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?
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/
Feel free to live in a city/county with strict gun laws with a high violent crime rate while the rest of us with guns live in one with a low violent crime rate.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/05/14/disarming-realities-as-gun-sales-soar-gun-crimes-plummet/
But no amount of facts will convince you I'm sure, since you want to "believe" guns are bad.
"Every country is unique, but Australia is more similar to the US than is, say, Japan or England. We have a frontier history and a strong gun culture. Each state and territory has its own gun laws, and in 1996 these varied widely between the jurisdictions. At that time Australia's firearm mortality rate per population was 2.6/100,000 -- about one-quarter the US rate, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the US Center for Disease Control. Today the rate is under 1/100,000 -- less than one-tenth the US rate. Those figures refer to all gun deaths -- homicide, suicide and unintentional. If we focus on gun homicide rates, the US outstrips Australia 30-fold.
The 1996 reforms made gun laws stronger and uniform across Australia. Semi-automatic rifles were prohibited (with narrow exceptions), and the world's biggest buyback saw nearly 700,000 guns removed from circulation and destroyed. The licensing and registration systems of all states and territories were harmonised and linked, so that a person barred from owning guns in one state can no longer acquire them in another. All gun sales are subject to screening (universal background checks), which means you cannot buy a gun over the internet or at a garage sale.
-
Australia didn't ban guns. Hunting and shooting are still thriving. But by adopting laws that give priority to public safety, we have saved thousands of lives."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/14/america-mass-murder-australia-gun-control-saves-lives
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.
"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
I suggest that people with your attitude just GROW UP. I submit that people are dangerous. Almost all people have the capacity to kill, given the proper motivation. The people who are made infamous by these school shootings have found that motivation. A lot of the victims of these shooters have found the motivation as well, but they were denied the tools by society, and by people like you.
You act as if guns are the only tools which might be used by a mass murderer. This is slashdot - why don't we submit a survey, to find out how many people know the basics for making a bomb? It's not terribly complex, after all. A novice can collect a few pounds of explosive material, and design a simple time delay fuse, or even an impact fuse. A novice in junior high school can find the basic instructions on line, and begin to refine those instructions into a plan. I'm wondering how many elementary school fifth and sixth grade kids could do it, given strong enough motivation.
Then, we have gases. If guns are hard to get, gassing a school may become a more inviting method of mass murder. Or poison.
I've got a better idea. Instead of pointing fingers at the NRA, take a good look at Hollyweird. 24 hours a day, movies are playing that make teen idols of people shooting up shopping malls, residential areas, downtown areas, office buildings - you name it. I submit that the MPAA has invested untold billions of dollars, brainwashing the less stable elements of society to use firearms as a solution to their problems.
Of course, you can come to my house to confiscate my weapons.
Oh, what's that? You're not going to do that? You're going to send some other mother's children to do the confiscating? Yeah, that's what I thought. All mouth, and no action. You want to give money, and give guns, to young men who desire power and authority so that THEY can come bust my doors down, and take MY weapons.
If and when you and yours have achieved this Utopian police state that you dream of, I hope you enjoy it. I can see it now, Chicago Land all across the United States.
"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
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.
Ok, I'll call your bullshit. Do you realize the data you're pointing to does NOT validate your argument?
If you want to say that more guns = more safety, then compare more relevant data, like the number of homicides by fireweapon in countries with diferent approaches to gun control.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has some interesting statistics. The latest data shows there's over 3 homicides by fireweapon per 100k population in the US per year. In Canada, Australia, and every single country in Europe, that figure is way below 1.
The very definition of violent crime is so different between countries that direct comparisons are not possible. The FBI defines violent crime as one of four offences (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault), while the British Home Office defines it as a crime "where the victim is intentionally stabbed, punched, kicked, pushed, jostled, etc. or threatened with violence whether or not there is any injury".
I would expect a country that treats a threat of violence (even without actual violence) as a violent crime to be safer, but that's just speculation on my part. Feel free to disprove me, but with relevant data, please.
"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?
OMFG, what a delucion you have! You have low violent crime rates? Bwahaha, give me a break.
And yes, I feel perfectly happy - and safe - living here in Finland where we have much stricter gun laws and much smaller violent crime rates, thank you.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
"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.
Do you even read this stuff and try the laugh test before you post it?
Local tribesmen raided a school. Not someone at the school going off shooting, wild 'indians' raided it. Not the same thing at all.
And then the next item is a guy that shot a headmaster so abusive that the jury acquitted him. Sounds like an interesting case but barely relevant here.
That list doesnt actually get going until much more recent years.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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)?
In 2010 there were 32,885 vehicle fatalities. 10,228 were listed as alcohol related. And those statistics are even skewed since if anyone involved, whether they were the cause of the collision or not, had any level of alcohol it's marked as alcohol related. The problem isn't drunk drivers. The problem is irresponsible drivers drunk or sober. If you're going to look at traffic fatalities address the real issue rather than the neo-prohibitionist agenda of certain groups. If you fix the maniacal driving problem and make people responsible for their actions when driving drunk driving won't be an issue.
Who is John Galt?
The problem with your statistics is that the gun culture in the UK was drastically different to the US before the ban anyway, as basically no one could ever be expected to be carrying a firearm on their person, and the increase in reported crimes comes hand in hand with a change in how crimes are recorded and reported, and increased immigration due to EU law changes.
Before the ban in the UK, firearms were still highly regulated and controlled - the police would visit your home to ensure you had a gun safe, and check to see you were correctly reporting your ammunition counts etc, and if they saw a problem then you had your license revoked. There never was a culture of people carrying guns around in their purses or coat pockets, so nothing changed there in potential threats to attackers. Concealed carry licenses are still available today, exactly the same as they were prior to the ban - you can still apply for one, and the rules haven't changed on whether you would get one or not.
Most obvious way: Don't count them unless the person is dead on the spot. If they die in the hospital they're not counted.
There are many ways. Murder count does not equal body count.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What do you mean? Are you saying you combine all the US states but only consider EU members states individually so none of them get into the hundred plus million? Or do you really have no idea how many people live in Europe?
Here's the population of some of the larger countries. Slashdot won't let me post them all because of the spam filter. Total population in the EU is over 500 million.
Germany: 80,640,000
United Kingdom: 64,231,000
France: 63,820,000
Italy: 59,789,000
Spain: 46,958,000
Poland: 38,548,000
Romania: 19,858,000
Netherlands: 16,795,000
Belgium: 11,162,000
Greece: 10,758,000
Portugal: 10,609,000
Czech Republic: 10,519,000
Ok, so we let you cherry pick - you can remove the two regions with the highest murder rate - DC and Louisiana (whose rates are 150% of the 3rd highest state - you get a rate of 4.11/100k
In fact, you have to remove the top 12 states before you get below the European level of 3.5/100k. But wait, if you get to remove your outliers, so do we, so I remove our top two - Greenland and Russia (Europe has really expanded since I left school) - which gives us 2.5/100k. The US would have to remove *half* of the states as "outliers" to get to that level.
However, I disagree with the gun control advocates - removing guns won't reduce your murder rate by much - you'd just find a different way to kill each other.
It appears that the timeline is:
Shooter enters school and shoots 1 student.
Shooter kills himself.
Police respond.
Police claim credit.
Unless I'm missing something here, it doesn't look like the police response accomplished anything. They arrived after the crime was over and done with.
"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.
You may find this article interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/12/gun_ownership_causes_higher_suicide_rates_study_shows.html
Yes, less guns means less suicides, as everybody who has ever talked to anyone whose suicide attempt failed will understand.
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.
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?