Texas school had a shooting plan, armed officers and practice. And still 10 people died.

[ehrnst]

The school district had an active-shooter plan, and two armed police officers walked the halls of the high school. School district leaders had even agreed last fall to eventually arm teachers and staff under the state’s school marshal program, one of the country’s most aggressive and controversial policies intended to get more guns into classrooms.

They thought they were a hardened target, part of what’s expected today of the American public high school in an age when school shootings occur with alarming frequency. And so a death toll of 10 was a tragic sign of failure and needing to do more, but also a sign, to some, that it could have been much worse.

“My first indication is that our policies and procedures worked,” J.R. “Rusty” Norman, president of the school district’s board of trustees, said Saturday, standing exhausted at his front door. “Having said that, the way things are, if someone wants to get into a school to create havoc, they can do it.”
.............................................................................................
The shooting didn’t seem to rattle beliefs or prompt the calls for change that followed the Parkland shooting. Norman Franzke, 69, whose granddaughter safely escaped Santa Fe High, noted that guns have been part of the culture here for generations. When he attended, students kept shotguns on racks in their pickups, ready for hunting after school.

“I don’t think this will change the mentality of this community,” Franzke said. “There may be some changes in how kids enter and leave school. But even then, he was a student, so he would still have had access.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/santa-fe-school-had-a-shooting-plan-armed-officers-and-practice-and-still-10-people-died/2018/05/19/58b1b55e-5b8d-11e8-8b92-45fdd7aaef3c_story.html

[TimeSnowDemos]

1. But of course

Guns can't meaningfully stop gunmen. Neither can 'security'.

Those are all just distractions.

[19catsandcounting]

2. This isn't a problem that anyone can solve

The only way to stop school shootings is to disarm the population or create sweeping changes throughout our culture that make every young man feel deep belonging to a community and a sense of unity with his country. Or do both.

No one, not even the Federal Government, has the capability of making either of these changes. If we harden every school in the country to the point where such attacks would no longer be good targets, shooters will attack other soft targets where the innocent gather.

I’m in a negative mood right now, would be much obliged if someone persuaded me I am wrong. What legislation could stop this?

[Nevernose]

4. Legislation can't "stop" anything

That doesn’t mean legislation is ineffective or not worth the bother.

For instance, raise the gun owning/purchasing/unsupervised usage age to 21. Something like 40% of school shooters bought their weapons legally and were between 18 and 21.

Along with the age restriction, hold gun owners responsible. If parents don’t lock up their guns, parents should be held accountable for crimes committed with those guns. A few high profile prosecutions of upper middle class white professionals who were irresponsible with their weapons would go a long way in changing the culture. People buy guns to protect themselves and their families, but guess what? Suicide is a much bigger threat to your children than home invaders, and access to firearms mean a greater likelihood of “success” in suicide attempts.

Most gun owners really are responsible, but that doesn’t mean shit if we don’t begin holding the irresponsible owners accountable.

And that’s just this one case. There are literally dozens of laws and regulations that could be passed tomorrow — some dealing with guns, some with schools, some with mental health — that would significantly reduce gun violence overnight, and that wouldn’t infringe on anybody’s eights or even “American culture” in any meaningful way.

[19catsandcounting]

6. Thanks! These are very good ideas.

[marlakay]

10. I keep wondering why the parents

Aren’t held responsible for not keeping the guns away from their kids. I personally think if you own a gun you are responsible for anything that happens with it. If you are afraid that someone in your household may get it then lock it up at a gun place.

[Nevernose]

11. State legislators with guts

Are going to need to write stricter, more specific laws addressing unsecured weapons and criminal liability.

Like it or not, people have to realize that times have changed. We just don’t live in a world where we can leave our grandpa’s shotgun in the closet and keep even .38 in the nightstand. Not if you’ve got people under 21 in the house. Setting aside school shootings, crime, and homicide in general, we know too much about the risks of suicide and access to firearms. If you knew for an absolute fact that someone you live has battled with depression — husband, roommate, mom, whoever — then I believe that you probably shouldn’t have a gun in your home, and if you do keep a gun in your home, you should be required to secure it under lock and key. Most states don’t even have a legal duty for owners to report stolen or lost firearms, and most states and the Feds don’t even have a database to keep track of them.

