The DHS's "Active Shooter" printable wallet card, for when "thoughts and prayers" fail

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/16/victims-selected-at-random.html

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Ah, yes; when danger threatens, run, cower and call for jackbooted thugs specializing in abuse of the citzenry.

I’d rather have a Winston Churchill printable wallet card.

…whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…

Take 'em down even if you have to knock 'em over with your tumbling corpse. And laugh, if you possibly can manage it. Spit blood in their eyes with your dying breath. Die like a sentient being, fighting against hatred and injustice, not like some sea cucumber.

But obviously the Powers In The Sky hate my ideas, because they interfere with the agenda of keeping the untermenschen suckers voters taxpayers living in the sort of abject fear that enables fascist police states.

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Silence your pager.

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vote

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The “from Hell’s heart I stab at thee” strategy…


It’s a great idea if you want to be a hero or a corpse or both.
And it also fits wonderfully with the more guns = more freedom/security school of thought that got us here.

Before we go too far down the retcon rabbit hole with Churchill let’s also remember that those bodies he was carelessly talking about sacrificing (we will never surrender) we’re everyone’s but his (lest we not remember Gallipoli.) The man gets way too much credit for his wartime strategy when what he really was a over privileged alcoholic butcher of other peoples sons.

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Active shooters typically use firearms? I call bullshit. It’s just that the lamestream media totally ignore the ones who use feather dusters.

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Any suggestions for a compact tool to wedge or jam doors shut in situations like this? I tried to find something, but all the items on the market seemed prone to failure.

I have a much more truthful design right here:

dysentery

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I’m actually proposing a subsidy or incentive for the purchase of assault rifles. Under one condition… if you use it to kill yourself you get the rifle for half the price.

Maybe you could also set up 2nd amendment zones, where fans of shooting people go in dressed up as kids, armed to the teeth and try to kill as many of their peers as possible until they are themselves killed. You could make “the zone” look like a high school too. The television rights alone would make a killing. It would be such an American thing.

/s (in case someone needs it)

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Or if those roles are not even on your radar, because they are not important.

Well, possibly. I don’t carry firearms, and that doesn’t stop me from going after people armed with guns. The trick is to stop worrying about what you are (whether you’re a hero, a corpse, or just some average schmoe) and instead react to what needs doing. You can’t do the right thing if you are obsessing over your own fears. Everybody’s got fears, and that’s why fear is such an effective tool for politicians.

OK, well, you got me on that one. But he was a great speaker on occasion.

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Worst Dn’D scenario ever.

Oh, this is real? FFS…

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files under “your tax dollars at work”

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Those are called “passive shooters.”

It must mean something.

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I don’t understand what “active” means in this context. If you aren’t shooting, then you aren’t a shooter. Shooting is an activity, so all shooters are active.

Waiting for the instructions for handling a passive shooter.

Well, it’s much more frightening to say “active shooter” than to say “criminal”.

If people stop being scared of it, somebody’ll do some focus groups to find a new buzzphrase.

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They showed us that film in elementary school! We had regular nuke drills, too, where we hid under our desks, unless we were in gym class in which case we squatted against the hallway walls with our hands locked over our necks.

My mother was shown Reefer Madness (only it was titled “tell your children” and it was a documentary) in her youth. Apparently it was a traveling show.

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It’s easy to say you’ll deny human nature and turn into one of the partisans from Red Dawn when some nut job comes at you with a gun. However this “man up and soak up the bullets for greater justice” schitck is reeeeeel thin

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It’s easier than you think. Go for it!

It seems to me that when a group is threatened by a predator (unless some authority figure interferes) about a third of any crowd will run, about a third will freeze, and about a third will go after the predator. It’s a great group survival strategy, and it is human nature. It takes a lot of authoritarian propaganda to stop it, which is a purpose the DHS Active Shooter card serves.

Granted I have only been in such a situation once where a gun was involved, so I am extrapolating from very little data.

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When that film first came out, it actually wasn’t horrible advice. It came out in Jan 1952, pre ICBMs and even pre Hydrogen bomb (though the US would detonate their first one in November of that year, the Russians wouldn’t until 1955). At any rate, the video initially was decently sound advice for a plane dropped bomb, assuming one wasn’t at the epicenter. Taking cover from one of the relatively low yield bombs would have helped protect someone from debris.

Of course, as the nuclear arms race went along, the maneuver became more and more futile.

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