The police released a statement during a press conference yesterday saying they believe all the children were shot by the gunman.
Translation: Police accidently shot at least one person.
Just a matter of time.
Hence why you don’t want wacked out gun totting parents with fuck all knowledge of whats going on running in there. Imagine how many more kids could have been caught in crossfire?
I agree, my position is that I don’t want any gun totting people running around a school but unfortunately that’s apparently a politically extreme position in America.
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And that woman was lucky it was just local PD she tried that with.
She would have got a far different response if she had done that with SAS or Seals
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I think some police officers don’t understand what their job is supposed to be. Everytime you hear about a police officer either failing in his duty or murdering another unarmed black person they come straight back to “I was fearful for my own life”.
Sorry, your job is to put yourself on the line to protect the public. You CHOSE this profession. It is your job to put yourself in potentially life threatening situations in order to protect civilian life. You have to be able to handle that situation.
I’m in the military, the chances of me facing a life threatening situation are probably low, but if it occured that I have to put myself in harm’s way to protect others then that’s what I signed on the fucking dotted line to do. Frustrates the hell out of me the responses police are allowed in this country.
The police in that town get 40% of the entire budget of the city and when they’re faced with a dangerous situation they allow a teenager with an assault rifle to enter a school while they hide in fear. What is the fucking point in them existing?
Anyway now that we know multiple trained professionals were unable to take down a teenager the Republicans are back on their soap box demanding we arm teachers. I’m sure that would go brilliantly. One thing I will agree with Republicans about that is teachers do actually care about children. We know they have thrown themselves infront of bullets to save children’s lives before. We apparently expect of Ms. Jones the 4th grade teacher but not the heavily armed police officer who spends multiple training days a year at the gun range.
We are so backwards.
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They do. They also know that they will get away with inappropriate behaviour or actions. Supposed to be a third world problem. 
In one of my earlier posts I was being facetious but truth is more perverse than fiction…
They know that once they utter those words they are granting themselves absolute immunity from prosecution.
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I hope the victims’ parents sue the fuck out of them and put them out of business.
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Not entirely sure the law works like that. If it’s legal to sell X in state Y, you can’t be sued for how it’s then used.
I’ve no idea if the same thing might apply here , but the Sandy Hook parents managed it.
"The families of nine Sandy Hook school shooting victims settled a lawsuit for $73 million on Tuesday against the maker of the AR-15-style rifle used in the massacre, in what is believed to be the largest payout by a gun manufacturer in a mass shooting case.
The agreement is a significant setback to the firearms industry because the lawsuit worked around the federal law protecting gun companies from litigation by arguing that the manufacturer’s marketing of the weapon had violated Connecticut consumer law.
The families argued that Remington, the gunmaker, promoted sales of the weapon that appealed to troubled men like the killer who stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, killing 20 first graders and six adults. The lawsuit was filed by relatives of five of the children and four of the adults."
That’s fucking barking. Car manufacturers appeal to people who like speed, can they get sued for a driver’s actions?
Chuck Todd has an awful defense (at least from the perspective of a TV “journalist” booking guests on to interview) that if you push them too hard they wont agree to come back. He seems to think vapid interviews that deflect from real issues while allowing them to push falsifiable talking point unchallenged are more important than holding a public official accountable.
This is a great point. There is a sense that anyone who does something like this is “crazy” and invariably every shooter gets a publicly declared post-hoc “diagnosis”, and while that is likely fair (if a blunt instrument) it isn’t Manson style voices in their heads that makes them do this. It is the societal disaffection. It has been mocked by idiots who refuse to understand the point being made, but Ben Collins, an amazing journalist covering the disinformation beat, laid out the progression of the Buffalo shooter’s path towards the act, and it started with a toothache he couldn’t get treated. Very quickly his frustration at this plus the anger SM algorithms saw him finding his way to conspiracy focused chan boards and soon enough his frustration and a toothache his dentist couldnt fix led him to buying into an anti-semitic conspiracy in which jews were trying to replace white gentiles with subservient blacks.
