“Less than five minutes…”
At yesterday’s school-shooting in Tallahassee, FL, two innocent victims died, and at least six more were injured.
To their credit, local police were on the scene immediately. They aggressively moved-in, locating, confronting, and shooting (non-fatally) the single perpetrator, effectively ending the danger and the event. In fact, this police response was among the most competent we’ve ever seen!
Still, the VCA had adequate time to harm multiple innocent victims.
As always, shallow media types are speculating endlessly about “motive” of the VCA, as if that were relevant.
The real issue, as my friend and colleague, Ed Monk, has been passionately proclaiming for the past several years, is how can we decisively stop these mass murderers any faster than we are now?
When the murderous shooting starts, there will be yet another gunshot victim every few seconds, and that will go on until the murderer is definitively stopped. Police response can range from minutes to hours, depending upon a host of factors.
Everything we’ve done so-far to address this issue, like installing numberless cameras (connected to monitors that no one is watching) has accomplished little to reduce that deadly time-line.
Every moment of inaction will be fatal to yet another hapless victim. Of the foregoing there is little doubt, as we have seen over and over.
With history as our guide, we can fully expect these mass shooting attacks to continue, at schools, churches, and other places where the blithely defenseless congregate.
“Motives” will vary. Outcomes will not!
Armed Tribunes (“Sheepdogs,” if you prefer that term), continuously present and in a position to respond at once (with deadly force) is ultimately the only tactic that will keep casualties to an absolute minimum during these terrible events.
Israelis have reluctantly learned this bitter lesson. The armed and ready are ever-present any time Israeli children congregate.
One can only speculate how many more innocents will be murdered/maimed before we, as a civilization, accept this same abject, but incontrovertible, verity!
“We deal in lead, friend.”
“Vin,” (played by Steve McQueen) to “Calvera,” (played by Eli Wallach) in the 1960 feature film, The Magnificent Seven, an American adaptation of a 1954 Japanese film, Seven Samurai
/John
