Ignorance Is Bliss. Also Death.

After a year and a half, the final report on the Uvalde Massacre was released last week.

And it told us something we knew within about a year of the Columbine Massacre – because the Secret Service reported it, after doing a deep study of spree killers: when someone is engaged in a spree killing (a mass murder with no other motivation), the best response is to meet them with violent opposition. Spree killers almost invariably operate in a psychotic reverie – and violent resistance shatters that fugue state. The directive: Don’t negotiate. Don’t wait for SWAT. Go in – if you’re a cop, do it as soon as you have another cop to cover you. Move in in mutualliy-supporting groups of 2-4 cops, and get rounds on target. If nothing else, violent resistance breaks the fugure state, and usually causes the spree killer to give up or kill themselves. (The Secret Service report didn’t endorse armed civilian resistance – but the real-world record shows a myriad of cases of regular schnooks ending spree killings. It’s the principle, not the actor, that gets the spree killer to point the gun at their own head.

And the Uvalde cops? Like the Parkland cops before them, they didn’t forget all their training…:

Eleven officers from the Uvalde school district and Uvalde Police Department arrived on the scene within three minutes of the shooter’s entry into the school. Five advanced initially and two were hit by shrapnel. Police made three attempts to enter the classrooms, which are adjoined by an interior door.

But as at Parkland, there was apparently crisis in leadership:

Pete Arredondo, then the chief of the Uvalde school police department, “directed officers at several points to delay making entry into classrooms in favor of searching for keys and clearing other classrooms,” the report found. He also tried to negotiate with the shooter, and treated him as a barricaded subject instead of a continuing threat to children and school staff, the report says…”The report concludes that had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” [US Attorney General Merrick ]Garland said.

The only “negotiating tactic” to which spree killers respond is shots on, or near, the target. They are the target.

Frozen

I’m never going to be the one to pile on someone who freezes up at the thought of charging toward mortal danger.

It happens to the best of people; trained cops and soldiers freeze solid when the immediate threat becomes real. Even soldiers who’ve been there, over and over, will freeze up – think of the Gunner Sergeant from Percy Sledges memoir The Old Breed, who fought through battle after battle against the Japanese, only to freeze up in his final battle.

Nobody can predict how they’d do.

Of course, there are still consequences. They may even be just consequences.

Of course, we know a couple things about spree killings: left unchecked, they rack up horrific death tolls. And the best way to end them is to respond with immediate lethal force .

Something that cops have been taught, now, for a few decades.

I’ll let God decide whether Scot Peterson – the cop who busied himself searching the buildings on the Parkland campus that didn’t have gunfire coming from inside during the Stoneman-Douglas High School massacre – is truly culpable for freezing up, not “under fire” but under the threat of it. He was 56, nearing retirement, probably not too unlike Danny Glover’s character in the (fictional) Lethal Weapon series, and just “too old for this s**t”.

Because due to double jeopardy, that’s the next judgment that matters. Because a jury acquitted him of culpability in those deaths last week:

“If they need to really know the truth of what occurred… I’ll be there for them,” he said.

Mr Peterson, 60, put his head in his hands and began sobbing as the verdicts were read out in court in Fort Lauderdale.

After the verdict, Mr Peterson told reporters that he would like to talk to the parents of the students who were killed.

I am not the one to judge.

But I’ll defer to someone who is (emphasis added by me):

But Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina was one of the students murdered, said he continued to blame Mr Peterson for not trying to stop the shooting.

“His inaction contributed to the shock, the devastation of students and teachers at that school,” Mr Montalto told reporters. “We don’t understand how this jury looked at the evidence that was presented and found him not guilty.”

“All I can say to the members of the jury is: ‘I think your school should hire him to protect your children,‘” he said.

The person who should be at trial, Sheriff Scott Israel, who held his officers back from confronting the maniac who murdered 17, and spent the rest of his disgraceful career as a gun control activist to deflect away from his own uselessness, has not been charged with anything. I don’t suspect he can be.