You can argue that only a crazy person would follow that path and take it to the conclusion he did, but when we talk this we tend to think of wild snaps of lack of judgement leading to a crazy person being dangerous. Not only does that misunderstand the very well planned (not a moment of madness) actions like this, but it unfairly maligns mental health issues as being dangerous to the rest of us.
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Doing so is active shooter policy though. This department were trained in it and simply refused to do it, and then in the hours afterwards repeatedly lied about their actions. And so while I understand the argument that parents screaming to do something can get in the way of the professionals doing their job, in this case they werent actually doing their job and were not doing that at the cost of the lives of the kids of the parents they were detaining.
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Remington were sued after Sandy Hook, as noted above. If a similar action is brought against gun manufacturers today, in light of shootings like this latest one, I am not so sure that it will prevail.
The crucial difference is now the make up of the Supreme Court. I suspect the conservative majority will close ranks around the gun manufacturers to protect them. It would be a tragic irony that pro-lifers would do that, but that’s what I expect would happen.
1000% this. The police forces in the US need to be disbanded and reconstituted following a model from a more functioning state. The failure of the ‘public’ police force seems almost a republican far right aim which they can weaponise to argue for the overarching failure of government and instead promote and privilege private wild-west type security alongside private everything else. I think it will take something seismic - almost like a civil war or east/west coast cession - to fix the US which seems stuck on a path to hell.
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So rushing head first with no clue about what your potentially going to face is current policy?
Sorry, but that sounds fucking idiodic, bordering on lunicy. Hence why proper teams like Navy Seals, SAS, SWAT wait while they gather as much information as possible before going in - it saves more lives than charging in without any clue or plan.
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I think with this incident a quick assessment could be made. It’s not like they were dealing with a highly trained crew who were going into the school. Just a disaffected young man, who tragically had the weapons to do significant damage, very quickly.
In the minutes before he entered the building, he should have been taken down. If he was an active shooter before entering the building, and if that went on for some time, the various guards and law enforcement personnel who were present and/or arriving failed in their duty.
If someone has been in the school a while, and that is their position when you first encounter them, then by all means, proceed with extreme caution as you don’t know what he has rigged, and you certainly want to be cautious about crossfire. Still, even then, there comes a risk/reward sort of thing, and with an AR-15 he can kill a lot of kids very quickly, so time is of the essence.
In this instance ideally he would have been taken down before going into the school.
As a parent (our kids were born in England, our family moved here when they were little) it has been alarming for me over the years living here to observe them doing active shooter drills at their Elementary and Middle Schools. I have been horrified that the possibility of this happening has always been in play for them, and that they have had numerous drills along the way to learn what to do to minimize the casualties. Shitshow.
I think you can make it sound idiotic with that sort of framing. Whatever you and I think of it, proactive, rapid engagement with only a requirement of small teams, sometimes as small as 2 people, IS current active shooter policy. And this is informed by the collective experience of US law enforcement dealing with the failures of the previous “wait and plan it out” policy (or lack of policy). I am not able to judge whether the policy is sound, but it is policy. This department was trained in it and didnt employ it. And they then lied about it. Repeatedly. I can and will judge that.
I am also appreciative of the fact that this may be an unfair standard for what we expect of local police. Can you really train up an every day cop to do this shit? After all, it was Border Patrol SWAT who showed up to help out seeing as this town is right on the border, who actually resolved the situation. Bizarrely, I actually have a good friend whose husband was part of that team (only found that out last night) and I can tell you that his training is most definitely not comparable to that of a regular cop. So on the one hand those of us sympathetic to the police reform arguments cannot demand a return to community policing (and the personalities, attitude and training that goes along with it) and then expect them all to be Rambo as well when the situation arises. But the point is if they are not going to respond in this militaristic fashion when needed, then damn well take the funding from them and lets stop pretending that throwing this money at them equips them to do this shit.
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The soul crushing part of this is realization that kids have twigged onto the fact that pretty much any school shooter today is going to have grown up doing active shooter drills and so knows the distraction and safety techniques the kids will be using.
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