This woman I knew shot a guy in Sunday School in Barnwell County, SC. She said he had been telling telling slanderous untruths, but I heard the dirt on her was accurate.
Lockdown drills are not proper procedure for an active shooter. They are procedure IF you are unable to escape the building and IF the shooter does not enter the room.
All I know is experts in the field (and you are not an expert and I am not an expert but I have been trained by one) ALL advocate training students and staff on Flee, Hide, Fight so I will assume they are correct and you are not unless you have some credentials I am not aware of.
Really? So if the students/staff escaped out of the windows like they should have once the shooting started, I believe the total school victims would have been three adults. Are you saying that is as severe as twenty-six adults and children?
I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night (not really). So that trumps your “I was trained by an expert.”
Here’s a fairly credible cite that trumps your snark.
FYI, the final report of the state Sandy Hook Advisory Committee is here (warning: long PDF). They do suggest further training in schools to prepare for an active shooter incident, but note that this one of many natural or man-made disasters that could occur and that the schools need to prepare more broadly. They note, “Nine children were able to escape from the classroom [room 10] and survived, either because A.L. stopped shooting in order to reload or because his weapon jammed.” So the students did flee, when it was possible. And note that the report says, “The testimony and other evidence presented to the Commission reveals that there has never been an event in which an active shooter breached a locked classroom door.”
So the classrooms where the victims were executed did not have windows to the outside and objects in the room to break said windows with? And could said windows be broken with said objects before Lanza entered the room?
If so then no, they did not flee when it was possible, they hid, did not fight and got murdered for it.
Yes, they didn’t flee. But remember that this was a classroom of perhaps twenty six- or seven-year-old children and their teacher, all of whom were terrified. So what they might have done is easy to criticize at a distance.
FYI, my elementary school (about an hour southeast of Sandy Hook Elementary) had doors from each classroom leading directly outside. It was built, I think, in the 1960s and I attended it in the late 1970s.
And actually, reviewing the timeline, the report said he entered the school just before 9:30am and shot himself by about 9:40am. Also, I’m guessing that the teacher was not a large woman and most of the furniture in Room 10 consisted of chairs and desks sized for first-graders. It’s possible that no, the teacher would not have been able to smash a window in time to save the students.
I don’t know about nowadays, but generally I recall school doors, even internal doors, are pretty solid metal or solid wood doors. The frame is typically thick metal or solid wood. A simple precaution would be to add the plastic shatter-proofing on the windows on each door, although some have the wire embedded in the windows too.
But yes, it’s not trivial to breach one of those doors.
I’m pretty sure that the solidness of school (and other public building) doors is for fireproofing. But it also helps make a decent barrier against an active shooter.
Change “terrified” to “untrained”. And let me make this clear, I am not necessarily blaming the teachers or the students. I am blaming the school and district administration that did not train their teachers except the incorrect “cower in a locked room and if the shooter comes in, cower some more until you are shot in the face.”
And for your earlier implications that training is ineffective, you may want to read about Rick Rescorla.
Respectfully, I’m not sure I agree. There is a limit, of course, to how much fear and paranoia we should expose our children too. But we still regularly conduct fire drills, tornado drills, and earthquake drills (in appropriate geographical regions) in schools. How many children have been killed by those things compared to an ‘active shooter’?
The National Fire Protection Association has a list of school fires with more than 10 fatalities. The most recent on the list is from December 1, 1958. This report by Stephen Satterly breaks down deaths at school by category from 1998-2012. His report is skeptical and urges caution about overemphasizing the dangers of active shooter incidents. Even so fires and earthquakes don’t even make the list, tornados and other wind events make up 2% while active shooter situations make up 4-5% of deaths from that period. So the actual risk of death from an active shooter events would appear to be roughly double the risk from a tornado. Note that the highest risk category is transportation, while the second highest risk is homicide. Active shooter events are subsets of homicide, but some aspects of the training might apply to lowering risk of other types of homicide as well.
Should we eliminate tornado drills and fire drills then? Drills and training are part of the reason, along with building codes and better technology, that the risk of death in those events is relatively low. Likewise, appropriate training and drills may further reduce the risk of death from an active shooter scenario. My daughter’s school is using the ALICE protocol and while I’m a bit unsure about certain aspects of it, it sounds a lot better to me than what happened at Columbine or Newtown. My daughter has come home after the drills and told us about them and shown no more signs of fear than after other drills. They make it a bit of a game for the smaller kids, while the staff and teachers have done some pretty intense and serious training. Active shooter incidents can be over in mere minutes, so passively waiting for police response doesn’t look like a good option.
This is the EXACT example Mrs Cad (nationally certified in physical security, certificate of fitness for fire-life safety) used. We teach fire/tornado/earthquake drills and we don’t worry that kids can’t handle it.
I’m kind of skeptical how much these drills can help. Active shooters aren’t predictable robots, they are disturbed human beings armed with rifles and generally more ammo than they fire during their rampage. Could a shooter not take out a rush of elementary school kids trying to tackle him?
If they all try to escape, could he not gun them down out in the open?
I used to think the same thing about the security guards armed with 9mm handguns that would be guarding a metal detector that was added to some high schools, post Columbine. If the 2 columbine kids had faced a barrier like that, they could have shot right through the vests the guards were wearing and taken them out. In theory.
Or, if active shooters were…responsive in their murder-spree planning, they could simply attack wherever the defenses are not. Modern American society has large, vulnerable crowds everywhere, all the time, somewhere, with no to minimal security.
Ultimately, active shooter training and guards is not a way to save lives. It probably reduces liability for future lawsuits (“we tried, but the active shooter had too much rifle ammo”) and it may cause active shooters to attack somewhere else, sort of how The Club doesn’t prevent auto thefts, it just encourages thieves to steal the car next to yours.
If he was inside, he wouldn’t be able to shoot people outside. And the Fight stae assumes that you are in a situation where you are already dead. If you fight back then MAYBE you have a chance - like giving CPR.
The following assumes the vast bulk of what can be recovered from the estate is liability insurance on the mom’s house. Assuming that is true the OP has a number of incorrect assumptions.
The $1M potential award would not be reduced by lawyer fees. The insurance company owes the estate the right of defense. This is true even if there the suit is baseless. There are two difference between having 25K in liability coverage and having 1M in coverage. Assume you are sued for $1M. The first difference is the quality and experience of the insurance company lawyer. Having a mill on the hook get you a member of the varsity.
Next the estate administrator and the heirs have zero say over any settlement. The decision to settle lies strictly with the insurance company. This is the second difference between 25K and 1M in liability insurance is if you have 25K in coverage the insurance will cut a check so they don’t have to defend against a 1M suit.
The only exception to this is professional liability (malpractice) insurance.