Utah (Gun Paradise) School Shooting Narrowly Averted

The NY Daily News

A Utah high schooler was prepared to gun down a former love interest and “open fire” on fellow students on a suburban Salt Lake City campus, but was caught when a hero teen spotted the loaded handgun stuffed in the suspect’s waistband, police said.

The 16-year-old junior at Fremont High School in Plain City admitted to detectives he wanted to kill a girl with whom he’d once had a relationship before unloading “on the rest of the school.”

“The quick response by law enforcement officers and school officials most certainly prevented this terrible tragedy from occurring,” police said in a statement.

The unidentified teen faces misdemeanor gun charges in juvenile court after his arrest Monday, police said. A fellow student saw the handgun around noon and alerted a school resource officer, who confronted the boy about the weapon in the farming community in Weber County, about 45 miles north of Salt Lake City.

Meet Myron May - The Florida State University Shooter - Deceased

CNN

The gunman was identified by authorities as Myron May, a 2005 graduate of FSU. He graduated from Texas Tech University's law school in 2009, and practiced law in both Texas and New Mexico, according to Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo. May moved back into the area a few weeks ago.

The school canceled all classes and exams Thursday in the wake of the shooting, offering counseling services to those directly and indirectly affected.

Meanwhile, investigators are surveying the scene and interviewing witnesses -- trying to determine exactly what happened and for what reason. DeLeo, the police chief, hedged when asked whether May had fired at officers, saying investigators still have more witnesses to interview. He said is appears none of the victims were targeted for any specific reason.

"Mr. May had a written journal and videos where he expressed fears of being targeted and that he wanted to bring attention to this issue of targeting," DeLeo told reporters. "A preliminary review of these documents and videos demonstrate that Mr. May was in a state of crisis."

School Shooting - Florida State University

Fox News

BREAKING NEWS: At least two people were shot in a library at Florida State University as a school alert message urged people to take shelter in a "dangerous situation."

FSUNews.com reported that the shooting occurred at around 12:30 a.m. local time on the first floor of the Strozier Library. The site reported that at least four gunshots were heard and approximately 30 police officers responded to the scene. 

A nursing supervisor at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital told the Associated Press that the hospital was treating two people for gunshot wounds early Thursday. The supervisor did not disclose the patients conditions or whether they were students. Hospital officials had no information about whether they could expect more patients.

More of Poe's Law.

The fun thing about gun loons is that they are super examples of Poe's Law (without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism.)

And when you think they couldn't come up with something more bizarre, they top themselves.

Unsupervised teens and guns--what could go wrong???

More on the Marysville, Washington School Shooting

Poe's Law in action

Poe's Law concerns internet debates, particularly regarding religion or politics.

"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing."

In other words, No matter how bizzare, outrageous, or just plain idiotic a parody of a Fundamentalist may seem, there will always be someone who cannot tell that it is a parody, having seen similar REAL ideas from real religious/political Fundamentalists.

Keep up the good work! This is better than anything Ladd Everett can come up with!

Not good

The first step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have a problem.

So much for the Second Amendment protects the First's Freedoms.

Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist known for her critical look at how women are portrayed in popular media cancelled a talk at Utah State University, citing Utah gun laws, after an email threatening a campus shooting was sent to the school.

The e-mail threatened "the deadliest school shooting in American history" if Anita Sarkeesian was allowed to speak at the school. The email is purported to have been written by a student with access to a semiautomatic rifle, several pistols and pipe bombs.

"I'm giving you a chance to stop it," the message reads, demanding that Sarkeesian's presentation be canceled.

The writer of the threatening email called Sarkeesian "everything wrong with the feminist woman" and blames feminism for the emasculation of Western men. The message also referred  to Marc Lepine, the gunman behind a deadly attack against women at a Canadian university in 1989, as a hero and promised a similar shooting at USU, specifically referencing Sarkeesian, attendees at the presentation, and students and staff at the women's center.

Sarkeesian asked school officials whether firearms would be allowed in the auditorium where she was scheduled to speak. USU officials replied that, in accordance with Utah law, anyone with a valid concealed carry permit would be able to enter with a gun, according to a statement released by the university.

Sarkeesian said she requested pat-downs or metal detectors for those coming to the presentation but was denied based on Utah's firearms laws.

Of course, the lawful gun owners would be protecting a crazy.

Or else become yet another mass shooter thanks to crappy US gun laws.

Or as one person commented on Facebook:

But only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun! So clearly what was necessary was for pro-Sarkaasian partisans to also show up armed, and then we could have a multi-way shoot-out in a crowded auditorium. Freedom!

To be honest, guns don't guarantee freedom--they never have. What guarantees freedom are people who are willing to speak out, especially if what they say is unpopular.

Those who kill only create martyrs.

