School shooting hoaxes have terrorized kids across U.S.

An officer accidentally fired a gun? Is it just me or is that something that just should not happen?

This is the most American thing I will read today.

Uhhh that officer has no business handling a firearm.

Tazers have electronics that record when they're used, and disperse little papers to mark where they were fired.

It's crazy to me that we haven't enforced a similar audit log on police firearms, such as when they were withdrawn, armed, and used.

The proper term here would be a negligent discharge. Nobody ever accidentally fired a gun. They either meant to or they were handling it in a negligent manner. The general lack of training and professionalism with American police is appalling. They rarely get sufficient range time to be proficient with their weapon. let alone stress inoculation so they can perform when the time comes.

When I was a school-aged child in the 80s and 90s here in Canada, we used to get routinely evacuated because people would "phone in" bomb threats.

"Swatting" to me just seems like a nuanced evolution of that same phenomenon. Only I thought it was that targets were now peoples' homes and the Internet has made it so that targets and perpetrators could be much farther apart from each other.

Other than that, given that "reporting a false threat against a school in order to trigger a response" was happening when I was in school 30+ years ago, I can't help but wonder "what's the 'news'?"

"During that investigation, one of the officers accidentally discharged their weapon."

I wonder what happened to that officer.

I like to say that accidents don’t exist and this is a great example. Everything people do happens for a reason, and calling things accidents just gives us excuses to not find the underlying reason most of the time. We should not accept “accidental” weapon discharges, especially by police. If you’re not able to control yourself inside a school you have not earned the responsibility of being a police officer.

> American danger of school shootings

“nothing we can do says only nation where this regularly happens”. sigh.

The NSA doesn’t perform domestic intelligence. Even in a conspiratorial world where they do: operating outside of their legal mandate would mean that they wouldn't involve themselves with things like this.

The NSA's mission is dictated by the government, and NSA is not authorized for domestic surveillance, as far as we know publicly. That duty falls on agencies like DHS and FBI, depending on the specific case.

And while the NSA technically could, and maybe even does so, on the down low (Google "parallel construction"), they aren't going to reveal, and thus burn, their TTPs in a domestic civil/criminal trial, when they could be using them to save large numbers of lives globally.

If there is a coordinated campaign of fear, then there must be somebody that benefits of it.

Criminals, like those that started a wildfire again in Tenerife (Spain) this week, casually in the same week of the Meeting of the European Political Community in Spain, can't avoid to reverberate the same patterns of behavior, and left traces.

Traces that could be feed to train an AI system and propose a list. We live in the age of full surveillance so here is a situation where AI could earn some pride, waiting for the correct team.

That's wild.

So now everyone is more scared, is there any evidence they are safer though?

There are absolutely legitimate use cases for phone number spoofing, especially for businesses (many locations but single contact number as an identifier), but that doesn’t mean it can’t be made a lot more resilient to bad actors.

> There aren't really legitimate use cases for phone number spoofing

Very valid reason, I want to sign up for an internet account somewhere, Google, Facebook, etc and not have it be traced back directly to me because I value my privacy.

If you're argument is that I shouldn't need to do that, well then you're just arguing against privacy in that case.

Does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN and the regulatory requirement that all providers implement it by June 2022 not cover text messages? If not, that's a massive hole.

Same, we even had one where IIRC it was just that someone wrote "the bomb goes off at 3:00" in a bathroom an unknown number of days before they noticed. I think they made us turn in handwriting samples.

The thing that I don't get is that when I was growing up on Argentina, I never saw anything like that. We heard about the shootings and bomb threats in the US, but once a teacher got stabbed in an Argentinean school and was national news. And that was the biggest event in years. Why do these kind of things only seem to be prevalent on one country? Gun prevalence explains the medium of choise these past 25 years, and one thing that needs to be tackled, but there seems to be other factors at play as well.

Same here. After a while it became fun. “Class is canceled!”

For me it was the mid-90s and my sister the late 80s. She had school cancelled on final exam day due to a bomb threat. The first half of 11th Grade, for me, students were put in "lock down"[0] and then dismissed early due to a bomb threat.

When I went to High School the doors were left unlocked during school hours. It was normal for past students to "pop in" during the school day or in the afternoon for social visits to teachers. We had hall monitors who would question why you were roaming the halls if you looked young enough to be a student but a simple "I graduated last year and stopped in to catch up with my programming teacher" was all that was required all but one time I stopped in (they made me get a pass from the office all of once). I'm not saying "it was safer this way" but I often wonder if the increased security -- sometimes approaching "prison security" -- has the side-effect of some segments of the population "behaving accordingly."

