tvc184

…… which is why I take news report with a grain of salt. What a reporter calls engaged, might mean absolutely nothing in the terminology from the police officers’ point of view.

On the news media angle…. One Saturday morning probably 15 years ago, I was the commanding officer on duty at my police department, in charge of maybe nine officers. Basically at that time I was the acting chief of police or the highest ranking officer on duty. An officer got out on a car on the frontage road of a freeway. I cannot remember now if he was dispatched after a passerby saw the car or if he just rolled up on it while on patrol The roof of the car was crushed and it appeared as though the vehicle had flipped off of the overpass. The vehicle was not occupied. I arrived a couple of minutes later and we secured the scene by shutting down the roadway. It appeared a person lost control of the vehicle and flipped off of the highway overpass. With no one in the vehicle and no known witnesses, we didn’t know if the person was thrown from the vehicle and into a ditch, in a drainage canal nearby, had crawled out may be intoxicated and gotten a ride home, etc. In such a situation, out of caution we assume the worst because you cannot usually re-create evidence later. A few minutes later a reporter from a local news media outlet showed up. The reporter was actually just driving down the highway and saw the police cars blocking the road and stopped to check. The reporter naturally did his job and asked what was happening. I said exactly what I said in the previous paragraph. It might just be a drunk who went off the highway and crawled out and hitchhiked home. The reported followed up with, but why is everything locked down. It is just like I said, we simply don’t know. We don’t want to find out this was a road rage incident and a guy’s body is in the canal and we simply drove away. I told him what I always say, in a situation like this we assume that it is a homicide and start from there. Hopefully in a short time we will find out that there is not much to it and we can go in about our business but you have to gather evidence now or never. He drove away and a few minutes later we located the guy at home. Yes he had lost control and gone off of the side of the overpass and had called a friend to bring him home. I am guessing that he did not call us because he was intoxicated but there was nothing we could prove at that point. We were probably on scene for a total of about 30 minutes and had the case wrapped up. No big deal….. right???? Well the next morning I got a call from the chief of police who was maybe a little bit angry. He asked me why he was not notified of a homicide and why were detectives not called out. My thoughts were like….. HUH??? Hahaha….. the lead story the next day in the news was, police working a possible homicide on the highway. Uhhhhh, chief, that is not what I told the reporter. I said we locked the scene down like we always do until we could confirm what we had. It was probably just a drunk that went off the highway and we wrapped it up within a few minutes and there was nothing else to do or anyone to notify. Ahhhhh…… There in lies my opinion about the news media. They did not outright lie because I did tell him that we were working a possible homicide but I also told him that it may have just been a wreck with no injuries. There was no follow up later by the reporter, he had the stunning headline that he wanted… And it turned out to be false. In the news story he could have at least cited information by me that the police had nothing to follow up on but we’re gathering evidence just in case something serious happened.

I read some news reports that said the school had an officer on scene and he exchanged gun fire with a suspect as he was entering the school, so almost immediately. A follow up said the school security officer might have exchanged gun fire, they were not sure. That is the problem with the news media. They are not worried about facts, they worried about innuendo and getting clicks on the articles. I don’t think they out right lie most of the time, they just do not check their sources. A rumor repeated becomes fact. There was a school resource officer on scene at the beginning of the Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Florida. He refused to respond and stayed outside of the door while he heard shots being fired. I was told that if you hear a shot being fired, that is another child dying. Any officer who refuses to enter in that situation, in my opinion, is a coward and needs to drop his badge and his gun on the desk on the way out the door. I made several posts and comments at my police department ripping that officer apart saying that he was an disgrace. I have no problem making such a criticism. I would simply like to know what actually happened before I started pointing fingers.

Oh yeah, Sandy Hook. No officers but campus secured by locked doors which worked as planned. Adam Landsa shot out the door and stepped through…

Columbine. School Officer on scene and they planned to take him out at the outset. He foiled their plan by not eating him typical cafeteria lunch but maybe oddly (premonition?) brown bagged that day and decided to eat in his car. In fact he engaged them almost immediately but as a school officer was on scene, they knew that and prepared to take him out. Parkland, FL Stoneman Douglas high school, school officer on scene…. 17 dead, 17 wounded. The largest school shooting, VT. An entire police department on campus and moments away… 31 dead victims at the school and 17 more shot.

