A Pennsylvania school is planning to fight active shooters…

…with buckets of rocks:

“Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone. If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned,” said Dr. David Helsel, [Superintendent of the Blue Mountain school district in Pennsylvania – Ed.] testifying to the House Education Committee last week in Harrisburg.

“At one time I just had the idea of river stone, they’re the right size for hands, you can throw them very hard and they will create or cause pain, which can distract,” Helsel told WNEP.

Helsel says teachers, staff, and students were given active shooter training through a program known as ALICE which stands for Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate and they routinely hold evacuation drills for active shooter simulations.

But if a teacher decides to lockdown a classroom, there are rocks in a five-gallon bucket kept in every classroom closet that students could throw if shooters get inside.

And the fact is, yes – with active shooters, any resistance is better than none.  It’s just crazy enough to…well, maybe be better than useless.

Speaking of better than useless – the district took some more concrete action:

Helsel says the district has no plans to arm teachers, however, Blue Mountain does have a maintenance employee who is trained and certified to work as school security and is armed.

People may laugh – but it makes more sense than any Twin Cities public school is going to.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We are told ordinary citizens don’t need guns, we shouldn’t try to defend ourselves, we should leave it to the professionals who have training and experience to do the job safely and correctly.

In other words:  “Trust us, we’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

The School Resource Officer who hid outside the school instead of engaging the shooter inside, resigned in disgrace.  He’s not the only Deputy who hid and waited.  The Coral Springs PD walked past three more cowering deputies to go into the school looking for the shooter.  And that’s after years of warnings were ignored.  No wonder the sheriff wants to blame Trump and the NRA for this disaster. The officer who resigned may be the only honorable person in that whole department.

And I’m not sure he’s being justly blamed.  Think of the TSA screeners at the airport.  All federal law enforcement people, supposedly there to protect the public from terrorists. They put on a big show of confiscating a two-inch pen knife and badgering anybody making jokes about bombs, but imagine the Florida shooter had skipped school to show up at the airport.  Imagine he had started shooting at people standing in the rope line, or taking off their shoes.  How many of those TSA screeners would have charged the gunman?  I suspect the answer is “none,” because they’re not warriors, they’re window dressing, and everybody knows it.

Same as the School Resource Officer.  He might be a sworn peace officer carrying a pistol but God help him if he shot a kid causing trouble , if he pulled a weapon on one, or even spoke sharply to him.  Jesse Jackson would be on the first plane and Gloria Allred would be in the seat right next to him.  The school hired the guy to be Officer Friendly.  They can’t expect him to suddenly turn into Rambo and they would have been horrified if they thought he might.

The deputy who resigned is a trained professional, all right.  But what’s he trained for?  Sensitivity to gender issues?  Minimizing racial arrest disparities?  Reducing truancy?  He was great at those jobs.  Don’t blame him for failing to do a job he wasn’t hired for, wasn’t temperamentally suited for, that nobody wanted him to do.

Joe Doakes

In the seminal essay “A Nation of Cowards” – an essay that may not have created an entire generation of Second Amendment activists, but certainly helped them focus their thinking –  Jeffrey Snyder wrote:

Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe that it is the police’s, not only are you wrong — since the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so — but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000 salary we pay him? [In 1993 – Ed.]  If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?

Adults who are kibitzing about the cops – but not calling for school sfaffers to assert their moral right, power and obligation to protect the children in their charge and themselves – are hypocrites.

And yes, I said “moral obligation”:

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let’s not mince words: He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence.

I think this essay needs to circulate again.

Grandfather of teens who killed after breaking into a man’s house, threatening his life and health, complains that the homeowner had an “unfair advantage” in the three-on-one fight because he had an AR15:

They got into a confrontation with the man who owned the home. Moments later the homeowner’s son emerged with an AR-15 and killed all three criminals.

Now the grandfather of one of the criminals is saying it wasn’t fair that the homeowner had an AR-15.

He says that it gave the homeowner an unfair advantage.

Oh, no.  One middle-class schlub has an advantage over three thugs who came equipped to deal him a three-on-one beatdown.   How horrible.

That is, of course, the point behind “assault weapons”; to not run out of bullets before your enemy runs out of attacks.

(Disclaimer for the record:  I would never shoot a human, even in self-defense, and I’d never own a gun, because they terrify me).

A mass stabbing attack left one dead and three wounded at the University of Texas Austin.

It could have been worse, but…:

Eyewitnesses have reported seeing a student pull out a concealed handgun on the suspect, and made him back down.

While one can expect the UT and Austin media to downplay such a story – after they all doubled and tripled down against lawful carry on campus – this blog presumes the story true, and that the unnamed student is a hero.

Three armed men tried to rob a Nashville store the week before last, guns blazing, robbery in mind.

An armed citizen changed their plans:

An unnamed person inside a Nashville (TN) sneaker shop went John Wick on three armed robbers last after they made the mistake of charging into the store with guns blazing.

A man died after he was injured during a shootout at a Bordeaux shop late Thursday night.

It happened inside retailer Hot Kicks, located in a strip mall at 3101 Clarksville Pike, around 11 p.m.

Metro police told News 2 a group of people were inside the store when at least three armed suspects came in through an unlocked back door and began firing.

One of the people in the store returned fire, while others took off running, according to police.

Metro police said officers found one man near the back door with several gunshot wounds.

None of the customers or staff of the store were injured in the exchange of gunfire. One of the three robbers was found critically injured outside the back door of the shop by police, and died at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. The other two suspects arrived at TriStar Centennial Medical Center leaking from fresh holes, and one of those two robbers is now in critical condition.