See also:

• Anita Sarkeesian, Video Game Critic, Cancels Speech After Threats of Massacre - NYTimes.com
• ‘Gamergate’: Feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian cancels Utah lecture after threat - The Washington Post
• Anita Sarkeesian cancels Utah State speech after mass-shooting threat - LA Times

Ohio School Shooter T.J. Lane Escapes from Prison

Local news reports

The convicted killer of three Ohio students at a high school cafeteria escaped from a prison Thursday night and a search was underway in northwest Ohio, police said.

Nineteen-year-old T.J. Lane escaped along with two other inmates from a prison in Lima, about 80 miles south of Toledo, and one of the inmates was captured, Lima police Sgt. Andy Green said.
A search was underway in woods and a residential area near the prison, Green said, and the two escapees are considered dangerous.

Lane, then 18, pleaded guilty last year to shooting three students in February 2012 at Chardon High School, east of Cleveland. He said he didn't know why he did. At his sentencing, he unbuttoned his dress shirt to reveal his T-shirt reading "killer"; he cursed and gestured obscenely as he was given three life sentences.

Quote of the day...

"a massacre transpired on the campus of Ocean Park High School, claiming the lives of nine hundred forty-seven individuals — the largest school massacre in the nation’s history.”

Of course. the NRA response to this was "more guns".

Not to mention how much carnage happened during the years with nothing happening.

from www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/01/district-suspends-dangerous-teacher-for-writing-scifi-novel-about-school-shooting-in-2902/

With School Shootings Routine, Parents Turn To Bulletproof Backpacks, Child Clothing

Huffington Post

The aftermath of school shootings is now all too familiar. The shock of the breaking news, the scenes of school evacuations, the ensuing political debate and the inevitable inaction. And for Ed Burke, the wave of new customers.

As CEO of the Massachusetts-based company Bullet Blocker, Burke sells one of the hotter goods in the body armor industry: bulletproof backpacks. And though he doesn't revel in the fact that business tends to boom after school shootings, he sees his company as providing a service for increasingly nervous parents.

"Business is growing unfortunately due to all the things happening in the country," Burke said.

The regularity of school shootings in America has set off a multi-directional reaction. Politicians have sought to respond with legislation. In some states, reforms have succeeded in passing. Federally, they have not, much to the chagrin of gun-control advocates.

"My biggest frustration so far is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage," President Barack Obama vented during a recent town hall hosted by Tumblr. "We're the only developed country on earth where this happens."

Where politics has failed, business has stepped in, taking advantage of legislative inertia.

Bullet Blocker's co-founder, Joe Curran, built his first bulletproof backpack for his two kids after the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. He realized the commercial potential, and began manufacturing backpacks and other school safety products for a wider audience. Today, Bullet Blocker produces iPad cases, notebooks, and school bag survival kits ($400 -- advertised as a "great self contained kit to augment the reaction plans for school lock downs").

The company has averaged 35 to 40 percent growth each year, Burke said. Last year, it grew by more than 50 percent. And when school shootings happen, like the one that took place last week in Oregon, interest spikes further.

"We had quite a few requests today," said Burke, speaking hours after news of that shooting broke. "There is growing awareness of the violence that is happening in society. People say, 'Geez this is happening all over, how do we protect ourselves?'"

There have never been any school shootings in the US.

They have been over 100,000 gun violence incidents since Sandy Hook of which between 7 and 74 were at or near schools.

But, from what I understand, for a "school shooting" to occur:

1. The shooter needs to be a student
2. The shooting needs to be within the school
3. The shooter intended to kill students in the school
4. The shooting needs to happen during school hours
5. The shooting cannot be related to extracurricular reasons

Wow, that knocks out a lot of shootings.

In fact, using this criteria we can not only knock off a few victims from the toll, such as Rachel Scott who was shot outside the school at Columbine. We can also get rid of a few school shootings!

For example, the 1999 Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings occured OUTSIDE the school!

Even better, Adam Lanza WASN'T A STUDENT!  Even better, we can knock out a few of the victims are not students. This criteria confirms what gun nuts have been saying all along--The Sandy Hooks shootings weren't school shootings, but it was a mass shooting.

Now, if people want to look like dicks, then they have to admit this is the case and they can knock that one off the books.

The real confusion is whether a school shooting is a mass shooting or not.

Some people only want the mass shootings which happen in schools to be considered "school shootings".  That is the fallacy which Politifact falls into in their piece:

For many people, this is the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the phrase "school shooting" -- an incident such as Sandy Hook or, before it, the 1999 Columbine shooting in Colorado that left 15 dead, including the shooters.

But, the people who want to dispute these numbers want to limit the amount of School Shootings to a number which is somehow "acceptable" rather than address the issue that gun violence is far too pervasive in US culture.

