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I saw a piece yesterday by a woman who watched, or heard about, the emergency drills her daughter did at her school. She learned that the advice for what to do if cornered by a shooter was “yell, throw stuff, try to distract,” and thought “well that’s not going to save her.” Then she realized that her kid was being taught to buy a few additional seconds for others to get away.
The awful thing is that under those circumstances, that advice is absolutely right – I’d been thinking earlier in the day that despite all the facile “arm the teachers/we need more good guys with guns” comments, during a mass shooting the most effective way to save others is to block the bad guy’s path, with your own body if necessary.
ETA — I know everyone pretty much agrees that if Sandy Hook didn’t lead to tougher gun laws, nothing will; but someone pointed out, while hoping they weren’t being too optimistic, that the kids at Sandy Hook were too young to have phones; Oasis was a dance club and too dimly-lit for filming+survivors may have feared accidentally outing their friends+getting lawmakers to care about LGBT issues is a toss-up; Las Vegas was a big crowd and a shooter with a high vantage point and it was hard to get a clear visual impression of what was happening. This was broad daylight, and the students were media-savvy teens, and one of them is an aspiring journalist who decided if he might die, he was going to spend his last few minutes documenting the incident, and he and his fellow-survivors have been posting the video and calling out politicians and getting in before the usual “it’s disrespectful to the grieving families to have the conversation about gun control now” deflection, and now they’re organizing student walkouts.
The awful thing is that under those circumstances, that advice is absolutely right – I’d been thinking earlier in the day that despite all the facile “arm the teachers/we need more good guys with guns” comments, during a mass shooting the most effective way to save others is to block the bad guy’s path, with your own body if necessary.
ETA — I know everyone pretty much agrees that if Sandy Hook didn’t lead to tougher gun laws, nothing will; but someone pointed out, while hoping they weren’t being too optimistic, that the kids at Sandy Hook were too young to have phones; Oasis was a dance club and too dimly-lit for filming+survivors may have feared accidentally outing their friends+getting lawmakers to care about LGBT issues is a toss-up; Las Vegas was a big crowd and a shooter with a high vantage point and it was hard to get a clear visual impression of what was happening. This was broad daylight, and the students were media-savvy teens, and one of them is an aspiring journalist who decided if he might die, he was going to spend his last few minutes documenting the incident, and he and his fellow-survivors have been posting the video and calling out politicians and getting in before the usual “it’s disrespectful to the grieving families to have the conversation about gun control now” deflection, and now they’re organizing student walkouts.
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Date: 2018-02-16 04:54 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2018-02-16 05:33 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2018-02-17 02:31 pm (UTC)From: