the denial of active shooters in school

This guy nails it....

Active shooters in schools: The enemy is denial

“How many kids have been killed by school fire in all of North America in the past 50 years? Kids killed... school fire... North America... 50 years... How many? Zero. That’s right. Not one single kid has been killed by school fire anywhere in North America in the past half a century. Now, how many kids have been killed by school violence?”
So began an extraordinary daylong seminar presented by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a Pulitzer Prize nominated author, West Point psychology professor, and without a doubt the world’s foremost expert on human aggression and violence. The event, hosted by the California Peace Officers Association, was held in the auditorium of a very large community church about 30 miles from San Francisco, and was attended by more than 250 police officers from around the region.
Grossman’s talk spanned myriad topics of vital importance to law enforcement, such as the use of autogenic breathing, surviving gunshot wounds, dealing with survivor guilt following a gun battle, and others. But violence among and against children was how the day began, and so I'll focus on that issue here.
“In 1999,” Grossman said, “school violence claimed what at the time was an all time record number of kids’ lives. In that year there were 35 dead and a quarter of a million serious injuries due to violence in the school. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. But we hear people say, ‘That’s the year Columbine happened, that’s an anomaly.’ Well, in 2004 we had a new all time record — 48 dead in the schools from violence. How many killed by fire that year? Zero. Let’s assign some grades. Put your teacher hat on and give out some grades. What kind of grade do you give the firefighter for keeping kids safe? An ‘A,’ right? Reluctantly, reluctantly, the cops give the firefighters an ‘A,’ right? Danged firefighters, they sleep ‘till they’re hungry and eat ‘till they’re tired. What grade do we get for keeping the kids safe from violence? Come on, what’s our grade? Needs improvement, right?”
Johnny Firefighter, A+ Student
“Why can’t we be like little Johnny Firefighter?” Grossman asked as he prowled the stage. “He’s our A+ student!”
He paused, briefly, and answered with a voice that blew through the hall like thunder, “Denial, denial, denial!”
Grossman commanded, “Look up at the ceiling! See all those sprinklers up there? They’re hard to spot — they’re painted black — but they’re there. While you’re looking, look at the material the ceiling is made of. You know that that stuff was selected because it’s fire-retardant. Hooah? Now look over there above the door — you see that fire exit sign? That’s not just any fire exit sign — that’s a ‘battery-backup-when-the-world-ends-it-will-still-be-lit’ fire exit sign. Hooah?”
Walking from the stage toward a nearby fire exit and exterior wall, Grossman slammed the palm of his hand against the wall and exclaimed, “Look at these wall boards! They were chosen because they’re what?! Fireproof or fire retardant, hooah? There is not one stinking thing in this room that will burn!”
Pointing around the room as he spoke, Grossman continued, “But you’ve still got those fire sprinklers, those fire exit signs, fire hydrants outside, and fire trucks nearby! Are these fire guys crazy? Are these fire guys paranoid? No! This fire guy is our A+ student! Because this fire guy has redundant, overlapping layers of protection, not a single kid has been killed by school fire in the last 50 years!
“But you try to prepare for violence — the thing much more likely to kill our kids in schools, the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill our kids in schools — and people think you’re paranoid. They think you’re crazy. ...They’re in denial.”
Teaching the Teachers
The challenge for law enforcement agencies and officers, then, is to overcome not only the attacks taking place in schools, but to first overcome the denial in the minds of mayors, city councils, school administrators, and parents. Grossman said that agencies and officers, although facing an uphill slog against the denial of the general public, must diligently work toward increasing understanding among the sheep that the wolves are coming for their children. Police officers must train and drill with teachers, not only so responding officers are intimately familiar with the facilities, but so that teachers know what they can do in the event of an attack.
“Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.
"But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”
Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.
Rhetorically he asked the assembled cops, “If somebody had spent five minutes telling that teacher what to do, do you think lives would have been saved at Columbine?”
Arming Campus Cops is Elementary
Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article called Arming campus cops is elementary. Not surprisingly, Grossman agrees with that hypothesis.
“Never call an unarmed man ‘security’,” Grossman said.
“Call him ‘run-like-hell-when-the-man-with-the-gun-shows-up’ but never call an unarmed man security.
"Imagine if someone said, ‘I want a trained fire professional on site. I want a fire hat, I want a fire uniform, I want a fire badge. But! No fire extinguishers in this building. No fire hoses. The hat, the badge, the uniform — that will keep us safe — but we have no need for fire extinguishers.’ Well, that would be insane. It is equally insane, delusional, legally liable, to say, ‘I want a trained security professional on site. I want a security hat, I want a security uniform, and I want a security badge, but I don’t want a gun.’ It’s not the hat, the uniform, or the badge. It’s the tools in the hands of a trained professional that keeps us safe.
“Our problem is not money,” said Grossman. “It is denial.”
Grossman said (and most cops agree) that many of the most important things we can do to protect our kids would cost us nothing or next-to-nothing.
Grossman’s Five D’s
Let’s contemplate the following outline and summary of Dave Grossman’s “Five D’s.” While you do, I encourage you to add in the comments area below your suggestions to address, and expand upon, these ideas.