It’s a shame.

By The Book

Unlike Uvalde and Parkland, the cops at the Covenant School shooting in Nashville did what cops (and citizens, for that matter) are supposed to do in the face of a spree killer: meet them with lethal force as quickly and effectively as possible.

As a general rule, spree killers spend a long time, sometimes years, planning their attacks, and frequently carry them out in a fugue state, almost a fantastical reverie. And resistance, especially with lethal force, even if it doesn’t kill or incapacitate them, frequently/usually makes them break off the attack, usually giving up or killing themselves as their fantasy comes to an abrupt end.

The Nashville cops appear to have done it right:

Here’s the body cam footage.

Warning: Extremely graphic.

And these cops, I will thank for their service.

Berg’s 18th Law Is Still In Full Effect

I’ll do my due diligence and make my usual reference to my self-coined but completely accurate dictum:

Berg’s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency

Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident.  It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.

I will continue to observe this law.

But to speculate just a bit? I’m going to go out on a short sturdy limb and guess mass shooting at the Covenant School disappears down the memory hole.

The shooter, y’see, is a former student who, while being almost universally “deadnamed” in the media by her original, female identity, seemed to be pretty actively presenting her…er, him…er, xheirself as (what biologists used to call) male:

That’s two spree killings in one. year carried out by gender-dysmorphic people. The avalanche of mental illness spurred on by the lockdowns and America’s general spiritual and emotional decline is paying dividends for those who benefit from both.

Darn that NRA.

And I’m sure various cultural cues, like this and this…

…were utterly unrelated.

By the way – like most spree killers, the murderer chose the target because there was less chance of resistance. The school was a “gun free zone”, and had other vulnerabilities that beckoned:

[Metropolitan Nashville Police Chief John Drake] answered, “Yes,” [that Covenant was the only school targeted] but noted there was another location the suspect considered striking as well. However, he said the suspect did “a threat assessment” of the other location and decided there was “too much security.

Draw your conclusions. I certainly am .

Unlike the Uvalde shooting, initial reports indicated the police response was fast, violent and decisive – something that the Feds long ago determined was a key factor for dealing with spree killers, and that this blog has noted time and again and again and again and again and again is of paramount importance in containing and ending these shootings.

Overcomplicated

James C. Moore is identified as a “lifelong Texan”.

That, and an op-ed that tries to poo-pooh the notion that a good guy with a gun actually does anything useful in extremis – would seem to be the only reasons he wound up getting his “op-ed” posted on CNN.com. It’s entitled “Texas shooting isn’t as simple as it seems“.

To which one might reply “Thanks, Captain Obvious, your promotion to Major is pending”. Just about any human endeavor, especially those around the edges of insanity, evil and depravity, is an inexact study.

But not nearly as inexact as Mr. Moore would have us think:

But if Wilson is the example of a good guy with a gun who saved the day, what does the other armed parishioner who was killed represent? Will he become proof to gun control advocates that arming the well-intentioned doesn’t work?

Only if the “gun control advocate” is a complete idiot.

This line is the flip side of the Dems’ “If it saves just one life…” canard; “If it doesn’t save every single life, then it’s all a lie!“.

Analyses of the live-streamed video from the church are suggesting that several worshippers were armed and drew guns. One of them appears to have been killed as he reached for his weapon.

In other words, Kinnunan was aiming at the victim, and was getting ready to shoot when the victim started reaching for his gun. It wouldn’t have mattered if the guy was reaching for his kid, his inhaler, his reading glasses, his cell phone or a pack of Certs – he was already in Kinnunan’s sights. Reaching for his gun didn’t save him – but it didn’t kill him, either. Watch the video; the guy had a spit second. It wasn’t enough.

But it was for Wilson.

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, responded to the incident by citing statistics on Twitter that indicate 3,500 people died in Texas from guns; CDC data shows just over 3,500 such deaths in 2017 and the average is one victim every three hours in the state. Deaths, she pointed out, have increased between 2015 and 2017, the most recent year for which there is CDC data. Watts also pointed out that Texas has been home to four of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern US history.

