Slashdot Mirror
How the Lessons of Columbine Saved Lives At Arapahoe High School
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ray Sanchez reports at CNN that the handling of Friday's shooting at Arapahoe High School, just 10 miles from the scene of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, drew important lessons from the earlier bloodshed. At Arapahoe High School, where senior Claire Davis, 17, was critically injured before the shooter turned the gun on himself, law enforcement officers responded within minutes and immediately entered the school to confront the gunman rather than surrounding the building. As the sound of shots reverberated through the corridors, teachers immediately followed procedures put in place after Columbine, locking the doors and moving students to the rear of classrooms. "That's straight out of Columbine," says Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. "The goal is to proceed and neutralize the shooter. Columbine really revolutionized the way law enforcement responds to active shooters." Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson credits the quick police response time for the fact that student Karl Pierson, the gunman, stopped firing on others and turned his weapon on himself less than 1 minute, 20 seconds after entering the school. Authorities knew from research and contact with forensic psychologists that school shooters typically continue firing until confronted by law enforcement. "It's very unfortunate that we have to say that there's a textbook response on the way to respond to these," says Trump, "because that textbook was written based on all of the incidents that we've had and the lessons learned (PDF).""
The first rule should be to not give easy access to firearms to the general public in the first place.
We should be reading the text book on how to prevent this kind of tragedies. Treat cause and not sympthoms.
I don't see saved lives but 2 lost lives.
So sad the news is
Columbine really revolutionized the way law enforcement responds to active shooters.
instead of
Columbine really revolutionized the way society identifies and treats those in need of psychological support in order to avoid them turning into active shooters.
The way to deal with shooter situations is having a better emergency procedures? What about all the hidden surveillance and monitoring and CCTVs and metal detectors and RFID tags? What did they do to help?
"school shooters typically continue firing until confronted by law enforcement."
Right. Because Sister Mary Elephant yelling "young man, put that thing down" just wont work. So maybe it's time to have armed guards and metal detectors as part of a larger strategy to help stop these incidents.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Schools are only gun free to the extent that there are no guns brought in from outside.
Europe has roughly the same population as the US and the murder rate is actually identical - if you exclude firearms deaths. The number of Americans murdered with knives etc. is pretty much the same as the number of Europeans.
The higher US murder rate is entirely due to the NRA and the politicians who are to weak in the spine to stand up to them.
The UK gun murder rate is essentially zero because it is almost impossible for a criminal to get a gun.
We need a war on guns. Make drugs legal and guns illegal. Shut down the manufacturers and the death merchants. It won't take every gun off the street but it will eliminate most of them within a few years.
Its only a matter of time before this happens.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Why do you only want to give criminals the right to carry guns?
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Actually Europe has a much higher population than the US. The population of the EU countries is now over 500 million. If Europe is more unified politically, it will be the single biggest geopolitical force in the world.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Schools today treat the kids like goats staked out for lions to kill and eat. If I want to cause mayhem and kill, where do I go? A "gun free zone"!
Hey, everyone, come here and perpetrate your crimes, no guns here to worry about!
Yeah, that's why schools all around the world are, basically, the biggest crime zones with huge death tolls...
Oh, wait, nope, school shootings are mostly the proud US tradition, with shooting incidents from all over Eurasia for all time counting less than US shootings just in past decade.
"Solution to shootings? More guns for everyone!"
The lesson we keep ignoring is that the root of the overwhelming vast majority of these cases is the same: mental health. Our country continues to completely ignore the elephant in the room. Until we improve access to mental health care, and de-stigmatize the pursuit of mental health treatment, we will continue to have unstable individuals in our society who will do this to us. We don't necessarily need to lock them all up, many can be treated; but they all need access to help.
Our current health care system fails miserably at this. The Health Insurance Industry Bailout Act of 2010 (aka "affordable care act", aka "Obamacare") does almost nothing for this problem.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
What was the European murder rate in the 20th century vs US? Please count millions murdered by the various Gov'ts.
"But it shouldn’t require another Sandy Hook to make us realize something has to change. The school shooters are committing a grandiose form of suicide. Media, traditionally, doesn’t cover suicides, and is very careful when it does. It’s a long-standing custom, borne out of numerous studies from groups like the Suicide Prevention Resource Center and the National Institute of Mental Health.
“More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals,” the NIMH concluded. “The magnitude of the increase is related to the amount, duration and prominence of coverage.”
