OMAHA, Nebraska — Students at Omaha Benson High School organized a walkout Thursday afternoon.
The walkout was in protest of this week’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It wasn’t how these students planned to spend their last few days of school this year, but they don’t feel as though they have a choice.
“School shouldn’t be a hunting ground, it’s the place where we’re supposed to learn and become successful. When we fear for our lives we can’t do that,” sophomore Bunny Galindo told KETV NewsWatch 7. …
Fourth-grade teacher Irma Garcia was one of two faculty members killed on Tuesday during a mass shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. On Thursday morning, her husband and high school sweetheart Joe died from what family members said was a “medical emergency.”
“I truly believe Joe died of a broken heart,” Irma Garcia’s cousin Debra Austin wrote on a GoFundMe page. “Losing the love of his life of more than 25 years was too much to bear.” …
San Antonio Spurs Head Coach Gregg Popovich Gregg Popovich: I Shouldn’t Be Able to Buy an AR-15, Neither Should You
San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich spoke at a ‘Stand with Uvalde’ rally Saturday, referenced AR-15s, and said, “I shouldn’t be able to buy one, you shouldn’t be able to buy one.”
Outkick.com reported Popovich’s participation in the rally.
Popovich’s statements on AR-15s came after he held up Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) as an example of a politician who is supporting gun control in the wake of the Uvalde attack. On May 27, 2022, Breitbart News noted that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tapped Cornyn to work with Democrats in pursuit of “bipartisan” gun control.”
After mentioning Cornyn, Popovich turned to the topic of the Uvalde attacker and criticized his ability to get a gun.
He said:
“Nobody’s trying to take away anybody’s guns, nobody. But they said that this 18-year-old, he probably had mental challenges, but they gave him a gun.
They gave him an AR-15.
They didn’t give him a hunting rifle, they didn’t give him a handgun, and the things that’s amazing to me about that.”
Popovich then started to ask why an 18-year-old can buy an AR-15 but redirected his point to say,
“Wait a minute, why can anybody buy an AR-15?
I shouldn’t be able to buy one, you shouldn’t be able to buy one.
Bill Maher: School Attacker’s Advantage Is Not Gun Type But Time
On Friday, HBO’s Bill Maher made clear the Uvalde school attacker’s advantage was not the type of gun he used but the amount of time he had to use it.
Maher said,
“I mean, this kid was in the room for 40 minutes before anybody came in. It wouldn’t have mattered what kind of gun he had. Any kind of gun could do any amount of damage in that time.”
On May 27, 2022, a Breitbart News op-ed noted, “We must understand that the attacker’s advantage in a school shooting is not so much the type of firearm he uses but the time he has without armed resistance and the degree of surprise that results from the launch of his attack.”
When there is no armed guard present to stop the attacker and no perimeter fencing, or there is weak perimeter fencing, and there are no armed teachers, the attacker has time on his side when he gets inside the school.
Consider Maher’s words again: “I mean, this kid was in the room for 40 minutes before anybody came in.”
Breitbart News noted that the February 14, 2018, Parkland attacker had time to pause and reload five times during his rampage. The Sandy Hook Elementary School attacker had more than nine minutes without armed resistance.
In addition, the “teacher left a door propped open” was debunked by video footage.
In case anyone wants a recap of what happened on Tuesday in regards to the police response (correlated by Brynn Tannehill on Twitter & other sources). Here is the failure we know so far, with more to come out:
- The armed school officer watched him enter the building, didn’t stop him, & just sat & waited for backup. We’ve been told that armed cops assigned to schools were supposed to stop this from ever happening.
- The heavily armed & geared up officers all waited 60 minutes before entering the school while kids bled out, wasting a golden hour. They could have saved the lives of some children who were shot if they had received medical attention in time.
- A child repeatedly called 911 during the hour the gunman was inside, per press briefing. Gunshots could be heard over the line. “Please send the police now,” the child begged. Texas DPS official says the on-scene commander believed the active shooter situation had ended & children were no longer at risk. “It was the wrong decision,” he said.
