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Macbook Saves Man's Life During Fort Lauderdale Airport Shooting (chron.com)
A 37-year-old credits his MacBook Pro laptop with saving his life during a shooting at the baggage claim of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. An anonymous reader quotes WPLG Miami:
He placed it in his backpack, but didn't think of it when he felt an impact on his back during the shooting... When the bloodshed was over, he said he went to the men's restroom and saw a bullet hole on the laptop. He gave it to FBI agents. And he was in shock when they found a 9 mm bullet in his backpack. That was when he realized a gunman aimed to kill him, but the laptop took the bullet for him. "If I didn't have that backpack on, the bullet would have shot me between the shoulders," Frappier said.
Good thing he didn't have the new MBP - would have been too thin to stop the bullet...
For those that didn't read the article or summary, apparently the gunman hated the new MacBook Pro so much that he shot that instead of the man.
It are the same kind of (bullshit)stories as the deck of cards stopping the bullet, or the cigarette case stopping the bullet, or the bible stopping the bullet.
How many other people at the airport which got shot did have their macbook with them and didn't get the chance to use it as a shield?
bash$
It are the same kind of (bullshit)stories as the deck of cards stopping the bullet..,
How is it bullshit if it worked?
What the MacBook has over most of those items is a greater area it offers protection for.
How many other people at the airport which got shot did have their macbook with them and didn't get the chance to use it as a shield?
Probably most, but think of it this way - it offers a concrete reason to sling your backpack over your back if you are running away from a shooting (or slinging it in front of you if you are running towards one).
It might even save someone life hearing this story if they think to do the same in the future...
I've often wondered if it would be a good idea to have a backpack made from kevlar... apparently that is a real thing (I espceially like how the results include a QuickClot bandage in case you go too cheap).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
a direct shot with a 9mm at reasonable range would mean they were surgically removing macbook pro bits from the bullet wound on his shoulder/back
It was only handgun ammunition probably from a good distance, and it's not like we have not seen a MacBook stop a bullet before...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Ft. Lauderdale shooter self reported to the FBI. They were too busy to deal with him.
For a 9mm to do that he'd have had to be close range. It's got no real punch. Cops sometimes shoot people four or five times in the back and they keep running.
On another side note, this guy just voluntarily gave the FBI his laptop. Now they can rifle through his files and see if he's likely to have committed any crimes.
The article said it was a laptop issued by his school. Not likely to be anything incriminating on it, assuming the storage survived, which is perhaps likely given how small the drives are today.
What I was thinking about is that he just gave the FBI something he did not own. It's not likely the school is going to bother a shooting survivor over a few hundred bucks lost on a laptop, given that is now quite obviously destroyed and potentially evidence in a crime. A less public incident like this could be construed as an elaborate theft. Going to school and saying, "a terrorist shot my homework" might sound exceedingly unbelievable without some sort of evidence to back it up.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
more about the near miraculous survival of the victim
Not miraculous in the slightest when you consider the five people who did die. If that's God's idea of a miracle, he's a bit of a prick.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Now his nightmare begins; trying to get a replacement from the school he works for and not getting charged for breaking it.
The baggage claim area is not a gun free zone. It's outside security and literally anyone from the street could come in with a gun, in addition to someone who had a gun in checked baggage. I don't know if this shooter had actually declared his gun or just put it into his checked luggage (I thought they scanned all checked luggage these days).
The "solution" to this has nothing to do with gun control or kevlar underpants and everything to do with mental health care.
This guy walked into an FBI field office claiming the government was trying to make him watch ISIS videos. They thought he was deranged, so they passed him off to local PD who got him run through whatever cheap mental health screening they use for nuts off the street and then he was set loose again.
The sad story here is that nobody has dime one to provide mental health services for a person claiming the government trying to make them watch videos. This is quite literally tinfoil hat territory, and because there was no money behind him (insurance or private dollars) he gets a social worker with a form designed to satisfy some lawyer's idea of liability. Just how might this have turned out differently if he had been seen by a psychiatrist, talked into a 7 day in-patient evaluation and possibly been given some medication (even if it was just xanax) to get him closer to normal -- or at least seen long enough by trained people to see if he had a more serious long term condition? This guy had been discharged for being a fuckup in the military, so chances are he had a long-term problem.