There were school shootings "in my day" but those were limited to rough schools in the inner city. They were reported along-side all of the other crime happening "in the high-crime areas of the city", brushed off by most of us.

Weapon policy was much more lax when I attended school. I routinely carried a 3.5" pocket knife to school because I was irritated with dullness of the various wire cutters/tools in my electronics class. My electronics teacher regularly borrowed my knife without questioning "why in the hell a HS student is bring what looks like a switch-blade to school" (I was always seen as "one of the good kids", though).

We lived about ten miles from a large rural High School, as well. I remember picking up a cousin at his school around hunting season and being surprised, back then, to see pick-up trucks with gun racks proudly displaying scoped rifles in both the staff and student parking lots. This was, of course, "prior to Columbine" and I suspect they put a stop to that shortly thereafter.

With news attention on school shootings and not bombs, it makes sense that hoaxes tend to focus in that direction. School shootings get a lot of coverage with the focus then usually shifting to legislation aimed at restricting gun ownership[1]. The issue is that it's caused people to identify "the problem" as "school shootings" rather than "mass casualty events."

Bearing in mind that the perpetrators of these sorts of things are often of the mindset of "taking out as many people as possible while committing suicide", if it were actually possible to "ban all firearms" in the US, the problem would not be solved. As a High School kid who's parents do not/would never own a gun ... extremely conservative, yet pro-gun control parents[2] ... I had no access to a firearm and no clue how I would acquire one. However, the summer before my senior year in HS, myself and a few friends went off into the woods with a pipe bomb I had made out of things from my Dad's basement and "black powder" salvaged from Independence Day incendiaries. We wanted to make "the mother of all M-80s." The device was smaller than most handguns, easy to conceal and easy to ignite. It would have been devastating if exploded in a hallway.

To this day I have never seen such a powerful explosion in person. "Fingers plugging ears" was not enough to prevent dampening of our hearing by 90% instantly. Despite being an "empty pipe bomb" (lots of "powder" but no screws/bolts/other shrapnel), pieces of it flew -- easily -- twice as far as the distance we were standing from it. Had any of us been positioned at the right angle there would have been no time to react and I have no doubt anyone in the direct path would have been killed/injured in a manner at least as seriously as if they'd taken a large caliber bullet.

About the only solution I have heard that would make a difference is "more high schools with fewer students." The school I attended was designed with about a 750-total-student capacity in mind. My graduating class was 850. We were packed into hallways so tight that you basically squeezed your way to class with the running joke being that if you were too tired, just lift your feet off the ground and let everyone else take you there by force. Putting a high-trained police officer in that situation and asking them to "hit the shooter" would be practically impossible. Even assuming they hit the target, the bullet would travel through several other students before its settled into a wall/other sufficiently dense object capable of ending its journey.

[0] Something we didn't drill for back then except for tornado drills.

[1] Which, despite generally being a supporter of second amendment rights, I find myself supporting some of the more sensible approaches. Incidentally, I am not in support of "arming the teachers" -- the probability that adding another gun to the situation won't just result in more students being caught up in cross-fire isn't an adequate solution.

[2] I live in a blue collar community that fits well into the category of "Reagan Democrats" -- so much so that until my late teens I had no idea Republicans were pro-gun and Democrats were anti-gun. Every Democrat I knew was a card carrying member of a union (usually one specific union) and every one of them had a firearm collection of a small militia. Nobody in my family/extended family -- all conservatives -- owned a firearm.

Almost 30 years ago, I attended a college prep high school in Santa Clara County that allegedly removed all of the lockers because of pipe bomb explosions in the 1970's. The safety rationale was "lockers plus bombs equals shrapnel." The concrete footings for the lockers were still present throughout the school's outdoor halls. The campus was completely open and each classroom was a free-standing building.

Instagram might be large enough of an organization that it can both cooperate with law enforcement investigators and handle press inquiries from journalists. And if they weren't large enough, hopefully their legal team is competent enough to direct the employs to attend to law enforcement first, everyone else second.

I agree. I think it's mostly the overreactions that drive even more hysteria and fear. We had lockdowns due to a vehicle theft on the property, due to random drug sweeps, being inside with the blinds closed due to a sniper, etc. Nobody panicked or talked about nightmares, just as nobody did when taking precautions for things like fires with fire drills. They need to be providing context if these drills and hoaxes are causing these sorts of issues. Like here is the statistical likelihood of this happening to you vs that, at school vs at home, etc.