I wonder if this is another(albeit much less relevant day-to-day) situation where the trend of police forces often recruiting from quite different areas than they operate caused problems.
In an ideal world you’d of course want any police officer to do his damn job and go in; it’s not a secret what you are signing up for and they aren’t hapless conscripts or anything; but it wouldn’t surprise me if having your own kids in the affected school district might provide some motivation where professionalism fails.
Hmm. That turns out not to be the case, either from a momentum or energy standpoint:
Momentum = mass * velocity
Bullet: .01kg * 400m/s = 4 kg m/s
Family Sedan: 2000kg*27m/s = 54,000 kg m/s
Energy = .5 * mass * velocity^2
Bullet: .5 * .01kg * (400m/s)^2 = 800 Joules
Family Sedan: 0.5 * 2000kg * (27m/s)^2 = 729,000 Joules
As you say, this isn’t the MCU. Bullets hitting you won’t make you fly through the air.
Your thesis is still correct. If someone is shooting at kids, you go shoot at them, armor or no armor.
A police sidearm round hitting armor plate will likely get your attention. An assault rifle round might go right through. It’s literally what they are made for. Small bullets going very fast to make tiny holes in infantry protective gear.
There’s also the fact that even unsuccessful attempts are likely to be of some value: this sort of spree killing is very much a matter of time: once the full police response shows up the place will be knee deep in SWAT team and the shooter’s position untenable; but in the time before then anything that slows him down saves lives, since he knows that and is trying to work as quickly as possible to compensate.
An indifferently trained cop with a handgun might not have much chance of success against a rifleman; but they have an excellent chance of slowing a gunman down more than unarmed children do; so they don’t have to win to run down the clock and save some people that the shooter would otherwise have had time to kill.
Criticizing the police for not having overwhelming force available on site would be unreasonable; but criticizing them for not doing what they can until the heavier units show up is a lot more reasonable.
Damn. I suspect that that’s not actually illegal; but I hope that they have to deal with everyone in town knowing that they did that. I’m not a huge fan of honor/shame societies as a rule; but if ever there were a situation where intense community shame was a deserved reaction…
I have heard the argument from Cops that it is their job to get home safely. It is not their job to put themselves in danger.
So obviously Police are the wrong tool to stop mass shootings.
And armed civilians have been proven to lack the training to effectively respond to a shooter.
And teachers dont want to have to shoot kids.
Its almost like having restricted access to guns and ammo is the only actual solution .
(Tangent somehow we are in a world now where cops cant be expected to out themselves in danger but Physicians absolutely must. A ER doc friend of mine was literally told that “If they only punched and kicked you, there is nothing we can do about it.” So Doctors work with violent people, and people with scary infections despite the risk to themselves. But someone who got into a job where they are armed, and trained to deal with violence, is not🤦♂️)
Orwell addressed that one in his March, 1940 review of Mein Kampf:
Also [Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. The same is probably true of Stalin’s militarised version of Socialism. All three of the great dictators have enhanced their power by imposing intolerable burdens on their peoples. Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner. Now that we are fighting against the man who coined it, we ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.”
We had a good run of sanity during the post-war economic anomaly, but we’re in this moment again. Insecure people who can’t or aren’t able to make it in a peaceful society and people who just want everyone else to be as miserable as they are once again see fascism and white supremacy as the answer.
Those would be among the “obvious reasons” I alluded to. It’s just sad that they’d likely still be more effective. (EDIT: Effective at stopping active shooters, that is - not at preventing more shooting deaths)
OTOH, yes, I completely forgot that in addition to accidentally shooting unarmed bystanders cops would deliberately shoot the armed ones.
Haven’t you seen movies/ played video games? Armour means all attacks go totally unnoticed until the AR gets to 0, and only then do bullets have an effect.
yeah, i’ve been watching him for awhile, and i don’t think i’ve seen him this upset on-camera until now. he tweeted that he had to shoot this video three times because he kept accidentally swearing while talking about this.
That’s both really crazy and not very surprising at the same time.
That’s what happened with the Columbine shooting. The police did their thing: they set up a secure perimeter and waited, resulting in many deaths that shouldn’t have happened. I thought that after that happened the training was changed, with the new rule being, if there’s an active shooter, go in now with whatever you’ve got. Seems like that didn’t happen in this case. Which isn’t that surprising, with low-budget small town police like this. Probably none of these police had training for a situation like this. None the less, when something like that is happening, the right thing to do is to go in and do your best, whatever that is.
I know a similar situation happened with the School Resource Officer in Parkland. He just didn’t want to put himself at risk. I get it, but dude, when you sign up for the job, there’s an implicit duty to protect others. But some of these guys view it as just a pay check and don’t want to put themselves at risk.
A little more surprising that no parents decided not to wait. In Texas there had to be someone around with a concealed gun.
This is very true.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking about this. I heard in one of the original news reports that the cop who actually shot the guy was CBP, in other word, federal and not a small-town doughnut eater. In my large town where I live, it absolutely wouldn’t be like this, there would be a stampede of cops and possibly other armed defenders rushing in there.
Which was like a million school shootings ago. If they are still using that tactic when it was not nearly as common an occurrence, and no one had time to work out a plan, then they need to fucking GET ONE. It’s not an excuse, it’s evidence of their failure to take public safety seriously.
It’s not their job to go in. It should be, and they like to pretend it is whenever anyone suggests that police should face any consequences or restrictions, but the legal precedent is clear: it’s not their job to protect anyone, just make arrests later. Hell, at one of the press events, they touted how they “contained the shooter.” In a classroom. Full of kids. That he locked himself in.
Kimmel put together a telling juxtaposition of the politicians in TX who enabled this massacre with news footage of the preventable tragedy:
Anyone who watches the entire thing, know that I do disagree with Kimmel’s assertion that Cruz and Abbott are not monsters, or that they care about anyone but themselves.
Oh I completely agree, that was my point that, wow, it’s sad how untrained, unmotivated and inert these small town cops are, but at the same time, low-budget small towns probably have lower levels of performance in a lot of professions. I also wouldn’t go to a cardiologist in a town like that if I needed one. You’re just not going to find the best professionals there.
Anyway… was the training out there? Yes absolutely, the FBI has a whole training program for law enforcement for this, and surprise surprise, that training was developed in Texas and the training center is the Texas State University. Yup, Texas and the FBI developed a whole training center for how to deal with active shooters in schools. I haven’t taken that training (I’m not LE) but I’m quite confident that the training doesn’t tell them to stand around and wait.
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