So many of these spree shooters are people walking around with sign around their necks that says "I HAVE SERIOUS MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS" and we just don't give a shit because nobody will pay for mental health care, so they just roam free. We're not even smart enough to pay for the low-end therapy where they just sedate him in-house for a few days, it's literally a rush to get them out the door before they cost somebody money.
Ditto for the area beyond 'security' as all literally anyone from the street walk in with a gun, open fire at anyone attempting to stop them from entering the 'secure' area.
There are also plenty of less obvious ways to get a weapon into that area, alas for you the dotted security line only provides security theater.
And that solution is... ?
And? The ACLU and others fought against involuntary confinement long ago and won. Today, if you can say where you are and why you are there, short of any overt acts of of violence, you aren't going to be held for very long as like it or not... even the mentally ill have the right not to be held without due process.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I agree in general this freedom makes sense, but if you imagine a scenario like this baggage claim. Let's say a well trained and well intentioned gun owner is nearby, and close enough to his baggage to safely whip out his gun in an instant to help out.
When the police come in and see not one, but two or more civilians engaged in a firefight, they will now be forced to make a split second decision who to shoot: Which one is the target and which is merely exercising his second amendment right to self defense. That might prove to be detrimental in stopping the perpetrator.
(The same thing could happen with a second concerned civilian: once two people are engaged in a firefight it might be difficult to identify which is the criminal and the resulting confusion could lead to many more deaths.)
The reason he was so successful in his mass murder is the rest of the people OBEYED THE LAW! In this case the "gun free zone" in the airport existed only on paper. Blood stained and bullet holed paper.
I thought the laws existed to keep us safe, no?
No, they don't. They exist to improve the chances of safety. They do not create total safety. Neither do guns. Black and white thinking is nearly always wrong. (See what I did there?)
And no, the reason he killed five people was NOT because the rest of the people obeyed the law. It was because the rest of the people were cowards, ignorant, or both, and ran, hid, or otherwise did 100% the wrong thing.
Run from a knife, charge a gun. If everybody within earshot dogpiled on him after they heard the very first shot, they could have cut the number of fatalities to as little as none. Maybe one. Maybe two. Definitely much less than five.
Shit, he was using standard hand gun magazines. He RELOADED TWICE. Stopping him before he used every round did not even require physical bravery. Anybody could have waited until he was reloading, then jumped him, with zero chance of getting shot. And any asshole who has played CounterStrike, or a zombie shooter, or shit, watched the fucking Lone Ranger knows that you can't get shot when somebody is reloading.
So no, the "gun free zone" is not the problem. Having guns everywhere is not the solution. Teaching people what to do is the solution. Bravery is the solution. The false bravery of a concealed carry "hero"? No, we don't need more of that.
The reason he was so successful in his mass murder is
because of lack of affordable mental healthcare and easy availability of guns.
It's the exact same thing every time in the US. Guy with mental health problems has access to guns.
Good guys with guns won't help much. It's an airport, there were cops and security staff with guns in the area. By the time they got there he had already discarded his weapon, laid on the floor and and was waiting to be arrested. If one of the civilians in the area had been armed, at best we would have maybe one or two fewer victims and a dead suspect.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Unfortunately, even if you could get this message out to everyone, the natural human reaction to danger is to move away. From flinching away from pain to running from sudden sounds, it's hard wired in by evolution.
The only way to overcome it is with military style training, getting people used to gunshot sounds and running towards people shooting at them. I doubt many people will be willing to go through that.
A more practical solution would be free mental healthcare to prevent the shooters ever getting to that stage.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If you have free mental healthcare then people won't get to the point where they need 24/7 care so often.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
If the bullet wasn't stopped by an electronic device, it's not "news for nerds."
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
It would be if it was a pack of condoms. Trojans indeed.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Two telephone books (do they even print those anymore?) will (just) stop a 9mm. That's FMJ -- and a reasonably large metropolitan area telephone book. Even a .22 LR will penetrate a couple of inches.
Military rifle ammo won't stop for much short of a couple of railroad ties. (The old standard for 7.62mm NATO and similar was that it had to penetrate a steel helmet at 1000 yards. Modern 5.56mm (.223) stuff is a little wimpier -- but will still easily go through a car door at close range.)
-- Alastair
Frankly, since this is the first incident of its kind, why would I ever be able to find something that doesn't exist.
Find me a single country where this happened before last week.
So, you characture a country based on one incident, and I am the one who has a diminished mental capacity?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?