- The officers tazed, pepper-sprayed, handcuffed, & arrested parents who were begging them to go in, all while still hearing shots being fired inside of the school.
- Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother of 2 students, drove 40 miles to the school when she heard about the shooting. After arriving, she was quickly handcuffed for “intervening in an active crime scene” & eventually persuaded law enforcement to release her. She moved away from the crowd, hopped the school fence, sprinted inside the school to grab her children, & made it out of the school with them alive.
- When officers did enter the school, they went to rescue their own kids rather than deal with the shooter & promptly went back out of the building to resume hanging out with the other officers.
- At one point, a few fathers got fed up, broke a classroom window, & started pulling children out themselves.
- Officers lied & said that the shooter barricaded the door when it was just locked. They said that they were incapable of knocking down or opening the locked door to the classroom where the shooter was, so they had a school employee come do it for them with a key, putting that employee’s life in extreme danger.
- Uvalde SWAT team had done a walkthrough of the school in February to prepare for a situation like this.
- Outside observers say Uvalde police ignored every lesson learned since Columbine.
- When the police did enter the classroom, they failed to neutralize the shooter first. As a result, another child died due to their incompetence because one of the cops hollered out, “Yell if you need help!” A girl called out “Help!” The shooter instantly shot her.
- It was an off-duty border patrol officer who went in & took down the shooter without any backup while the local police were outside handcuffing & tazing parents & claiming they were waiting for more & more & more backup. (This has been updated to say the individual mentioned removed children from the school, not taken down the shooter)
- Initially lied about the timeline, lied about what the shooter was wearing, lied about their response, lied about a “barricade,” lied about multiple details.
- Police is 40% of Uvalde’s budget.
- Initial reports by police that they pursued & pinned down the shooter in a classroom were false. In reality, the shooter had plenty of time & locked himself in a classroom.
*And the best part, because of the Supreme Court decision in Castle Rock v. Gonzales, a 2005 decision delivered by Scalia, no matter how incompetent, cowardly, or negligent officers are, they cannot be held accountable.*
Edit: all this info can be found at Washington Post, NPR, Huffington Post, the Associated Press, NBC, New York Times, & many more, as well as cell phone videos released by the parents at the scene.
“School shootings are a modern phenomenon. There were scattered instances of gunmen or bombers attacking schools in the years before Barry Loukaitis, but they were lower profile. School shootings mostly involve young white men. And, not surprisingly, given the ready availability of firearms in the United States, the phenomenon is overwhelmingly American. But, beyond those facts, the great puzzle is how little school shooters fit any kind of pattern.
(…)
In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.
Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.
But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
Granovetter was most taken by the situations in which people did things for social reasons that went against everything they believed as individuals. “Most did not think it ‘right’ to commit illegal acts or even particularly want to do so,” he wrote, about the findings of a study of delinquent boys. “But group interaction was such that none could admit this without loss of status; in our terms, their threshold for stealing cars is low because daring masculine acts bring status, and reluctance to join, once others have, carries the high cost of being labeled a sissy.” You can’t just look at an individual’s norms and motives. You need to look at the group.
His argument has a second implication. We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to describe contagious behavior—implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous. If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.
Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?”
“Several years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker positing that national school shootings might spread like a disease. He cited the models of Mark Granovetter, a Stanford University sociologist whose theory of social-influence “thresholds” explained the gathering force of a riot. Imagine an avalanche, where the first tranche of snowpack to move might be quite unsteady, but as the wave of snow gathers force, it becomes powerful enough to dislocate even the most stable trees and houses. Similarly, a riot might begin with one wild rebel throwing a rock through a window just to get a rush. It becomes a public movement when the momentum is powerful enough to move even the relatively stable people nearby to join in the rock hurling.
In this way, a spate of mass shootings might behave like “a slow-motion … riot,” such that each murderous event normalizes, or encourages, new participants to join the movement.