Getting one’s info from Shannon Watts is its own punishment.

“Gun deaths” includes suicide. There is an epidemic of suicide – but that epidemic crosses all means of commission – tall buildings and bridges, rope, pills, or reading Shannon Watts.

And even the “four deadliest mass shootings” bit is a canard.

  • Sutherland springs was “Gun Free”. It prompted the legislative changes that allowed Jack Wilson to kill Kinnunan.
  • Luby’s Cafeteria happened when Texas was a restrictive “May Issue” state. Nobody in the cafeteria was legally armed. Suzanna Grazia Hupp offered gut-wrenching testimony on the subject.
  • The Michael Whitman shooting at the University of Texas, awful as it was, was largely stopped by…armed citizens returning fire with high-powered rifles to keep Whitman’s head down while the police (and a citizen) closed in to take him out – which would be largely illegal today.

If you get your information from the “Gun Safety” movement, you’re not getting information.

Little has been reported about the suspect at White Settlement other than indications he has an arrest record, which will make some critics wonder how he got a gun. But it is not illegal to sell a gun to a felon in Texas, unless you know he is a felon, which he isn’t likely to tell you since he is a felon and wants a gun.

That’s not just Texas. That’s the law nationwide.

And it’s exactly why “universal” background checks are completely absurd – although I doubt Mr. Moore has thought it through to that point.

If you think that’s absurd, sit down right now and try writing an enforceable law that prevents it. There are sufficient loopholes in firearms regulations and such an abundance of supply of weapons that anyone in America can get a gun, good guy or bad guy.

Right.

And when you make it illegal for good guys to get, carry, or use their firearms, who does that leave?

Inevitably?

It’s depressing that a significant chunk of this country thinks this is “reasoning”.

Count The Proposals…

…that the DFL, Dave Pinto, Linda Slocum, and the Dreamdicle Kids are pimping, that were already in effect in today’s Maryland school shooting:

  • People under 21 can’t possess a gun in Maryland.
  • Magazines over 10 rounds are banned (and appear to have been irrelevant, although Berg’s 18th Law is in effect).
  • “Universal” Background checks are in full effect.
  • Carry permits are rare and hard to get.

A good guy with a guh – in this case, a cop who did his job – apparently is the hero, here.

Not “commonsense gun safety reforms”.

Level Of Threat

A friend of the blog writes:

One of my neighbors once said she likes what St Paul has become for people like those begging for money at the street corners. She thinks it’s wonderful that we “respect” them so much that we just leave them alone, let them stand outside in all kinds of weather begging for money. I have two problems with that. One, I think some of them are scammers, no different than those trying to get money from you with other stories, like the Nigerian prince. We should not encourage scams. Two, the legitimate people, who are possibly homeless, possibly mentally ill, should also not be encouraged to stand out there in the elements. How is that respecting their life? Making sure they are taking medications, giving them opportunities to be accountable, that is respectful of their lives. Giving them anything at a street corner just enables them to not be accountable.

I thought of that when I was pondering Trump’s latest about guns and the mentally ill.

I think liberals are having fun trolling him about this comment. And I can see his statement as possibly troubling because we know of lessons from history where governments actually did decide who was and was not competent for guns.

Now, I am not really versed in legality. But, in a case like the Florida shooter, where there was apparently threats or causes for concern, over a period of time, I don’t think any due process would have taken too long to happen in order to actually do something. And I think the way Trump brought it up actually opens up the possibility for discussion to actually do something, if people want it.

How does this relate to my first story? I don’t know if it does, except that perhaps in both cases, we have gone so far off the deep end in what respect for a person’s life might mean that we think no intervention or enabling type intervention is actually better than tough love, holding people accountable. While Trump’s statement could produce action in many different directions, one direction it could go is towards more individual accountability.