1. Denial — Denial is the enemy and it has no survival value, said Grossman.
2. Deter — Put police officers in schools, because with just one officer assigned to a school, the probability of a mass murder in that school drops to almost zero
3. Detect — We’re talking about plain old fashioned police work here. The ultimate achievement for law enforcement is the crime that didn’t happen, so giving teachers and administrators regular access to cops is paramount.
4. Delay — Various simple mechanisms can be used by teachers and cops to put time and distance between the killers and the kids.

a. Ensure that the school/classroom have just a single point of entry. Simply locking the back door helps create a hard target.
b. Conduct your active shooter drills within (and in partnership with) the schools in your city so teachers know how to respond, and know what it looks like when you do your response.​

5. Destroy — Police officers and agencies should consider the following:

a. Carry off duty. No one would tell a firefighter who has a fire extinguisher in his trunk that he’s crazy or paranoid.
b. Equip every cop in America with a patrol rifle. One chief of police, upon getting rifles for all his officers once said, “If an active killer strikes in my town, the response time will be measured in feet per second.”
c. Put smoke grenades in the trunk of every cop car in America. Any infantryman who needs to attack across open terrain or perform a rescue under fire deploys a smoke grenade. A fire extinguisher will do a decent job in some cases, but a smoke grenade is designed to perform the function.
d. Have a “go-to-war bag” filled with lots of loaded magazines and supplies for tactical combat casualty care.
e. Use helicopters. Somewhere in your county you probably have one or more of the following: medevac, media, private, national guard, coast guard rotors.
f. Employ the crew-served, continuous-feed, weapon you already have available to you (a firehouse) by integrating the fire service into your active shooter training. It is virtually impossible for a killer to put well-placed shots on target while also being blasted with water at 300 pounds per square inch.
g. Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.​

Coming Soon: External Threats
Today we must not only prepare for juvenile mass murder, something that had never happened in human history until only recently, but we also must prepare for the external threat. Islamist fanatics have slaughtered children in their own religion — they have killed wantonly, mercilessly, and without regard for repercussion or regret of any kind. What do you think they’d think of killing our kids?
“Eight years ago they came and killed 3,000 of our citizens. Do we know what they’re going to do next? No! But one thing they’ve done in every country they’ve messed with is killing kids in schools,” Grossman said.
The latest al Qaeda charter states that “children are noble targets” and Osama bin Laden himself has said that “Russia is a preview for what we will do to America.”
What happened in Russia that we need to be concerned with in this context? In the town of Beslan on September 1, 2004 — the very day on which children across that country merrily make their return to school after the long summer break — radical Islamist terrorists from Chechnya took more than 1,000 teachers, mothers, and children hostage. When the three-day siege was over, more than 300 hostages had been killed, more than half of whom were children.
“If I could tackle every American and make them read one book to help them understand the terrorist’s plan, it would be Terror at Beslan by John Giduck. Beslan was just a dress rehearsal for what they’re planning to do to the United States,” he said.
Consider this: There are almost a half a million school buses in America. It would require almost every enlisted person and every officer in the entire United States Army to put just one armed guard on every school bus in the country.
As a country and as a culture, the level of protection Americans afford our kids against violence is nothing near what we do to protect them from fire. Grossman is correct: Denial is the enemy. We must prepare for violence like the firefighter prepares for fire. And we must do that today.
Hooah, Colonel!

 

Spot on for all point, but my favorite one;

Armed citizens can help. Think United 93. Whatever your personal take on gun control, it is all but certain that a killer set on killing is more likely to attack a target where the citizens are unarmed, rather than one where they are likely to encounter an armed citizen response.

Do you think the death toll would have been as high if just one school administrator had a CCW and was carrying

 

Another good one (with a nod to @Clyde)

Let citizens invoke Second Amendment rights | PennLive.com

I am saddened by the massacre in Connecticut and pray every day for the dear children and their families.

