by definition, ignore any laws they care to break. The illegal trade in drugs (And please don't go off on the war on drugs, which is a whole nother can of worms) drives the drug dealers to arm themselves to defend themselves from other criminals. Drug dealers have lots of cash and desirable commodities on them. And they can't call the police to file a complaint about the guy who mugged them for all their drugs and cash, nor can they sue another drug dealer for interfering with their drug dealing business, nor sue their supplier for selling them fake drugs instead of real drugs. So all disputes generally reduce to one party backing down to threat of violence from the other. Thus the drug dealers want to have lots of guns. Not because they want to kill everyone on the street, but because they have to be perceived to be able to defend themselves against their competitors and their predators. This psychology is what drives the extreme violent reactions to disrespect from others in their subculture.

So the drug dealer subculture is awash in illegal guns. The bigger and badder, the better. Because the guns are not just dangerous tools, but they are talismans of power. This plethora of guns spreads out to all the other criminal subcultures for much the same reasons. Although the psychological effects of chronic illegal drug use make the use of these guns in fights more common. paranoia, rage attacks, nihilistic traits, and depressed higher brain functions all feed into this mess.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

Children growing up in the poverty and crime stricken portions of our cities are constantly exposed to guns. guns in the hands of people who are often intoxicated and violent. Guns are also constantly being stashed in public areas. The drug dealer doesn't want to have the gun on their person, in case the cops come along to arrest him or her. They know that the firearm possession charges are being used by prosecuters to put them in jail for long periods of time, far longer than the drug dealing charges. But they do want the gun to be readily at hand, in case another criminal comes along to attack him. So the guns are stuck into all sorts of hideaways. One of the parks in Boston that is near the nightclubs, the police have made it a habit to go look through it every friday and saturday night. they often find guns stashed in the bushes. Because the criminals know there is a metal detector at the doors to clubs that are popular with the criminals. Kids playing in the park the next day find guns the cops missed and the criminal was too drunk or stoned to remember where they hid it.

Guns also find their way out into the affluent suburbs. Many say they are against guns in the hands of ordinary people, but don't practice what they preach, and arm themselves, or if wealthy enough, hire armed guards to protect them. Sarah Brady had a concealed handgun license, back when Virginia only issued them to police and very few others. Yes, they are less common, but they are out there too.

So just like kids in health class are taught to recognize what a hypodermic syringe looks like, and to not touch it and call an adult to take care of it, kids should be taught to recognize what a gun looks like and to call an adult to take care of it. But there is that pesky curiosity trait that humans have, and kids even more so. If a kid finds something new, they pick it up and start playing with it to see what happens. If this happens to be a loaded gun or a used syringe, lethal results can happen with both. So by teaching the kids what it is, telling them the correct thing to do, and reducing the temptation to play with it since it is a known thing, you save more lives of children. Child development folks have done the research. Kids will home in on any new object first. They have specifically done the research with what kids will do when they are put into an apparently unsupervised environment that contains among other things, a firearm. Kids who have not had any kind of teaching on guns, except what they see on TV, go and play with it. and they copy what they saw on TV, they point it at their playmates and pull the trigger. Kids who have had one of the gun safety training programs in their school, or had a parent who taught them about responsible gun ownership. They don't touch it, and they call an adult to deal with it safely. Any adult that the child calls to deal with a gun, they should know enough to handle it and unload it safely, and remove it or remove the kids from the area while they call for appropriate assistance.

I've probably gone over the comment length limit again.

[xyzzysqrl]

More guns could only have made this shooting LESS violent.

[dalesql.livejournal.com]

New information trickling out. There apparently was a teacher in the cafeteria at time of the shooting. This brave soul was reported to have tackled the shooter while he was trying to reload, and during the struggle, the last shot was fired into the shooter's head.