Teachers unknowingly shot with plastic pellets during active shooter drills
courierpress.com
courierpress.com
(Compare: the DEA agent who shot himself while talking to a classroom about gun safety:
Wasn't that the terrorists intention all along?
Sociopathic kids will use the events and memories from the drills as triggers to intimidate and remind their peers of the threat - or as you say, even further as inspiration for actual attacks.
And I'd be willing to bet there are some unusual psychological characteristics of the folks who perform these drills and arrange them - does a normal-minded person really want to teach others what it's like to live in threat of imminent death?
All of this time and money should go to reducing the possibility of shootings occurring in the first place, and reducing the cycles of hurt which lead to them, rather than re-enacting and normalizing them.
Referring to fellow citizens as civilians as if they were separate from them, obsessions with guns and military equipment, and maybe most visibly telling, mixing "blue line" symbols with things like "The Punisher" logo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punisher
> The character is an Italian-American[4][5] vigilante who employs murder, kidnapping, extortion, coercion, threats of violence, and torture in his campaign against crime. Driven by the deaths of his wife and two children who were killed by the mob for witnessing a killing in New York City's Central Park, the Punisher wages a one-man war on the mob and all violent criminals in general while employing the use of various firearms.[6] His family's killers were the first to be slain.[7] A war veteran and a United States Marine Corps Scout Sniper, Castle is skilled in hand-to-hand combat, guerrilla warfare, and marksmanship.[4][5]
> The Punisher's brutal nature and willingness to kill made him a novel character in mainstream American comic books when he debuted in 1974. By the late 1980s, the Punisher was part of a wave of psychologically-troubled antiheroes.
In any case, he should have cleared the weapon before his demonstration and kept it pointed in a safe direction.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/14/593531945...
"A 17-year-old student was struck in the neck, according to his father, Fermin Gonzales III, who spoke to Monterey County Weekly. "He was going to go to his next class, but he was pulling out metal fragments," Gonzales said of his son. "It was a soft metal." "Nobody from the office came in and looked at what had happened," he alleged." (Struck in the neck from shrapnel, fyi)
"In a series of tweets, he (Donny) said, "20% of teachers, a lot, would now be able to ... immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions ... Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A 'gun free' school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END!""
I feel like existing laws should cover this. If they need a new law so specific to this situation, I'd worry there's nothing covering many other situations.
Can they press charges for assault? That'd send a clear message.
And if they don't in Indiana, then a limited fix for teachers isn't the solution needed.
It sounds like this whole training activity is being run by idiots that don't actually know anything about or respect gun safety. Shooting someone unexpectedly with an air soft gun is already illegal. If the teachers signed a liability waiver making it okay, it's on the teachers for willingly participating in a clearly stupid and dangerous activity. If they didn't, then the injured teachers should hire a lawyer and sue...
I have to disagree here. Signing a waiver isn't iron-clad in court. You can't just sign a waiver saying it's OK for someone to shoot you, or do anything else illegal to you. Unless these teachers were clearly warned that this would injure them and draw blood, they have good cause to sue, and even if they were warned that way, they can still sue, arguing they were afraid for their jobs.
I'd like to see these teachers sue the bejesus out of this school district. It's absolutely incredible that anyone thought this was a good idea, and if no one goes to jail for it, the local government clearly deserves to pay dearly for it.
That the solution isn’t gun control but instead making it illegal to shoot teachers unexpectedly with airsoft rifles is evidence of how insanely beyond the pail US gun policy and the whole discourse has become. New Zealand had a shooting, six days later, gun control. That’s how you solve the problem. Anything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.
I saw a YouTube video from a few years back. A Canadian walked into a gun store co-located with a gas station and bought a semi auto rifle. I also recall a more recent video from one of my subscribed YouTubers firing a different semi-auto rifle. I don't think your logic really holds up to the facts.
You just need a PAL to buy them. No background check at the time of sale, and no registration.
By comparison, here in California owning most of these guns would get you a felony punishable by years in prison.
Sorry, but your logic doesn't hold up. You said, "Probably because most guns are illegal so we don’t need them." Since Canada has ready availability of semi-auto long guns, has relatively relaxed gun laws, and even licensing and daily background checks would not have stopped all mass shooters, your logic that such drills are therefore not necessary is empty and illogical.