On the other hand, The Daily Beast came up with the number 68:

We keep a tally of school shootings at The Daily Beast, too, using a slightly different methodology. We include only shootings that occur on school campuses while students are present. We count shootings that result in no fatalities as well as those where the only victim was a shooter who committed suicide.

We published a report last year using our data to show just what a school shooting looks like, noting specifically: “These events aren’t necessarily the types of tragedies that come to mind when one thinks of “school shootings”—madmen in fatigues roaming school hallways, strapped with automatic-style guns, murdering indiscriminately—nor do they receive the media attention of such mass shootings. But they can be similarly traumatizing for students and staff, and they have led to at least 24 injuries and 17 deaths over the past year.”

The following day, another school shooting at Arapahoe High School added to our tally. As of today, we count 68 school shootings, with 28 dead, and 66 injured.

Oliver Burkeman gets to the point in his post at the Guardian:

(If you think this kind of absurdity is confined to the fringe, see this only slightly less mendacious CNN piece (and Politifact), which brings the figure down from 74 to 15 by excluding, among others, shootings motivated by "personal arguments, accidents [or] alleged gang activities and drug deals". Johnson says the cable channel stole his work.)

What’s especially dispiriting about this flat denial of reality is how little prospect it offers for rational discussion or compromise. Even if you're a supporter of gun control, you can still hold a reasoned discussion with somebody who believes that the benefits of widespread firearms ownership outweigh the harms. You can discuss international comparisons; and how no comparable country experiences anything like this level of gun violence; the other person can seek to establish why those comparisons aren't relevant; or that, yes, violent deaths are actually in decline in the US, and so on. But when the pro-gun side of the argument consists of simply insisting that the gun violence that people are so distraught about isn't real gun violence? Then there's no clear way forward at all.

And let’s not forget the bigger point here. A pro-gun journalist applies the most stringent imaginable criteria to the term 'school shooting'; he rejects every instance he possibly can, for reasons many might regard as spurious, and then triumphantly declares that there have only been … seven bona fide school shootings in America since December 2012!

Only seven school shootings since December 2012.

I hope I never to get to the point at which the word "only" in that sentence makes even the slightest bit of sense.

As I said we can knock the numbers down even further if we want to say there have never been any school shootings in the US.  That should appeal to the people who do nothing to stop the plague of US gun violence.

So, do we want to split hairs or try to come up with a solution to a real problem is the real issue here.What is important is that people died. What category some people choose to put a specific shooting is irrelevant to our mission. Our mission is to stop future shooting, no matter what the location or circumstance.

Gun Violence at U.S. Schools Rises Sharply

The Commercial Appeal

A fatal shooting in Oregon on Tuesday was the 31st firearms attack at a U.S. school since the start of the year, marking a sharp acceleration in the rash of violence that has occurred on campuses across the nation.

The incidents range from the 20 people shot near UC Santa Barbara less than threeweeks ago to gunfire that resulted in no injuries at all.

The frequency of attacks has picked up since the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., where 20 first-graders and six adults were gunned down.

In the 18 months since that tragedy, 41 deaths have occurred in 62 documented incidents at U.S. schools. In the 18 months before that attack, there were 17 deaths in 17 incidents. Everytown.org, a group that promotes gun safety, lists 72 incidents since Sandy Hook.

The increase comes at a time when all types of violent gun deaths have been essentially flat since about 2000, following a sharp drop since the 1980s, when such deaths peaked in the U.S.

UC Santa Barbara Drive-By Shooting Leaves 7 Dead

Huffington Post

Police said a gunman driving a BMW near the university campus went on a rampage that left seven people dead, including the shooter. Authorities described the tragedy as "obviously the work of a mad man."

Seven people remain hospitalized with gunshot wounds or other injuries, including one who has undergone surgery, following the shooting spree Friday night in the beachside community of Isla Vista, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said.

The gunman got into two gun battles before crashing his black BMW into a parked car. Deputies found the lone suspect dead with a gunshot wound to the head, but it wasn't immediately clear whether he was killed by gunfire or if he committed suicide, Brown said.

More on Andrew Boldt

Andrew Boldt, the victim of the Perdue University shooting is profiled here.  The author points out:

I cannot imagine what his family is going through tonight. The shooter, identified as 23-year-old Cody Cousins, has been arrested, but his motives are not yet clear. Whatever the motives, this 21-year-old young man did not deserve to die today. He probably went in to work like you or I not suspecting a thing.

I know a lot of you feel that you could put an end to any active shooter incident, but do you really have the bottle to handle it in real life?

I should also add that most people in the US know at least one person who has been a victim of this plague. It shouldn't take too much longer before people start getting upset and actually doing something about this problem.

The Perdue Victim

This is Andrew Boldt who was a senior in electrical engineering at Perdue University. Andrew was from West Bend, WI and graduated from Marquette High School.