It’s 2018. That’s a foreseeable, avoidable risk, and I think people should start going to prison for negligent homicide, manslaughter, or even murder depending upon the circumstances. Anyone afraid of a law enforcement operated database because of “government tyranny” or some such obviously bullshit reason certainly lacks all right to ever say “support our troops” or “blue lives matter” ever again.

I suspect that there are an awful lot of civil liability lawsuits we just don’t here about in many of these cases. Not “sexy” enough for the news. We should make it easier to sue the owners, we should remove all caps on penalties, and we should make it a debt impossible to discharge through bankruptcy (just like my student loans).

Responsible gun owners would have nothing to fear.

[Straw Man]

14. Texas already has such a law.

https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-46-13.html

Whether it is strict or specific enough is open to debate.

[Nevernose]

17. That's precisely what I was debating

I’m arguing that people who allow unfettered access to those under 21 or those with chronic psychological disorders (like depression) should be punished severely, preferably as severely as the actual person who pulls the trigger.

Under that statute you listed, the Santa Fe school shooter’s dad can be charged with a Class A misdemeanor. At most it’s a year in jail (if he’s poorly behaved), and afterwards, he can still buy more guns.
I’m actually opposed to harsh sentencing for most crimes, but there are exceptions. Crimes of violence and crimes committed by those in authority are those exceptions.

[USALiberal]

5. You are 100% correct........

Unless you remove all guns from society, which WILL NEVER HAPPEN, you cannot stop a lone nut from killing a few people.

Shotguns will always be legal. Pistols will always be legal.

The gun culture in this country make it worse.

The real issue is why we have so many people who want to do this.

[19catsandcounting]

7. Rifles will always be legal too.

I think the issue is that Capitalism amongst many other factors are highly effective at dissolving communities, family and a unifying culture. Young men are mentally and physically equipped to kill, if they are bitter, resentful and in despair, the innocent to whom they feel no connection become targets for cathartic violence. Obviously not just young men are susceptible to this.

[Yupster]

12. Yet mass school shootings never used to happen

So what's changed in our population over the last 50 years where mass shootings at schools are now routine while they used to be unheard of.

Wikipedia has a good list of all the school shootings for 100 years.

There used to be a lot of them but they were the boyfriend shoots new boyfriend at the school dance ot principal kill himself in his office. This shooting as many people as possible is a very new phenomenon.

It's not the guns that has changed. They've always been around.

It's not the lack of protection at schools. They sued to have open doors.

So what's changed in the population where people do things they never used to do?

[19catsandcounting]

13. My perception is

The dissolution of community, loss of unity, increased desperation/inability for regular people to attain status....How do we get that?

[B2G]

16. 100 years ago we didn't have schools with 3000 students.

But there were guns.

Too many kids means too little supervision and too much potential conflict. They are microcosims of the larger society.

[Yupster]

18. I went to school 50 years ago

and my high school had 3,000. 100 years ago. I'm not that old so can't say.

[Fla_Democrat]

20. What a wonderful opportunity to have a

well thought out, intelligent, reasonable conversation.....

Too bad we can't have it here.

[ehrnst]

21. Since Columbine, there has been a model for young white dissaffected men

to make their pain known worldwide.

Those that might not have been shooters if they were in high school 30 years ago, might now be.

There is a ritual - social media messages, manifestos, then going into school and down in history.

This is why the media doesn't mention the name of the shooters as much.

But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence

[NightWatcher]

3. Attackers have the upper hand. One could walk into a police station and start shooting...

...and kill several I'm sure before police shot you dead.

It's not about just being secure, because the type of secure needed to prevent all shootings is unattainable. Think high security super prisons. No kids are going to school in a Super Max but anything short of that is susceptible to violence.

[kacekwl]

8. Imagine if he had a more

potent weapon. Good thing dad didn't have a AK type weapon at home.

[BlueDog22]

9. Yeah

No surprise. A determined shooter is going to plan for those things. Remember he knew there was an armed officer there, and probably planned on dealing with him.

[LisaL]

15. He dealt with him by shooting him and almost killing him.

If the shooter is already in the room any armed cop would have to enter that same room immediately putting cop into disadvantage.

[Yupster]

19. And if you put an armed cop in any room,

a determined shooter will switch to a mall or movie theatre.