You cannot prove a negative. I hope for your sake, you're just trolling with deliberately faulty logic.
California has pretty much this, and in implementation is much stricter than Canada. The result? There are mass shootings here as well as lots of urban gun violence.
New Zealand already has stricter gun laws than many places in the US.
Throwing up your hands and saying it’ll never work without trying it is tantamount to accepting the status quo. None of that is okay.
The government unilaterally taking away the rights of innocent people shouldn't be okay. If it's okay with someone, then it means they're okay with stomping on the human rights of people they don't like.
I'd rather have individual rights and armed guards in the schools and places of worship.
It’s much easier to bring in illicit firearms across unmonitored state lines than national boundaries.
>>> I'd rather have individual rights and armed guards in the schools and places of worship.
Horrifying.
So taking away everyone’s right to feel safe and secure? Wonderful. And to be alive. That’s the problem, life is always trade offs. I don’t feel comfortable with everyone armed, that infringed on my rights. Any other country that took away guns, gun crime went down, that’s facts. The reality is you don’t need guns. I don’t need guns. I do however want to live. And I want my children to grow up in a country without mass shooter drills and metal detectors so you can pursue your hobby, because 300 years ago a few people thought everyone should have muskets and slaves. Constitutions are amendable for a reason.
Sounds like that trade off is just better.
Latin America has many countries with restrictive gun control and widespread gun crime. Brazil and Mexico have actually relaxed gun control so people can defend themselves[1,2]
But even if your claim were true, who cares if gun crime goes down if overall murder and crime rates don't? Are people better off if killed or mugged with other weapons?
1: https://theglobalobservatory.org/2019/02/brazil-most-homicid...
2: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mexicos-vigilantes-legalized-an...
By all means, ban guns in New York and San Francisco if that's what the people of those cities want, but don't impose your needs on people who live completely different lives.
I'd also suggest your opinions about America are pretty divorced from the realities on the ground.
St Louis and Baltimore have murder rates as high as the worst countries in Latin America; much worse than Mexico or Brazil, and many more American cities murder rates are as high as Mexico or Brazil.
If you have effective ideas to improve that I'm sure they'd love to hear from you, but personally I'm not smart enough to fix every problem in society.
The reality is the shootings are a symptom of a real, meaningful social problem. They’re not the cause in and of themselves. At best allowing people to intimidate each other with weapons is masking the real problem and prolonging the pain of those suffering — while simultaneously giving untrained and unqualified vigilantes easy ways to hurt people. At worst, you’ve just made it easier for people to murder unchecked. We’ve had fairly lax gun policy for centuries so it’s pretty clear your plan to just arm everyone and hide in the sand from the real cause hadn’t worked so far, so why should it start now, all of a sudden?
Guns aren't a hobby out in my rural town...we have bears, mountain lions, and wolves ...and livestock to protect....you can choose to not buy a gun if you want but I'll always keep mine as long as I live around nature's predators...
This in contrast to California where all firearms sales other than black powder muzzle loader have backgry checks run every time someone buys them.
This is distinct from restricted firearms (mostly handguns) where a new background check is performed each time you buy a restricted firearms.
In California, all firearms save for some really old ones are treated like restricted rifles in Canada. You have to get a background check and wait 10 days for every purchase even if you already own a dozen guns. Plus there are a bunch of rules about the shape of the grip, whether it has a for grip, the shape of the muzzle brake, and whether or not the stock folds that can make guns felonies to possess.
All guns (save for the aforementioned muzzle loader) are registered in California. Well, technically not registered because to do so is a violation of Federal law. But the State does log every firearm brought into the state, every firearm bought, and every firearm transferred. So basically a registry in everything but name.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017122.pdf, quoted in https://medium.com/s/youthnow/the-response-to-school-shootin....
In 2014 I was working IT for a private high school which had an active shooter drill on a yearly basis. I was told they started it two years prior because a student came onto campus with a handgun.
Both in southern California.
