Well, for once the police managed to stop a shooting before it took place.
“Not here,” she said in disbelief. “You hear about this everywhere else but not here.”
Translation: When this was happening to other people’s children, it was fine. It’s not supposed to happen to mine.
That’s quite uncharitable. We don’t know anything about the woman, much less that she thought school shootings elsewhere were “fine”.
It’s pretty normal for people to mentally compartmentalize these types of shocking incidents as “things that happen in other places” rather than their own local community.
No kidding. There’s no need to be so judgemental of that woman over such a short quote. People react to all sorts of events this way. Tornados, fires, kidnappings, etc.
This. And you don’t even necessarily realize you’re doing it, because I’m pretty sure it’s a coping mechanism in the face of how awful school shootings and mass shootings are - if it could happen in your community, you’d probably be a little bit more fearful just living your life.
I’m from Orlando. I’ve been to Pulse a few times, but I’d moved to Minnesota before the shooting. A friend of mine was supposed to go that night, but one of her friends was running late so the whole group decided to reschedule. I wasn’t close to anyone who died. But events like these feel different when it’s your community, when it’s places you’ve been, rather than just another horrifying tragedy playing out on the news.
Considering how rare school shootings are, they are damn near always “not here.” Doesn’t mean they can’t be there and that you shouldn’t take steps to prevent them, just that they are unlikely even if you do nothing.
My niece described to her grandmother (my mother) the stress of school-shooting-drills. That she even had to do that is horrible. The change over the last twenty years should make everyone sick. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with people, but it’s awful. That’s what I meant to represent with my comment.
Absolutely. Active shooter drills are a focus on litigation instead of prevention. Prevention would mean stopping bullying and also providing proper mental health services. The anti bullying campaigns that have been popular over the last couple of decades are little more than for show. Many zero tolerance policies conflict with anti bullying and ends up punishing the one being bullied. Mental health issues are just pushed off onto the parents who often do not have the resources to help or are a major source for the issues in the first place. Combine those with easy access to guns and you have high rates of school shootings. Treating those causes will do a hell of a lot more and have benefits outside of simply avoiding shootings than jusy doing active shooter drills. Active shooter drills treat a symptom that is very unlikely to occur rather than treating the cause which cures a lot of symptoms in the end.
The jailing of parents who provide access to guns is perhaps the only bright spot I see. We’re otherwise failing so hard.
We can afford to solve these problems. We just decided not to ever since Reagan and probably before.
Rare…?
In the grand scheme of things, yes. Despite the number one cause of death for children being gunshots, school shootings only make up a very small amount of those. There are a fuckton of schools and the probability that your local school having a shooting is pretty damn small.
Don’t get me wrong, there are way more than there should be and certainly more than damn near any other country per capita but that does not mean they are common. We should still work to prevent them though because what is needed to prevent them has many other benefits.
The United States leads globally in school shootings, with 288 incidents from 2009 to 2018
Over the same time period, Mexico suffered the second highest number of school shooting incidents with a total of 6.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-shootings-by-country
So, the USA had 48x more incidents than Mexico, the country with the second highest.
Hum, gee, I wonder what modern data looks like…
https://www.statista.com/statistics/971473/number-k-12-school-shootings-us/
America number one bay-bee!
It’s like a fatal car accident. You know it happens, but almost always in the news about another place.
Yes, they shouldn’t happen but they are very rare. The majority of them that are called shootings aren’t like Columbine, they’re usually gang or beefs between drug deals and just shit people acting like shit around a school.
Or maybe it means she had heard about that elsewhere, but not where she lived. Why do you feel the need to make her seem like a villain in some way? She’s just a poor a woman who was fearing for her child’s life.
Did I miss the part of the article that described an active shooter?
All I read was there were shots, kids ran, and “threat was neutralized”.
That chain of events could just as easily describe someone gunning down a random innocent person who actually posed no threat.
Maybe this happened as the headline would like us to believe, but that article isn’t enough to prove it.
Police are intentionally vague immediately after anything like this. If police just shot someone for no reason, I doubt they would describe it in such a way. To me it seems pretty clear it was an active shooter that was eventually killed or injured to a point of incapacitation by police. I guess if you’re still skeptical, you’ll find out as more details become available.
The vagueness of a police statement makes it more credible? That sounds like a fairly dubious approach IMO.
That’s not my approach. I just said its not abnormal. Police are always vague immediately after something like this. I don’t think I drew any connection between vagueness and credibility, and if I did I didn’t mean to.
You question where it mentions an active shooter, then repeat the part about it being an active shooter…? I’m confused.
I mean, there’s no active shooter now, but when the shooter was active, there was an active shooter, and that’s how it would have been called in.
They only mention one shooter, the person who merked the alleged threat. They say nothing to substantiate the claim that anyone else was shooting, or even aiming a gun.
Did you even read the article…?
I think the question comes from
Did I miss the part of the article that described an active shooter?
All I read was there were shots[…]
Where else would the shots have come from if not a shooter? The threat was later neutralized (whatever that may mean) but yes, there was a shooter at some point if there were gunshots.
The article claims an active shooter was neutralized.
The article only discusses shooting in the context of someone being shot, the alleged active shooter.
That article, at the time that I read it, did nothing to describe anyone else firing a gun, except for the “hero” who allegedly neutralized that’s supposed to threat.
Let me put it this way. Let’s say I’m walking past a middle school with a gun, I see you, and promptly gun you down and claim that you we’re an active shooter threat - even though you fired no shots.
The article, as it was written, could just of easily been written about that fictional scenario.
You understand my problem with it now?
Nobody said anything about a second shooter.
Great, so then we agree. The article only describes someone being killed, and all it does to justify that killing is to label them an active shooter.
But the only person the article describes as firing any shots, is the one who killed the supposed threat.
Maybe that person was a threat, I don’t know. I just know the article was so poorly written and sourced, that it shouldn’t have been published.
“Man kills another man, but pinky promises that guy was about to kill a bunch of kids. No further information necessary, obviously checks out”.
It doesn’t actually say the police fired any shots either. (Edit: actually it does, scratch that part.)
But if you read this quote:
“It was maybe like pow-pow-pow-pow,” Keller told The Associated Press by phone. “I thought it was fireworks. I went outside and saw all the children running … I probably saw 200 children.”
She heard gunshots, then there were kids running. That sounds like the start of the event, not the resolution.
Ultimately we don’t have enough detail to say for sure, but given it was reported as an active shooter, that’s enough to justify the headline.
Right, and that scenario along with the quote could just as easily been applied to the hypothetical alternative scenario I laid out on my last comment.
This is just a terribly written and poorly sourced article that no editor should have allowed to be published.
FFS
Or to make a headline that isn’t Murican: Police murder schoolchild who hadn’t committed any crime yet, and were too chicken shit to de-escalate the situation and save the child’s life.
Last I checked, that kid had 2nd amendment rights to walk around strapped with as many guns as he wanted.
Do the words “active shooter” mean nothing to you?
Read the article? Why even read the headline when you can look at the word “police” and use your imagination
You didn’t answer my question.
What?