Gently reply
Wrong. You ignore the elephant in the room. Take away the crimes of two inner city subcultures from the statistics and then the murder and violent crime rates are the same as Europe. You are focusing on a minute sliver of the pie of gun crime, and ignoring the real problem. Based on your myopic view, you would take away guns from people who have the right and ability to own properly own and use them.
Oh, but you MUST be wrong! Hitler and Stalin, among others, made possession of potential murder weapons illegal! No one in Europe could have been murdered while they were in power! /sarcasm
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Most countries that regulate guns also regulate sales of ammonium nitrate fertilizers which is by far the next most popular tool for mass murder.
The US does not regulate ammonium nitrate particularly well which is why that factory in Texas was located next to two schools and the likely perpetrator could not even be prosecuted for the murders despite having made two pipe bombs.
Very few firearms deaths are caused by career criminals. The vast majority are suicides and accidental shootings. Making guns illegal would practically eliminate those causes of death. Only criminals would have guns to leave round the house for the kids to use.
The UK does not have idiotic mandatory sentences for low level drug possession or peddling. But carry a firearm during a crime and you get ten years almost automatically. Fire the gun and its fifteen. Anyone involved in the crime kills someone and its a whole life sentence.
Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right to cause 50,000 deaths a year for your hobby. Moreover I don't think the general public is impressed by the NRA attempting to save their hobby at all costs by attempting to persuade the politicians to ban video games instead.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right to cause 50,000 deaths a year for your hobby"
Change 'hobby' to 'social drinking'. How about we take this logic and apply it to alcohol (as it relates to deaths due to drunk driving)? Any takers? If not, why not?
"The vast majority are suicides and accidental shootings. Making guns illegal would practically eliminate those causes of death."
This is naive and illogical. I suppose you think the first suicide came after the invention of the firearm? There are many ways to commit suicide, and many, many dangerous items with which one can kill oneself accidentally as well.
Suicide is an act of hopelessness. If you want to prevent it, you should act to give hope to the hopeless, not to take what little they do have away from them. And accidental deaths are best addressed with safe handling training. People that handle firearms carefully and correctly are not the problem there.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"You are just ignoring that drugs are, easy, the biggest motivator for crime at these same time you completely ignores that guns, on the right hands, also saves lives." if you legalised drugs, you'd take away the biggest motivator for crime.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Yeah, because Connecticut is the heart of gun nut country, and totally not endless suburbs with a couple cities tossed in. Someone needs a refresher on geography.
Until you take away the crimes of the inner city subcultures from Europe then they go up again. You think Europe doesn't have ultra-violent ghettoes and a drugs problem? You need to get out more.
Poverty has to do with race, because the US has a highly racially-stratified class structure that condemns large portions of the populace to live their lives under a prior assumption that they are lazy and criminal on account of skin color. Gun violence "has to do" with race (by way of poverty and denial of opportunity), but not with race as a causal factor the way right-wing racist bigots would have you believe. There's little deterrent to crime if you're going to be ground into poverty and processed through the prison pipeline regardless of actual personal behavior, ethics, and ideals (but on account of skin color and location).
It is a cultural sickness, a culture that glorifies violence, that disparages the peacemaker and worships the killer.
The guns are just a tool. Without them we would have fewer gunshot wounds and more stabbings, more people with their heads caved in, etc.
But as long as we can blame it on the guns, and on law-abiding gun owners who never hurt anyone, we can keep distracting ourselves from the national illness and keep pretending we are fine. It's just those nasty guns, and these silly hicks that dont want to give theirs up. No need to re-examine our values and way of life, no need to think hard questions. Just outlaw the guns. That'll do it.
Not.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
"Newtown took place in the heart of gun-nut country, not the inner cities."
And that was 28 deaths, right? Add that total to all of Conn for 2012 and what do you have?
What was Chicago? Over 500? That's a Newtown every two weeks, isn't it?
You can pick an anomaly and base your reactions off it and the passions they invoke -- and not solve the problem. Or you can look at the over all stats and WHERE the problems are and have a simpler smaller target to address. Then MAYBE you can reduce those numbers dramatically.
Its just a hobby, you folk don't have the right
I think you will find that, legally speaking, we DO have the right.
Having the ability and means to protect your household from others is a pretty fundamental thing, and its scary that so many people are prepared to trivialize it. As has been pointed out so many times, the premise that you can just cede all of your rights to the government and trust them to do the right thing has turned out to be wrong a million times over.
What, do you suppose the second amendment was written to allow people to hunt as a hobby?