And what does that mean? They yelled at him 50 yards away? They put him on a wall and were frisking him? Please let the rest of us know these details that you have. I am truly curious.

I am not against any of that. I have said probably a couple of times in this thread, harden the schools, arm the teachers and if you want to, add police officers. At least make it hard and when somebody does start the attempt at mass murder, at least cut down the casualties. The point I hit is mainly at politicians and the news media that repeo the mantra that we have to stop this from ever happening again and the fact is you cannot. You can minimize the impact. Your numbers are a little flawed however. Counting equipment, training and the stuff you’ve mentioned, every officer probably costs $125,000 a year. You say a trooper per school. Oooookay….. It would be more like 3-4 per school so about $3-$4 Billion extra per year. A single officer, working a single door and taking absolutely no break, even to go to the bathroom it’s what your numbers would entail. Realistically it would take at least 3 to 4 officers to secure a school somewhat effectively. Even that is just getting by. That does not account for sick days, vacation, mandatory training, etc.

Out of curiosity, do you have any experience shooting man size targets with a handgun under a severe time constraint, while under extreme stress and then at other targets that are moving?

School shootings are probably not mass murders. I think if a guy accidentally shoots a gun in the parking lot, they call that a school shooting. In other cases might be one guy got mad at another guy and shot him in the leg. I tend to think that such person-to-person shootings happen more in larger inner-city areas than in rural areas. ND is pretty rural. The entire state has roughly twice the population of Harding, Jefferson and Orange counties. That is sometimes the problem with statistics. Many times the people that are anti-gun report how many gun deaths happen every year in the United States. What they call a gun deaths are not all homicides because it turns out that at least half of them are suicides. In some discussions however, the numbers are put out to imply that they are murders when in fact they are not. I have not checked in the last year but in most years approximately 2 to 3 times as many people are murdered with hands and feet than there are with rifles. Here is the FBI report on the known murders (criminal homicide) in the United States over a five-year period ending in 2019. Look at 2019 rifle murders, 364. Now look at personal (hands, feet, etc.), strangulation (which is also Personal however you are not beaten or kicked to death) and blunt objects such as striking someone with a hammer, ain personal but the hand held weapon killed instead of the hand itself. So The numbers for being hit with a hammer, beaten, kicked or strangled comes to more than 1,200. Toss in knives and the total goes to almost 3,000. Let’s see, 364 killed by those evil rifles and 1,200 with hands or blunt instruments held by the hand and 1,600 on sharp instruments held by the hand. So hands, feet or handheld items are 800% more likely to kill you than a rifle. Is it the weapon that is the problem or the person? So in 2019 we had 13,927 people murdered. If we could have saved the life of 100% of the people killed by a rifle, murder total and that year would drop to….. 13,563. Wow, getting rid of rifle would have a huge impact!!! In reality, most of those killed with a rifle could have been killed with a pistol but the actor simply had a rifle available. Therein lies the politics of gun control. If we could just get rid of those rifles and those high-capacity magazines……

And those theoretical sprayed bullets would have gone where?

That is what I was talking about. If they were in position to do so. Do you have any information that they were in position failed to stop him? I was chasing a felony suspect one time and he went over the fence of a fenced in school and broke into the school while I was chasing him. There were no kids there and he turned out not to be armed but we did not know that at the time. The guy was ahead of me however and running away. So, were these officers in position to stop the guy? Do we have any information that their training failed at them? If you want to see criticism, go behind the scenes in a shift meeting, a locker room, a secure police forum or on the back lot of the police station and watch officers criticize other officers. We aren’t exactly shy about calling them like we see them. We don’t always do it in public but we typically don’t defend what we think is stupidity.

Oops…. it went over my head.

Yep, that is why I prefaced it with overpriced with a pretty cool store. They used to have a decent restaurant inside. It has been about 10 years since I’ve been there. Buc-ee’s…. corn, restrooms, ice…. keep heading south.