Cruz made plenty of threats that were themselves grounds for arrest – and could have been, were it not the school’s policy not to arrest students it they could possible avoid it.

The Main Reason To Arm Teachers Allow School Staff With Permits To Carry

Donald Trump’s proposal to allow teachers and school staff with carry permits to carry their firearms in school has drawn the predictable firestorm of uninformed knee jerk responses.  It’s a gun issue, that’s just how it goes.

It’s also provoking a slightly, if you will, off-target response from some shooters.

Don’t get me wrong – of course it’s better to have an armed staffer in the room, with the potential to respond, when and if the shooting starts.  Armed citizens have ended three school shootings (Pearl Mississippi, Edinboro Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Law School); there’s nothing superhuman about spree killers, or for that matter inherently less capable about school staff.

But here’s the bigger point.

Trouble:  As we’ve noted based before, spree killers – as studied by the FBI after the Columbine massacre – plan theire attacks for months, sometimes years. One of their key planning criteria– is resistance likely?

For example, James Holmes– the Aurora movie massacre shooter– had a choice of six theaters when he was planning his attack. He didn’t pick the biggest seater; He didn’t pick the closest theater; he picked the one feeder in the area that was a “gun free zone”.

Likewise, as we’ve noted, spree killers (as well as terrorists, for that matter) tend to avoid targets where resistance is possible   .Example – after Israel started allowing teachers to bring guns to school after a series of kibbutz school massacres in the 1970s, the number of school massacres drops to zero without any further ceremony.

In other words–The deterrent effect of knowing that people might have guns,Is enough to deter the attack.

It isn’t that what we’re looking for?

Or is that all just too logical for the American left?

 

 

The Terrible Hours

You’re in a room.

Between you and the exit – any exit – is someone who is busily killing people.  So you’re not going anywhere.  Probably not, anyway.

You’re in the midst of a spree killing – sometimes called a rampage killing.  You’re surrounded by crowds of people, as someone – one person, most likely – is carrying out some deluded or diabolical plan to kill…

…well, lots of people.  Maybe you’re in a gay bar, and the killer’s faith hates gays.  Maybe you’re in a synogogue, and the killer hates Jews.  Maybe you’re in a classroom, and the killer hates classrooms?  Or you’re in a church basement, and the killer hates you, whether you be Episcopal or Black or Unitarian.  Maybe it’s just because you’re a westerner, and they’re there to make a point, and inflict terror upon the rest of us westerners.   Or maybe they’re just doing the bidding of the voices in their head.

Either way, here you are.  When you woke up this morning, you didn’t expect to be involved in a spree killing.  Only one person in the room did.

You’re not him.

But there’s no getting around it.  And barring some miracle, there’s no getting away from it;  There are two exits from the space you’re in – but the shooter can see both, and has been mowing down anyone trying to get to the exits for quite some time.  Once, he stopped to reload, and someone rushed him with the only weapon he had available, his bare hands and shoed feet; perhaps he didn’t realize one can reload with a round in the chamber; that bit of resistance, valiant as it was, ended with a body on the floor.

Seeing someone shot down trying to attack the attacker took the fight out of the rest of the people in the room with you.

You may be dimly aware that the room you’re in is a “gun free zone” – an irony that causes not a single laugh.   You’re probably not aware; you may be like most Americans, and have never considered making carrying a firearm part of your lifestyle.  You might have even been one of that tiny, dim little fraction of the population that thought those signs made you safer.

But here you are.


The first transcripts of the 911 traffic in and around the Pulse night club have been released.

These are preliminary transcripts – but if they’re even remotely accurate, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to reach a couple of inescapable conclusions.   And it’s not from the mainstream media, so it’s got that going for it.

I’ve included the entire list of transcripts below the jump.

In the opening moments of the massacre, Omar Matteen engaged the cop who was providing off-duty security.  The cop and Matteen exchanged fire; neither was hit, and Matteen retreated into the club, where the massacre continued.

