No way to prevent this: teen murdered while returning an airsoft gun to a sporting good store

Meh. There’s never going to be a situation where a SWAT team can show up in under 20 minutes to kill an active shooter without the cops being on a hair trigger all the time.

that isn’t my point, my point is that the system doesn’t work at all. she did what she was supposed to do and it was exceptionally futile.

It’s not even a we can’t have it both ways situation. We get neither. The cops kill the mentally ill person and don’t respond to reports of what turns out to be a mass shooter. If they changed to killing both or killing neither that’s already an improvement.

(Obviously they shouldn’t shoot people in distress but that’s how low the bar is)

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That sounds a lot like a SWATting call, not a lot of easy answers. One thing’s for sure, this was handled better than Uvalde.

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I thought the concerning text message was “I’m going to die today” or something to that extent. The friend must have interpreted that way hence why they called suicide hotline and not the cops initially which I assume she would have called first if the message was “I’m going to shoot up a school”

the content hasn’t been released AFAIK but it’s been reported that she was told she was going to “hear about it on the news.” it isn’t very hard to infer what that implicit threat entails

Maybe, but both the person actually receiving the message and their parent seemed to think it was a suicidal threat

(or made an atypical decision to call a suicide hotline about what they believed to be a mass shooting threat)

Articles seem to differ but seems the basic flow of info was shooter sent Instagram message to adult friend that they were going to die today and all this will make sense later.

That friend asks dad if she should tell someone

Dad says yeah definitely

Friend calls suicide hotline (which can vary dramatically in who answers, could be a master level therapist some places or an unpaid volunteer college kid others).

Suicide hotline says seeing as you’re not person of concern you need to talk to police.

Then sounds like friend either calls or is connected to a police number other than 911 dispatch. Not clear to me if this means suicide line gave wrong number, made judgement wasn’t emergent or if friend found that number and called on own?

heard all of that the same except I’ve been under the impression from reports I’ve read that she first called police who then told her to call non emergency. this makes sense for them to do if the threat was vague or implied, they generally don’t respond with emergency unless it’s something very specific or a black person was seen existing anyway.

my point is really nothing other than you can easily frame this as a near perfect response from everyone involved (forgiving the police given the lack of clear details atm) and it still results in three 9 year olds dead (plus staff). like it’s hard to draw any other conclusion than to ban guns, and if you’re not going that far, at least for fuck’s sake start banning weapons that can mow people down like this in seconds. show me this much death in the typical handgun spree, it doesn’t come close, and people generally seem to have so little idea how powerful these guns are in comparison to like a 9mm handgun. it’s a joke they repealed the ban, but the fact that states like tennessee require NO waiting period and only restricts felons and wife beaters from owning, and I doubt that’s well enforced. it’s just pure insanity to even have this conversation yet again for like the 300th time.

Yeah actual gun control is the clear answer. And people say I’m naive but I genuinely think that decreases police brutality as well as I think there is some genuinely held reasonable fear that every person they encounter is packing a gun that police in other countries don’t have hanging over them

given the anniversary I’ve been reading and watching a lot about waco - the branch davidians, although definitely a weird religious gun cult but not white nationalist, inspired a wave of white nationalism (compounded by the randy weaver incident a few years prior) that culminated in the OKC bombing and now is literally mainstream us politics. the gun nuttery is tied into all of that, it really is a religion deeply rooted in white nationalism. I don’t know if we’re ever going to come close to uprooting that. to them it truly doesn’t matter if kids die, that just means we dont have ENOUGH guns. to them violence is the solution and answer to everything. it’s why I think there really will be armed civil conflict in my lifetime here.

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sorry for rambling this incident’s really riled up the GOP hivemind and it’s defeaning, got me all worked up, but I wonder what’s going to happen when we have the DREAM scenario go awry, like a school has an armed perimeter, gates, armed teachers, the works, and some janitor just sneaks a rifle in with their backpack and wipes a bunch of people out anyway, or worse, coordinated group attacks like columbine, except not by moron teenagers. will people ever hit a point where it’s like “ok this doesn’t work” or will they just pivot to “well yea kids have to die sometimes sorry bout it go find a safe space snowflake”

what’s even worse, we don’t have competent, compassionate, or capable police at all and everyone knows it so there’s also a real fear of being defenseless that the gun lobby preys on, even though every statistic in the book says you’re probably not safer with a gun in the house.

Yeah things don’t feel promising these days. I actually have been thinking about this a lot lately and in process of seeking out and starting a new hobby as really realizing my time spent reading news/etc online has not been great for me so need more non-digital time in my life.

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Pretty sure they would say we need more security and thoughts/prayers under any scenario, no matter what.

I’m genuinely shocked this hasn’t happened yet. Like, at some point three or four of these deranged assholes are going to find each other on 4chan and realize they can put the body count inside a school at 100+ plus if they’re smart, and probably get away and then go do it again in the same day or the next day. It would be trivially easy. I can only assume the FBI or someone is running cyber ops to pick those people off before they find each other, but that only works until it doesn’t anymore.

so what you’re saying is that trans mass shootings increased by 50% this year.

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One of the things less known about Columbine was that it was supposed to be a school bombing more than a shooting. They had a bomb in the cafeteria but it didn’t go off. It was big enough to kill hundreds more

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A reminder that not only is there no way to prevent this, we’re actively rolling back onerous and burdensome regulations, like the requirement to get a permit before buying a pistol in North Carolina.

Yayyyy freeeeeeDUMB!

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