I think it was during the Obama administration that many conservative organizations tried to get 501(c)(3) non-profit tax exemptions and were repeatedly denied but when looking into it, similar liberal groups were easily certified.

That would be a nearly impossible task since you would have to find their social media and have them admit that it was theirs. I know as background checks we have checked social media pages but you never know if someone has something hidden under a false identity. To expect at the point of a gun sale to start checking someone’s thousands of posts on maybe a dozen different social media sites, would be an almost impossible task. If assuming that became a standard, people would simply start with a falsified name in that post under their true identity. Maybe while on the way to perpetrate an act they might change to their real identity or something like that but unfortunately, these people aren’t stupid.

It would not take long. I was directly involved in such an investigation which fortunately turned out to be negative. We got information of an online threat and jumped all over it and had what we needed within an hour or so should we have needed to act. That is not the end or nearly all of the investigation but it gives enough to start confronting someone and doing some fairly quick intervention.

[Hidden Content] Mass murder, not suicide except the guy that did it.

I have no clue as to the sequence of events but what training are you suggesting that they forgot?

I would think that legal immigrants are vetted before entry is allowed but don’t know. The majority is probably not people who applied, filled out their application and waited in line.

They are far from minimum wage, just sayin’….. At one time government workers were thought to get less pay but better benefits so it was a trade off. Now it might be pay and benefits.

My favorite overpriced sporting goods store is/was (?) in Uvalde… Oasis Outback.

No, it’s the two amendments that most seem threatened. How much of an issue is the right to privacy in your home and entry has to be with your consent or a warrant signed by a magistrate, the right to an attorney or the right not to give a statement? To try to claim otherwise is a straw man argument.

I had mentioned this previously. What is the deadliest school attack in United States history? It was almost 100 years ago, in 1927. How many firearms were used? None. A 55 year old man lost a school board election and was angry at the world. He used dynamite and killed 38 children at school. He sat back and waited until rescuers rushed in to help, then he drove a pick up truck loaded with dynamite into the people and detonated that, killing and injuring more. Counting the perpetrator who committed suicide in the explosion, there are 48 dead and 53 injured. It is 101 casualties at a school where no firearms were used. That was in Bath, Michigan. How do you stop an attacker who can choose his target and has time to plan? About three years ago I asked some high school students about the same thing because of another similar incident at the time. What happens at the local high school if they put a policeman at every door or where entry is allowed with a metal detector? Would that stop an incident? Can we lock the school down and make sure no one gets in with a weapon? Sure!!! Okay, would that stop a shooting at the school? Certainly!! So I asked them, in this lockdown and safe school what happens when the final bell rings? The answer was that within about two or three minutes, 1900 students pour out of the school. Of those, about 500 gather at the bus stop. So for my next scenario, I have a semi-automatic rifle with plenty of ammo and a suppressor. If I am 100 yards away concealed, how many children can I shoot before they even realize what is happening? Dozens? Which way would they run not knowing where the shots are coming from? This has already happened in 1998 in what was the second deadliest school shooting in US history before Columbine a year later. In Arkansas and 11--year-olds and a 13-year-old child took some weapons and waited for a fire drill at school. They were small and not nearly prepared but they shot 15 people and I believe five of them died. Because they were too young to be sentenced as adults, they stayed in prison until they were 21 and released. I believe one is alive today and one was killed in a car crash about 15 years ago. Of course they did not have suppressed weapons and we’re not shooting into a crowd of kids at a bus stop. I could go further, a lot further but do you get the point? And to be sure I am not against safety measures. You might as well make it at least tough and have someone put some thought process into it rather than on a whim, walking into a school and start shooting. You cannot stop a dedicated attacker however. How much money and circumstances are you willing to spend to save that single life? We could pass a federal law requiring governors on all vehicles to restrict speed to 45 miles an hour and we would reduce highway deaths by about 30,000 people a year. How much money should we spend annually to save 30,000 people?

The “one life saved” is a bogus premise.

No different.