It took six minutes for five or six officers to show up; they broke out a patio window and, armed with “patrol rifles” (it’s a marketing term for “pretty much the same gun Matteen had”, for police departments and city councils that don’t want to have to explain to their dimmer constituents why they’re buying “assault rifles”), entered the building.

And took cover, as the shots continued.

I’m not going to monday-morning-quarterback the cops.  I’d damn sure take cover if someone was in a room, shooting.

Standards and Practices:  At the Columbine massacre, the Jefferson County (CO) SWAT team, nervous about reports of bombs in the building, held up outside the high school for four hours before entering.  By this time, all the victims, and the two killers, were stone cold dead.

This caused some significant outcry at the time; why had the citizens of Jefferson County spent all that money lavishly outfitting a SWAT team to not one degree behind the current SOCOM fashion curve, only to have them turn out no more useful to saving lives than the Jefferson County VFW Drum and Bugle Corps?

And to their credit, law enforcement did some studying.  They found a couple of things about spree/rampage killers:

  • They tend to exist in a fantasy world.  In this fantasy, killing will make them…something. Important.  Martyrs.  Popular.  Something.
  • The planning for the attack tends to be extremely elaborate (by the planner’s standards, anyway).
  • That many rampage killers – not all, but most – carry out their final “mission” in a sort of reverie; this is the culmination of their entire fantasy life.
  • Breaking that reverie – by upsetting the plan, interfering with the fantasy, and “getting inside their decision loop” – is essential in thwarting an attack once it’s underway.
  • The best way to do this – or at least the best way available when prevention has ailed, andonce the shooting starts – is to shoot at the shooter.  And preferably hit him.  But any resistance will do, really.  Because…
  • …once the shooter meets resistance, their reverie usually breaks, and their long-fantasized plans go awry, they usually – not always, but usually – panic; they break off the attack, they give up or, frequently, they kill themselves.  Sometimes it doesn’t work – Matteen kept shooting after he met resistance (I’ll speculate that his terrorist motivations may be part of the reason for this).  Sometimes it works amazingly well; Nick Meli had only to point his gun at Jason Roberts (he checked fire out of worry that he’d hit a bystander), causing Roberts to withdraw into a nearby store and kill himself, still carrying hundreds of unspent rounds.   More according to the theory – Jeanne Assam shot and wounded Matthew Murray inside New Life Christian Center, after he’d already killed two (and two more at an earlier crime scene); Murray withdrew and ended his worthless life.
  • Because of this observation, the convention wisdom among law enforcement became to “get in there and engage active shooters”; rather than wait for SWAT teams and bomb squads to assemble and stage and come up with a plan, individual officers, armed with whatever was in their cars or on their persons – “patrol rifles”, shotguns, handguns – should move toward the shooting, and try to put some lead in and around the shooter.  To seize the initiative, to take control of the narrative.
  • While cops don’t say this in public, of course, it doesn’t really matter if the person putting that fire into and around the shooter has a badge or not; incoming bullets all sound the same. This blog has compiled a sizeable list of mass shooters thwarted by civilians with guns – currently 16 and counting.  From Nick Meli to Dr. Lee Silverman, the list of regular schnooks who’ve thwarted mass shooters is much, much longer than the media and the ignorant (pardon the redundancy) are willing to comprehend, much less admit.

Apparently, though, someone from Orlando didn’t get the memo.  Or, more likely – I’m guessing, here – the SWAT team, in a situation of immense stress and confusion, held off doing anything drastic while they figured out what to do.

When Seconds Count…:  As Bob Owens at Bearing Arms notes, around the point in the transcript where Mateen is reloading his magazines.  I’ll add emphasis:

The terrorist has been killing at will, unimpeded, for 20 minutes, longer than any mass shooting in recent American history [except possibly Columbine – Ed.] (in 1966 Charles Whitman, the University of Texas bell tower sniper was still active 20 minutes into his rampage, but civilians and police were actively firing on his position).  Virginia Tech was over in 12 minutes. Sandy Hook took five.