There is a quote something like “those who ignore history are destined to repeat it.” Sadly, I read the book a few years ago detailing the massacre of a middle school in Beslan, Russia, where the author stated that America was a likely candidate for similar tragedies. His reasons mainly were America’s ignorance and bias against firearms, mostly fueled by the media.

We have armed guards in armored cars to protect our money. We have armed salespeople in our jewelry stores to protect our jewels. And we have armed security guards in malls to protect the customers. And yet our most vulnerable and precious resource, our children, are unprotected. Banning firearms (for legal citizens) is a huge mistake and will not prevent such a massacre from occurring.

The problem is that we, as a society, have refused to accept the absolute responsibility to protect ourselves, our families and our students, from all attacks, period. All of the recent “massacres” could have been stopped immediately by citizens invoking their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves. Instead, we have become afraid to take that responsibility or too lazy, expecting the police to stop all of this.

Ask yourself: What are you going to do for the 15-20 minutes waiting for police to respond when someone is breaking into your house intending to rape, murder or assault your family? Sadly, I believe the author of the book (“Terror at Beslan”) was correct.
LARRY McCARTER
East Hanover Twp.

 

Another

The Volokh Conspiracy » Why Bans on So-Called “Assault Weapons” Are Unlikely to Diminish the Deaths Caused by Mass Shootings

Why Bans on So-Called “Assault Weapons” Are Unlikely to Diminish the Deaths Caused by Mass Shootings

Eugene Volokh • December 18, 2012 3:33 pm
I’m on the record as saying that bans on so-called “assault weapons” are likely constitutional (see pp. 1483-87 of this article), and several state courts have held the same under state constitutional individual right-to-bear-arms provisions before Heller. Such bans leave law-abiding citizens with ample access to other guns that are equally effective, and therefore don’t substantially burden the constitutional right. There are plausible arguments that the laws are so unlikely to do any good that they should fail “intermediate scrutiny,” even if they don’t substantially burden the right, but I’m inclined to say that courts should probably apply heightened scrutiny only to laws that do impose such a substantial burden. (For more on this general constitutional question, see also pp. 1454-61 of the article.)
But for the very same reasons, the bans seem likely to have no effect on fighting crime, because they leave criminals with ample access to other guns that are equally effective for their criminal purposes. So-called “assault weapons” are no deadlier than other weapons.
To begin with, note that assault weapons are not fully automatic weapons (which is to say machine guns). Fully automatic weapons have long been heavily regulated, and lawfully owned fully automatics are very rare, very expensive, and almost never used in crimes. Rather, assault weapons are a subset of semiautomatic weapons, generally semiautomatic handguns and rifles
Semiautomatic handguns and rifles — of which there are probably at least about 100 million in the country, and likely more — are undoubtedly extremely deadly; but the subset that is labeled “assault weapons” is not materially deadlier than the others. One way of recognizing that is looking at the definition in the 1994-2004 federal assault weapons ban; the ban lists several types of guns by name, and then provides these generic definitions:

(B) a semiautomatic rifle that has an ability to accept a detachable magazine and has at least 2 of–
(i) a folding or telescoping stock;
(ii) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon;
(iii) a bayonet mount;
(iv) a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor; and
(v) a grenade launcher;
(C) a semiautomatic pistol that has an ability to accept a detachable magazine and has at least 2 of–
(i) an ammunition magazine that attaches to the pistol outside of the pistol grip;
(ii) a threaded barrel capable of accepting a barrel extender, flash suppressor, forward handgrip, or silencer;
(iii) a shroud that is attached to, or partially or completely encircles, the barrel and that permits the shooter to hold the firearm with the nontrigger hand without being burned;
(iv) a manufactured weight of 50 ounces or more when the pistol is unloaded; and
(v) a semiautomatic version of an automatic firearm ....​

