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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.
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
I'm happy (and alive) because my grandfather's rum-flask took a bullet for him in WWI.
My brother has the dented flask in case anyone questions the legitimacy of the story.
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.
I was thinking how much fun it would be if the bullet shorted the battery...
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.
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