This terrorist was charging magazines, as the OPD waited and victims bled out on the dance floor and in bathrooms.

He had time to reload (as in “put more bullets in his magazines” – perhaps twice.

“High capacity magazines” were clearly irrelevant to this situation, by the way.  As they were at Virginia Tech, where the shooter used mundane handguns with regular (12-15 round) magazines.

Victims are bleeding out, no longer responding to the dispatchers they called to save their lives.  Other callers, including a nurse who is among the wounded, are warning that victims are losing too much blood.

No one is coming.

No one is coming. 

It isn’t until 38 minutes into the terrorist attack that the now-reloaded shooter calls Orlando PD and announces that he is a Islamic terrorist aligned with the Islamic State.

At this point, a competently trained SWAT command, having learned from the Russian experience at Beslan that terrorists call to “negotiate” only to stall for time and improve their positions to kill more people, should have recognized that the best option for a shooter in a confined space with hostages is to throw in flash-bang grenades and storm in while he was disoriented to take him down.

And yet they didn’t.

Why?  We don’t know, yet.  Maybe we never will.

At the end of the day, a cop wants to go home safe.

Who can blame ’em?

Defense:  Well, I’m no monday-morning quarterback.  If I’m a patrol cop, armed with a rifle I’ve rarely trained on, in a thin kevlar vest that might turn a pistol bullet or shotgun pellet but not a rifle round, going into a dark room full of screaming people, floors slick with blood, and the deafening sound of rifle fire in a confined space booming all around?  I might well take cover, and stay there.  Maybe hiding behind the brick I’d crap.

And the Supreme Court has ruled as much, saying that while it’s police’s job to try to protect you, they’re not really liable if they don’t.

On the other hand: the taxpayers of Orlando, like those of every major city, have spent years and millions outfitting police SWAT teams with all sorts of high-test body armor, flash-bang grenades and other right-with-the-SOCOM-fashion curve hostage rescue goodies, and the exquisitely expensive training that goes with with it (or so one hopes that’s where the money went).

Why did the Orlando SWAT team wait until 5:02AM – three hours after the first 911 call – to breach the wall and go into the club?  Why did it take fifteen more minutes to kill Mateen?    We don’t know.

How many died in those three hours?    Go through the transcript (below he jump), and count the number of people whom callers report expiring to blood loss as they huddled in piles on the dance floor, or to cell phone contacts quietly dropping off the line, leaving nothing but the sounds of gunshots and screaming in the background, as victims slowly bled out.

Go ahead.  Do it.

It sounds like an awful place.  Who can blame the SWAT team for being careful?


You.

You, huddled on the floor and playing dead in the room full of frantic people and a growing toll of wounded, maimed and dead bodies, can blame them.   As the hours tick by, as the blood on the floor gets sticky and dry, as the gunman reloads, kills another handful of people, reloads again and again.

It’s you who won’t be going home.

Could it have been different?   If one other person in the room with you had had the means to react in a meaningful, e.g. life-threatening, way?

Maybe.  There are no guarantees, least of all when bullets are flying.    Who knows – maybe they got hit before they had a chance to draw.  Maybe they’d draw, but get shot first.

Or maybe they’d trade fire with the killer, and lose – but un-nerve the killer, allowing at least a  few people to escape.

Or maybe, just maybe, the citizen with the gun would catch a few lucky breaks; the killer doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head, after all.  A couple of shots to the back while the killer was looking the other way, and suddenly it’s camera crews and yellow tape.

But as the hours drag on, it’s pretty clear – the only help that’s coming is from outside.

Sometime.  Maybe.  Hopefully before you join the dead.


NOTE:  While I intend my comment section as a discussion, and tolerate dissent and cognitive dissonance better than most, be advised; comments I deem stupid will not be deleted; they will be mutilated for my pleasure.  

The judgment of “stupidity” is all mine; it doesn’t mean “disagreement”; just stupidity.  I know it when I see it.

There will be no other warnings.

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