As you might gather, bayonet mounts, barrel shrouds, and the like don’t make guns materially more lethal. A grenade launcher might, but grenades themselves are already extremely heavily regulated, and in any event rifles with grenade launchers aren’t relevant to mass shootings or, to my knowledge, crime generally. Guns that fit these categories may look more dangerous; but they aren’t more dangerous.
What makes a gun deadlier? Longer barrels do, since they give the bullet more time to accelerate; that’s why rifles are deadlier than handguns, all else being equal. Accuracy does, but (for obvious reasons) no-one is trying to ban guns that are especially accurate, at least setting aside possible arguments related to high-end sniper rifles. Caliber does, because wider bullets are generally heavier bullets, but assault weapons aren’t defined by caliber size. The amount of gunpowder (and possibly some other attributes of the gunpowder) in a round does, because that too affects muzzle velocity, but assault weapons aren’t defined by this. The type of bullet might matter (for instance, hollow points used in handguns tend to be deadlier but also are more effective for lawful self-defense, since they tend to stop the attacker more reliably), but that too isn’t a function of whether the gun is an “assault weapon.”
The ability to fire relatively quickly used to matter, centuries ago when early weapons took many seconds to reload, but these days pretty much all semiautomatics and revolvers (and even other guns) fire quickly enough for any criminal’s needs; and again assault weapons aren’t defined by rate of fire. (Indeed, if you’re trying to hit what you’re aiming at, you need to take time to aim again after every shot, since the recoil will have moved the barrel.) Magazine size might matter, but probably matters very little given the ease of replacing a magazine (true for all semiautomatics, and to a lesser extent even for many revolvers); more on magazine size limits in this post from August; and high-capacity magazines can fit many guns that aren’t “assault weapons.” Banning assault weapons thus has basically no effect on the lethality of gun crime, or of mass shootings more specifically.
For more on all this, see Prof. Gary Kleck’s Targeting Guns (pp. 110-118). Kleck is a very serious gun policy scholar; though he has generally come to be skeptical of gun control, he is highly respected, and the book on which Targeting Guns is based — Kleck’s earlier Point Blank — won the American Society of Criminology’s Hindelang Award in 1993 for being the “book, published within three (3) calendar years preceding the year in which the award is made, that makes the most outstanding contribution to research in criminology.”
If I’m right on this, then banning assault weapons would have as little effect on mass shootings as banning whiskey would have on drunk driving. Even if we concluded that drunk drivers were disproportionately drunk on whiskey, banning whiskey would just mean that the drunk drivers will shift to vodka, gin, tequila, or other alcoholic beverages that are just as dangerous as whiskey. The same is true for the so-called “assault weapons.”

 

?? Yeah....but, you brought up Beslan a couple months ago with similar concerns.

 

Here's another good piece grounded in anti-liberatum (logic)

The case for gun rights is stronger than you think - CNN.com

"Throw shoes, keys, iPods at the active shooter....they will surrender."

Editor's note: William J. Bennett, a CNN contributor, is the author of "The Book of Man: Readings on the Path to Manhood." He was U.S. secretary of education from 1985 to 1988 and director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President George H.W. Bush.
(CNN) -- On NBC's "Meet the Press" this past Sunday, I was asked how we can make our schools safer and prevent another massacre like Sandy Hook from happening again. I suggested that if one person in the school had been armed and trained to handle a firearm, it might have prevented or minimized the massacre.
"And I'm not so sure -- and I'm sure I'll get mail for this -- I'm not so sure I wouldn't want one person in a school armed, ready for this kind of thing," I said. "The principal lunged at this guy. The school psychologist lunged at the guy. Has to be someone who's trained. Has to be someone who's responsible."
Well, I sure did get mail. Many people agreed with me and sent me examples of their son or daughter's school that had armed security guards, police officers or school employees on the premises. Many others vehemently disagreed with me, and one dissenter even wrote that the blood of the Connecticut victims was ultimately on the hands of pro-gun rights advocates.

To that person I would ask: Suppose the principal at Sandy Hook Elementary who was killed lunging at the gunman was instead holding a firearm and was well trained to use it. Would the result have been different? Or suppose you had been in that school when the killer entered, would you have preferred to be armed?

Evidence and common sense suggest yes.

In 2007, a gunman entered New Life Church in Colorado Springs and shot and killed two girls. Jeanne Assam, a former police officer stationed as a volunteer security guard at the church, drew her firearm, shot and wounded the gunman before he could kill anyone else. The gunman then killed himself.

In 1997, high school student Luke Woodham stabbed his mother to death and then drove to Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, and shot and killed two people. He then got back in his car to drive to Pearl Junior High to continue his killings, but Joel Myrick, the assistant principal, ran to his truck and grabbed his pistol, aimed it at Woodham and made him surrender.

These are but a few of many examples that the best deterrent of crime when it is occurring is effective self-defense. And the best self-defense against a gunman has proved to be a firearm.
And yet, there is a near impenetrable belief among anti-gun activists that guns are the cause of violence and crime. Like Frodo's ring in "The Lord of The Rings," they believe that guns are agencies of corruption and corrupt the souls of whoever touches them. Therefore, more guns must lead to more crime.

