School shooting in CT

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So what if his mother had been a "prepper"?
So what if he had easy access to guns?
He was 20 years old and therefor legally responsible for himself.
The bottom line is if someone who worked at that school (teacher, principal, janitor, cook, secretary, or whoever) had been armed they could have put a few holes in him before it got as far as it did. It's a gun free zone so it was a soft target. Soft targets are weakness and weakness invites attack for the obvious reasons.
Chances are he wouldn't have gone there had not not been a gun free zone and if he had he would have very likely met resistance.

I would prefer to have the lunatics stopped by security before they can get inside the school. After all, with teachers or janitors shooting back, I'd think that alone could cause the body count to rise just by accident of friendly fire.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I would prefer to have the lunatics stopped by security before they can get inside the school. After all, with teachers or janitors shooting back, I'd think that alone could cause the body count to rise just by accident of friendly fire.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Sigh.............
Apparently they didn't have security and it would have taken armed security to stop him.
Armed security guards for an entire school district would be expensive. Good ones considerably more expensive.
And I was, of course, talking about school employees being armed via the CCW licensing process at their individual choosing, not just casually handing out pistols to the school staff as they file in each day.
I carry and I know lots and lots of others that do. We're not dumb hooligans who are going to shoot up everything and everyone but the intended target then reload and do it all again.

Sigh.............
Apparently they didn't have security and it would have taken armed security to stop him.
Armed security guards for an entire school district would be expensive. Good ones considerably more expensive.
And I was, of course, talking about school employees being armed via the CCW licensing process at their individual choosing, not just casually handing out pistols to the school staff as they file in each day.
I carry and I know lots and lots of others that do. We're not dumb hooligans who are going to shoot up everything and everyone but the intended target then reload and do it all again.

All issues of gun control to one side, would you agree that there is a problem with mass shootings and something needs to be done to improve the situation?

For the last two years I was employed as a contractor for the Department of Homeland Security with the official title of “Risk Analyst.” Along with a team of complete and total geniuses (no hyperbole), we were tasked with investigating risks to United States citizens from terrorism, transnational crimes and natural hazards. And after putting together a detailed report outlining exactly where our nation’s dollars should be spent to get the most protection possible, it was promptly thrown out because it didn’t match up with what the bureaucrats were expecting. And the reason for that is their perception of risk, which is the same reason that people are about to over react to the recent events in Colorado . . .

Risk is a simple thing to understand mathematically, but massively complex to apply. The formula is very straightforward:

Risk = Threat x Vulnerability x Consequence

Where:

Threat = The probability of being attacked in a specific manner
Vulnerability = The probability of the attack being successful GIVEN that it is in the process of happening
Consequence = The bad stuff that happens if you are attacked successfully

Naturally this is very easy to apply with things like economic losses, but when you start adding people into the equation it gets messy. We start coming across questions such as “what is the value of a human life?” Which if you’re the U.S. Government is somewhere around $6 million, by the way. But mostly I prefer to keep dollars and lives separate in my analyses. Enough about that, back to the point at hand.

If you’re doing a straight analysis of terrorism events (and I would classify the Colorado shooting in that category), you quickly see that even based on open source information, the risk is extremely low. The actual number of initiations per year for terrorism events is classified, but we can safely assume that the majority of foiled terrorism plots are immediately paraded in front of the media.

So, MAYBE one or two legitimate initiations a year (threat). And since the news isn’t constantly filled with reports of terrorist attacks, it’s a safe bet that the vast and overwhelming majority are foiled (vulnerability). The issue is that a successful attack would be devastating (think nuke over Manhattan) (consequence).

Terrorism is what we call a “low probability, high consequence event.” It will almost never happen, but when it does, the consequences are unthinkable. But because of the low probability the actual risk from terrorist attacks is extremely low.

Let’s scale this down to a personal level from a national level.

For the individual, the biggest consequence of concern to you is the lives of you and your family. Even if you’re a sad, lonesome single man like me that goes to the movies alone, your life is your biggest concern. Whereas the government has to be concerned with a great number of lives, all you really care about is the lives of your immediate family.

There are a great number of scenarios which may result in the loss of you life. Like an airplane crash. Or a car accident. Or a house fire. Or a mass shooting. And while there may be differing levels of threat and vulnerability for these events, the upper boundary of the consequence remains the same: you could die. So while governments are also concerned about loss of life, the reality is that there is no real upper bound for death tolls for attacks but there is a definite “hard ceiling” for the death of your family.

Which means that when assessing the risk to you and yours, the only logical approach is that the probability of the event happening dictates how concerned you are about that particular scenario, since the consequence side of the equation is constantly pegged at the top of the scale. You should be looking for high probability scenarios first and worrying about those in order of probability.