I love a happy ending.

“Play stupid games, get stupid prizes”.

It’s a mantra my first carry permit instructor, the late Joel Rosenberg, used to drill into his students’ heads.  The point?  The best case of self-defense is the one you don’t need to state in front of a court.  Don’t put on your legal gun and go to roughneck bars, or hang out where stupidity is likely to break out.   If someone provokes you, walk away – using extreme measures.  “When you’re armed”, Joel used to say, “it’s incumbent on you to be the biggest pussy in the bar”.

And the stupidity doesn’t start when the potential violence does.  Oh, no.

One of the things police and prosecutors would do, if you got into a lethal-force self-defense incident, was pore over everything they can find about your past, to find some way in which they can convince a jury that it wasn’t really self-defense.

Remember – under Minnesota law, there are four factors that must be upheld when you claim self-defense using lethal force:

1. You must not be a willing participant:  you can’t start a brawl, and then shoot someone who breaks a bottle.
2. You must reasonably, immediately fear death or great bodily harm.  Reasonable means “it’ll convince a jury”.  Immediate means now; if someone says “I’m gonna kill you…tomorrow”, you can’t kill them first.
3. You must use appropriate force.  In other words, you can only use the force needed to end the threat.  No more.
4. You must make a reasonable effort to retreat.  Reasonable.  If you’re pushing your baby in a stroller, you don’t need to leave it behind.  If you’re a 70 year old man with a knee replacement attacked by four youths, you don’t need to try to out run them.  And in Minnesota, it doesn’t apply in your house.  In “Stand Your Ground” states, this provision is disregarded.  Minnesota is not a Stand Your Ground state.

When you claim “self defense”, you must meet all four of the criteria above.  That means all four; if you miss one of them – or if a jury can be convinced you missed one of them, rightly or wrongly – you’re in big trouble.

Big Trouble:  Allen Scarsella was convicted of “Riot”, First Degree Assault and some counts of Second Degree Assault for an episode that happened at the protests outside the Minneapolis Fourth Precinct in November 2015.

The jury deliberated for seven hours following two weeks of testimony from nearly two dozen witnesses — including surprise testimony from Scarsella and a co-defendant — before returning guilty verdicts on all counts.

So – how did Scarsella get convicted?

Let’s go through those four elements.

Fear Of Death:   Observers, and even some of the victims, testified that there was a chase, as at least seven protesters ran after Scarsella and his companions.  Was fear of death or great bodily harm reasonable?  We’d have to ask the jurors – but the law doesn’t require one to be a mind-reader.

 Mobs do stupid things.  Call this a definite maybe.  It would certainly be obtuse to rule it out just because you don’t like the defendant or his motivations; people who believe objectionable things have rights, too.

Convincing a jury of this sort of thing is why defense attorneys make the big bucks.

Duty To Retreat:  Well, no doubt there.  Scarsella and his friends certainly tried to get away.   Call this a no-brainer for the defense.

Was Lethal Force Appropriate?:  Well, assuming it was reasonable to assume the threat was immediate and lethal, the shooting ended the threat.  As far as that goes, let’s call it a non-factor.

Not A Willing Participant:  Here’s the thing about jury trials (or so I’m told by my lawyer friends); a big part of the job is making sure the jury likes you, feels for you, identifies with you.  This becomes important when it comes to this criterion of self-defense in particular.

Going where a confrontation might happen might be considered “willing participation” – but in the Darren Evanovich shooting, where a Good Samaritan chased an armed robber into an alley, the prosecutor decided the evidence showed the Samaritan was not a willing participant; he went looking for the purse, not a fight.

But while Scarsella may well have had second thoughts about attending the protest long before the shooting started, the prosecutors also found some evidence that made him pretty  unsympathetic to the jury:

They watched several videos taken before and after the shooting, including ones of Scarsella making racist comments; and they viewed numerous texts where Scarsella described his intent to kill black people.

Now, could a good lawyer have gotten a jury to disregard this?  Maybe, maybe not.    Even racists have the right to defend their lives; self-defense isn’t a popularity contest.

But jury trials, to a great extent, are.  And the prosecution (according to sources familiar with the case) were able to create an impression with the jury that Scarsella went to the Fourth Precinct looking for a fight.  Which blew away his chance of calling himself an “unwilling participant”, and with it, his self-defense claim.

The obvious lesson – if you value the right to self-defense, and you believe things that a jury might find unsavory, then keep quiet about them, especially on social media, text messages and other searchable media.

And it’s not just racial ugliness.  If you’re a shooter, for crying out loud, don’t be jabbering on Facebook about how eager you are to turn your new shotgun on an intruder.  It’l make it harder for a zealous prosecutor to paint you as a slavering gun nut with an itchy trigger finger.

Another obvious point – the Good Samaritan in the Evanovich case, as well as the Broadbent shooting in 2015, involved citizens who followed the rules; after shooting, they called the police and tried their best to render first aid.  Scarsella fled the scene and didn’t call the police and was caught sometime the next day – a bad tactic if you want to claim self-defense.  It’s good to be a responsible citizen.

Like every self-defense shooting, the Scarsella case should be a sobering reminder – in this case, of what not to do.

A good guy with a gun shoots two robbers at a pizzeria in Levittown, Pennsylvania:

The shooting happened late Tuesday night at Porfirio’s Pizza and Pasta, located in a shopping plaza in Levittown, about 25 miles northeast of Philadelphia.

The customer took out a gun and shot both men after they allegedly pistol-whipped him, Middletown Police Chief Joe Bartorilla told reporters.

The police are still investigating.  But I’m pretty sure we all know where this ends up.