Hardly a gang banger or other person that you lot deem worthy of death, yet he was one of the many thousands killed or wounded by firearms in the United States.

Remember that even "shefearsnothing" was killed by her husband using a gun.  Not to mention the judge who restored her concealed-weapon permit last year questioned her judgment and said she had "scared the devil" out of other parents at the soccer field.

The ultimate upshot is that the more people who die or are effected from senseless gun violence, the more it hurts your position.  It can happen to you whether you own a gun or not.  In fact, having a gun makes it far more likely it will happen to you.

Unless they are idiots like you, but the good news is that you are more likely to die from your own weapon than use it on someone else.

In other words, you are a dying breed.

I should also add that this is not "dancing on the graves of the victims"--it's putting a face to the numbers and statistics.  Another thing you lot don't like as it is easier to blow this off if you believe all the people who are victimised by this plague are "criminals or gang bangers" rather than a nice guy or one of your own.

It pisses you off when you realise that you are wrong and you have to lash out at everything else besides your bullshit, antisocial beliefs.

New Mexico 12-Year-old Shoots Two Classmates

USA Today

A 12-year-old boy was taken into custody Tuesday after a shooting at a Roswell, N.M., middle school that left two teenage classmates seriously wounded. 

An 11-year-old boy was in critical condition and a 13-year-old girl was upgraded to satisfactory Tuesday night after being air-lifted to a Lubbock, Texas, hospital, about 175 miles away, according to a University Medical Center spokesperson. 

Officials said the boy, apparently the intended target, was shot twice in the face with a shotgun, and the girl once in an arm. A classmate said the shooter, a seventh-grader, was being bullied, but New Mexico state police said they still did not have a motive. 

Roswell police said the shooting occurred about 8:11 a.m. local time (10:11 a.m. ET) in the gymnasium at Berrendo Middle School. A teacher subdued the suspect.

School Shootings

We are failing our kids. It's our generation's responsibility to come together and make it stop, now. #gunsafety pic.twitter.com/O2AJk5GEb4

— Shark (@mydearloveys) December 21, 2013

More on the Arapaho High School Shooter - Karl Halverson Pierson

Karl Halverson Pierson

US News

The 18-year-old Colorado man who shot a fellow student before killing himself Friday intended to shoot numerous people, but his rampage was interrupted by a school resource officer who responded to the shooting, officials said Saturday.

“His intent was evil,” Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said of Karl Halverson Pierson. “And his evil intent was to harm multiple individuals.”

Upon entering the school, Robinson said, Pierson fired one round down the hallway. He then shot Claire Esther Davis, 17, who just happened to be sitting nearby with a friend as he headed toward the library. The girl suffered severe head trauma and remains in critical condition at Littleton Adventist Hospital.

Confronted by the officer, the teen committed suicide less than a minute and a half after he entered the building, armed with a shotgun and multiple rounds of ammunition that he purchased legally, the sheriff said.

Robinson said the response of a school resource officer was “absolutely critical” to the fact that that there were no additional injuries or deaths.

Robinson said Pierson entered the school from the north side and fired one random shot down the hallway before firing at the victim at point blank range.

ierson then entered the library and ignited one of the Molotov cocktails. The deputy sheriff then ran through a long hallway from the cafeteria to the library. While the deputy was containing the shooter, the shooter took his own life at the north end of the library, Robinson said.

FBI: Active Shooting Incidents Triple in Recent Years

The Commercial Appeal

Active shooters are defined by the FBI as gunmen who arrive on the scene with the specific intent to commit mass murder. Unlike other mass killings or mass shootings, this sub-set does not include incidents such as bank robberies or drug deals that may turn lethal.

According to the FBI, there is a disturbing rise in the number of “active shooter” incidents across America, like the Greenville attack. The FBI is basing its conclusion on data collected by a Texas State University researcher that was exclusively obtained by Scripps News. The data shows the number of active shooter events in the U.S. has tripled in recent years. “There is a higher number of people being shot and a higher number of people being killed,” said special agent Katherine Schweit, head of the FBI’s active shooter team which formed after last year’s rampage in Newtown.

The Scripps review of the active shooter data found a total of 14 attacks this year, with gunmen shooting 73 people and killing 39. Four of those incidents resulted in shootings but no fatalities. “The characteristics that bind them together unfortunately is (the) shooter’s desire to kill” said Special Agent Schweit, and to kill “as many people and kill them as fast and freely as he may be able to ” she said in an exclusive interview with Scripps.

The FBI’s new team does not yet keep its own statistics on active shootings but has turned to information collected by outside researchers, most notably those at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. Dr. Peter Blair is an associate professor of criminal justice at Texas State and has been evaluating active shooter data which show an average of 5 incidents per year from 2000 to 2008. But from 2009 to the present the number rose to an average of 15 per year. Blair attributes much of the rise to events that might escape attention from other researchers.