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Macbook Saves Man's Life During Fort Lauderdale Airport Shooting (chron.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the backpack-took-a-bullet dept.

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.

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Old MBP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Good thing he didn't have the new MBP - would have been too thin to stop the bullet...

    1. Re:Old MBP by starless · · Score: 5, Funny

      and it's storage would of been harder to get back / have to pay apple shop pricing to use the there recovery cable.

      Just wondering if you're trying to get the largest number of grammatical/word usage errors in a single sentence possible...?

  2. tldr by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Re:Makes me think... by swb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.