At the time, Gladwell’s conjecture was mocked for its suggestiveness. After all, there wasn’t much evidence to support the claim that Granovetter’s threshold theories applied to mass shootings that were separated by many months and committed by strangers who had had no chance of meeting.
But according to a 2015 paper out of Arizona State University, “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings,” there are some data that mass shootings often occur in bunches, which indicates that they “infect” new potential murderers, not unlike a disease. “We find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past,” the authors wrote. Suicide and terrorism, too, have been found to be likewise contagious. (Interestingly, the authors found “no significant association” between the rate of school and mass shootings and the state’s prevalence of mental illness.)
Diseases spread among individuals, but the contagion of mass shootings seems to spread through broadcast media. In an interview with The Atlantic in 2015, Sherry Towers, the ASU paper’s lead author, hypothesized that television, radio, and other media exposure might be the vectors through which one mass shooting infects the next perpetrator. Like a commercial, each event’s extraordinary coverage offers accidental advertising for depravity. One reason why mass-media coverage of shootings might inspire more shootings is that public glorification inspires some mass murderers. Eric Harris, the central planner of the Columbine murders, wrote Ich bin Gott—German for “I am God”—in his school planner.
(…)
That might explain why there aren’t standard methodologies, definitions, or even conclusions about their frequency or causes. For example, an analysis by Mother Jones starting in 2012 found that mass shootings killing four or more people have become more frequent in the past few decades. But a separate analysis by Grant Duwe, the research director at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, found that while the mass-shooting rate has not increased since the 1970s, the number of victims has grown steadily since the early 2000s. Duwe supposes that the rising deadliness of mass shootings might be most responsible for the growing perception that these events are becoming more common, since the number of casualties is the strongest predictor of media coverage. It’s a scary story, no matter which side is correct. Given the contagion research, one can imagine a sinister feedback loop that might explain the recent spate of murderous sprees. If more victims mean more media coverage, and more coverage means more inspiration, it implies that historically violent mass shootings might be the most contagious.
Mass shootings are often committed by lonely and unrooted men, suffering from both grandiose aspirations and petty grievances. The postmortem descriptors are practically rote: He was cold, weird, withdrawn, a loner (and, one must note, always “he”). It’s astonishingly rare to read the antonyms: He is almost never warm, welcoming, the most popular kid in school. Even when mass shootings are not, strictly speaking, terrorism, they still seem to adhere to a sort of dark and nearly invisible ideology of oppressive self-aggrandizement, a bid for greatness that requires the destruction of others. Just because there is no formal institution like isis to symbolize this strain of white rage doesn’t mean that the rage isn’t ideological. It’s possible that many instances of white-male mass-shooting violence are, in fact, driven by a media-inspired religion of grievance and greatness—a mass-distributed sickness for which male outcasts are most vulnerable to infection.
“This isn’t a guns situation,” President Donald Trump claimed on Sunday in a brief address from Tokyo. But the statistics offer no doubt. There are more gun deaths in America because, simply, there are more guns. The American rates of firearm homicide, child-firearm mortality, and gun-related suicide are far higher than in any other industrialized country. The United States, home to 5 percent of the industrialized world’s population under 15 years old, accounts for 87 percent of its unintentional firearm fatalities involving that age group, according to a 2003 paper. Mass killings are an epidemic that so many leaders refuse to name, or even to see. If America cannot amend the laws that facilitate such violence, it should at least commit more resources to studying why this seems to be a paradoxical age of historically low crime, yet contagious mass murder.”
why, so the cop can prey on kids sexually? so the cop can hide in the break room during an active security threat? so the cop can use deadly force against 12 year olds?
fuck school resource officers, some of the most useless, insidious and disgusting members of this society
Our school resource officer actively sent kids who were waiting for their rides out to wait in the rain, bc we weren’t allowed to be unsupervised after school…. I don’t remember them doing anything else…
The culture of violence around raising children in the US is astounding. Scrapping Roe v Wade to turn unexpected fetuses into unwanted infants. Baby formula shortages to starve the babies already born. And then school shootings to kill them before they’re even grown. Astounding.