"Nine out of ten public schools now drill students and teachers to respond to mass shootings, according to the National Center for Education Statistics." [regrettably via Vox: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/16/17016382/s... but still, seems legit]
[0] A distressingly large percentage of students will be near some kind of gunfire while at school, yes—a whole lot smaller percentage will experience the sort that these drills address. The more common variety that way more will hear or see are targeted (gang, grudge, whatever) shootings on or near school property, not the mass shootings these drills are designed to prepare them for.
You sure? Because even when I was in the military, they trained us to respond to security events by locking our area down rather than running into the fight unless we were designated responders. Sounds to me like the cops just wanted to fire their fancy training pellet guns at someone.
These shelter in place drills are addressing a symptom, and not the cause of violence.
I find it difficult to articulate how much it pisses me off. Teachers are each responsible for a priceless group of people, if they individually would like the option to defend themselves and their students they should get the proper training and carry a firearm.
GOOD
The current "shelter in place" model of active shooter drills KILLS CHILDREN. In combat we had another name for "shelter in place"... "die in place".
People must be taught to fight back or flee. They must because it is not instinctive. Most of us were raised in relatively peaceful societies and have a school yard/Hollywood understanding of violence.
For those who haven't seen the Christchurch video, the killer was ALMOST taken out by one lone person who rushed him while his back was turned. Sadly, this brave soul was alone in his efforts and perished. He came literally within inches of getting the drop on the shooter. Had there been a second brave soul with him the shooting could have ended with far less death.
Two unarmed adults in close quarters can absolutely disarm one person. In a fight, two are four times as effective as one.
If someone is attacking you there are two options, run or fight. Hiding in a room with no exits is to wait for death, as evidenced by every eyewitness account we've ever heard on the news, "I heard the shooting in the other room, I knew we were next".
From a tactical point of view a school/church shooting is a de facto "raid". There are principles of conducting and defending against a raid. The active shooter drills I've seen are in total ignorance of these principles.
These are elementary schoolteachers - they're job is to educate (and half baby-sit) children.
I'm not making any statement with training, I'm just saying the method here is inappropriate.
EDIT: Plus how is this training? Are they expected to "fight back"? Okay cool a pellet gun hurts - what's the point? A gun hurts more anyway - if it doesn't kill you.
Maybe not but it sure looks like a battlefield[0].
0: when you’re in the midst of a school shooting
[0] https://www.chds.us/ssdb/number-killed-by-year/ [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.ht...
EDIT: Yes during a shooting your environment does resemble a battlefield. Shootings are not common however (see above statistic) so I feel resources may be more valuable elsewhere.
My recommendation, if you are in this situation, is to think one more time about your chance of escape. If there is truly no chance of escape, and if there are willing confederates, create a situation where the shooter is distracted and you can get the drop on him. (If possible, such that your confederate stands a chance of escape. They could distract by running and ducking into a doorway in the other direction, for example.)
If there are multiple, determined, trained shooters, it's probably best to run.
If my family is with me, my first objective is to get them to safety. If that's not possible I'm certainly not leaving them to "hunt" the shooter.
If someone is actively engaged in shooting innocents and I'm alone, I'm going toward them under cover or concealment. I'm going to try my best to be as accurate as possible, and accuracy is proportional to the time taken to take the shot. The best resolution here would be firing before I'm seen and preventing the shooter from being able to continue their assault. That said, most mass murderers don't intend to survive to be captured, and someone returning fire is often enough for them to cut their massacre short through suicide to avoid that - so if I don't have a means to get closer, taking a shot that is unlikely to be effective is better than waiting and doing nothing. Even if they attempt to return fire at me, that means that innocents being targeted by them have more of a chance to reach cover.
Finally, and by far the most likely, I wouldn't be close enough to the shooter to immediately stop the situation. In that case I would keep my firearm holstered and try to help others flee to safety.
For what it's worth, I don't see any of this as being at all likely. On any given day I'm extremely unlikely to need a firearm; over the course of a year, a decade, or a lifetime, that chance goes up to merely "unlikely". By far the most likely circumstance I will ever use a firearm is self-defense is demonstrating the ability and motivation to defend myself, probably by merely preparing to fire by reaching for the gun.
I'm 36, and this has held true in the handful of situations I've encountered thus far; I've had one instance where I made the decision to draw and fire, and in the second or so before I had drawn and began to pull the trigger my assailant had stopped their assault and began to flee.