But the evidence simply doesn't support that. Take the controversial concealed-carry permit issue, for example.

In a recent article for The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, by no means an avowed gun-rights advocate, declared, "There is no proof to support the idea that concealed-carry permit holders create more violence in society than would otherwise occur; they may, in fact, reduce it."

Goldberg cites evidence from Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA, that concealed-carry permit holders actually commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population.

The General Accountability Office recently found that the number of concealed weapon permits in America has surged to approximately 8 million.

According to anti-gun advocates, such an increase in guns would cause a cause a corresponding increase in gun-related violence or crime. In fact, the opposite is true. The FBI reported this year that violent crime rates in the U.S. are reaching historic lows.

This comes in spite of the fact that the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Supporters of the ban (not including anti-gun groups who thought it didn't go far enough in the first place) claimed that gun crime would skyrocket when the ban was lifted. That wasn't true at all.

In fact, after the expiration of the ban, The New York Times, whose editorial pages are now awash with calls for more gun restrictions, wrote in early 2005, "Despite dire predictions that America's streets would be awash in military-style guns, the expiration of the decade-long assault weapons ban in September has not set off a sustained surge in the weapons' sales, gun makers and sellers say. It also has not caused any noticeable increase in gun crime in the past seven months, according to several city police departments."

But let's take the issue one step further and examine places where all guns, regardless of make or type, are outlawed: gun-free zones. Are gun-free zones truly safe from guns?

John Lott, economist and gun-rights advocate, has extensively studied mass shootings and reports that, with just one exception, the attack on U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, every public shooting since 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns. The massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary, Columbine, Virginia Tech and the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, all took place in gun-free zones.

Do you own a gun that fell under the now-expired federal weapons ban?

These murderers, while deranged and deeply disturbed, are not dumb. They shoot up schools, universities, malls and public places where their victims cannot shoot back. Perhaps "gun-free zones" would be better named "defenseless victim zones."

To illustrate the absurdity of gun-free zones, Goldberg dug up the advice that gun-free universities offer to its students should a gunman open fire on campus. West Virginia University tells students to "act with physical aggression and throw items at the active shooter." These items could include "student desks, keys, shoes, belts, books, cell phones, iPods, book bags, laptops, pens, pencils, etc." Such "higher education" would be laughable if it weren't true and funded by taxpayer dollars.

Eliminating or restricting firearms for public self-defense doesn't make our citizens safer; it makes them targets. If we're going to have a national debate about guns, it should be acknowledged that guns, in the hands of qualified and trained individuals subject to background checks, prevent crime and improve public safety.

 

I told my nine year old that there is nothing that can be done to prevent these nut jobs from trying to kill. He was instructed to grab a pen or pencil yell get him and attack the bad guy. Even 5 year olds weigh 40 pounds. The guy could not have thrown off all of those kids and the teacher. Some would have died yet some would have lived. We have spent too much time teaching kids not to fight instead of what to fight for.

 

Teachers = first responders = Minutemen

“Conversation”: Minutemen can protect against active shooters | GunsSaveLife.com

 

Others have had this same idea and the libs almost implode upon hearing that you should fight back. It's always better to die cowered in a corner if you're a lib because really, this can't be happening to us.

Check out the links to the original stories:


Critics Pile On Writer at National Review - She said Adam Lanza could have been stopped ... by men

 

Wow, that article probably made a few feminist heads explode! There are even those saying that "if you don't own a bushmaster you're a pussy" male aggression. This was no act of male aggression- it was an act of utter cruelty. They are completely different things.

 

I would be wiser to address the problem with mental health rather than a useless gun ban. With them still on streets, they could easily switch to Molotov cocktails.

 

or chlorine gas, or pipe bombs, ... or machetes. Evil will find a way.

Joe is an alcoholic--he loves whiskey. It's all he will drink. Whiskey is then outlawed. Does Joe sober up and get his act together . . . or, does he find out he wasn't that attached to whiskey after all and switches to something else.

To put another way (and I directed this question to a libtard today): "Do you think Lanza would NOT have shot up the school had him mom not had an AR-15, but only a shot-gun?"

 

The they will ban shotguns and ignore the mental health issues. You've seen pictures of the last five shooters and that is being ignored?

 

You probably won't see this on the news: Congress cut school safety funding.

Obama Administration Slashed Funding for School-Safety Programs - By Andrew Johnson - The Corner - National Review Online