But it’s not, and people don’t.

While the eventual outcome is the same, what really drives people’s level of concern over a particular scenario is how novel and terrifying the experience prior to the death (not that you’d remember it). People are used to the idea of dying in a terrible car accident or burning to death in a house fire, but mass shootings are typically a more concerning scenario and therefore perceived as a higher risk despite the facts at hand.

For example, for the United States:

100 people PER DAY die in car accidents (source).

2,640 people PER YEAR die from house fires (source).

167 people died from mass shootings… in the last DECADE (source).

From a straight analytic standpoint, there’s no reason to be concerned about mass shootings. None whatsoever. The probability that you will be involved is so small that my calculator switches to scientific notation when I try to compute it.

But people will still be concerned.

It’s human nature to place a higher value on a scary death than a normal death. So while the final result is the same (your untimely demise) the difference in how you get there is the differentiating factor. What we’re dealing with is an emotional reaction to a situation rather than a logical reaction and that’s something that people don’t understand and don’t want to face.

The primary reason that people are finding this scary is that they don’t have control over that situation. People fear plane accidents more than car accidents because they’re not the ones in control of the aircraft. Its the same for other “random” events like terrorism and mass shootings. We’re perfectly happy driving ourselves of a cliff to a gruesome death, but when our lives are in someone else’s hands we begin to fear that situation.

This exact same reaction has led to our government throwing their money away on ridiculous expenditures to make sure that low probability, low consequence risks don’t happen (because they’re scary to the handful of people that would die) rather than spending money on minor improvements that would drastically reduce high probability high consequence risks. It’s the same reaction that fuels every post-massacre response from the government.

So what does that mean for those of us who understand the relative risks? It means that we have an uphill battle to fight against the emotional response of those who are overly concerned about this scenario, and generally facts and numbers don’t do any good. They will keep seeing themselves in that scenario and become more and more afraid.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. If I did I wouldn’t have quit my job in frustration at seeing my work going unused. But hopefully if we are persistent enough we can make them understand as well, and let them stop living in fear.

Imagine that you ran a school district, and some rich foundation, worried about school shootings, gave you the following offer: We’ll hire armed security guards for you, who could try to do something about the school shooter. These aren’t going to be highly trained police officers, just typical security guards, given some modest training and subjected to basic background checks. It’s not like they’re highly skilled; security guards rarely are. But they have a basic understanding of how to shoot, and when to shoot.

They wouldn’t deal with ordinary trespassing, vandalism, and the like, nor would they be at all guaranteed to be effective in the event of a school shooting (who can offer such a guarantee?). But they’d provide someone on the ground who could try to interrupt a killing spree. And the foundation is paying, so it’s virtually no cost to the district. Would you say yes?

I imagine that you probably would. You probably wouldn’t much worry, for instance, that the guard would go crazy and himself start shooting — theoretically possible, to be sure, but unlikely. You’d figure that someone who can defend the school with a gun during an attack (as opposed to the police, who will come in many precious minutes after the attack begins) is better than no-one.

Nor would you object in principle about there being a gun in school, since it’s in the right hands. Just like people who have money often pay for armed neighborhood-wide security patrols, and don’t insist on the unarmed kind or no patrol at all, you’d probably think that this free security guard would probably be helpful.

But wait! The foundation has just learned that its investment portfolio has done very badly, and the grant doesn’t go through. But someone else suggests: Instead of hiring special-purpose security guards, why not take some of your existing employees — teachers, administrators, and the like — and offer them a deal: They’d go through some modest training and subjected to basic background checks, and in exchange they’d be given the right to carry the same guns that the security guards would have had.

Indeed, this way you could have not just one security guard but several (if several staff members sign up). And you might get people to do this even without paying them, since they might value the ability to defend themselves and to not be sitting ducks should the worst happen. (If there’s some union contract or labor law that precludes that, that can of course be changed, if people think this is a good idea.) Maybe Assistant Principal Joel Myrick, who confronted the Pearl, Mississippi high school shooter with a gun, after Myrick went to the car to get it, might have participated in such a program if it had existed, and had let him keep the gun in school.

And no need to call the licenses given to those who participate in the program “concealed carry” licenses, just in case some parents and others don’t like the concept. Just call them “volunteer security guard” licenses, though you might expect that most people who sign up for this will also have licenses to concealed carry on the street. Of course, if a killer does show up, maybe some of these volunteer security guards will just cower in the corner rather than trying to defend the students, or attack the killer. But it seems more likely that someone will confront and try to stop the killer if that someone is armed then if that person is disarmed.

What’s your answer to that? Is there some reason why the armed security guard is safe and helpful, but the armed teacher, administrator, or staffer — er, the teacher with a volunteer security guard license — would be useless and a menace?