parkland police response failure sun sentinel broward county
courtesy Sun Sentinel

I’d like to preface this accounting of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High failures on Valentine’s Day 2018 with this reminder: no one is coming to save you; you are on your own.

The South Florida Sun Sentinel has compiled a comprehensive and disturbing timeline of what happened — and didn’t happen — that day in Parkland.

A gunman with an AR-15 fired the bullets, but a series of blunders, bad policies, sketchy training and poor leadership helped him succeed. Information reported over 10 months by the South Florida Sun Sentinel reveals 58 minutes of chaos on campus marked by no one taking charge, deputies dawdling, false information spreading, communications paralyzed and children stranded with nowhere to hide.

2:19:54 P.M.: A campus watchman has a chance to stop gunman [name removed] before any blood is shed. But he doesn’t do it…he does not pursue [him] and does not call a Code Red to lock down the school.

2:21:16 P.M.: Second unarmed monitor spots gunman, turns the other way.

2:21:23 P.M.: Freshman Chris McKenna enters the first-floor stairwell and sees [the gunman] loading his gun. Cruz tells him “You’d better get out of here. Things are gonna start getting messy.”

McKenna runs from the building and informs Aaron Feis, a football coach and campus monitor, that there is someone with a gun. There is no evidence that Feis, who has a radio, calls a Code Red.

2:21:38 P.M.: [Campus] watchman hides in closet.

Yes, there is more. A lot more. The Sun Sentinel’s excellent article catalogues the catastrophic failures of multiple individuals in positions of authority, both those employed by the school and in local law enforcement. You should read the whole thing.

But here’s the takeaway.

I have a teenage daughter. The possibility of a school shooting has been a reality her entire life although it has certainly ramped up in recent years. Now that she’s in high school she’s in the age group most likely to be targeted.

Her friends expect to be saved. In the event of a school shooting they have been trained and drilled to shelter in place and to throw books or whatever is nearby at a killer. They have been trained to hide in clusters; they have been trained to take refuge in rooms with no exits and spaces with no windows.

These kids – your kids, your friends’ kids -are being taught to hide and wait it out because the cavalry is coming. The adults will save you.

No, they won’t.

I hope it isn’t only adults reading about the failures that took place during the Parkland murders. I hope teenagers read it too and, instead of blaming guns, they realize they must learn to take matters into their own hands when it comes to their self-defense.

My daughter has a plan – she’s had one for years, we simply improve it as she ages and changes schools – but her friends do not. One of the roughest things for her to hear is something I feel the need to remind her about at times: you are responsible for your own safety. You are not responsible for the safety of your friends. Yes, there’s more, but you get the idea.

Let’s backtrack a bit. What about 911? Well…

2:22:13 P.M.: The first 911 call.

Broward County’s disjointed 911 system slows the law enforcement response.

Because the first 911 call is from a cellphone, it goes to the city of Coral Springs. But the Sheriff’s Office handles police calls for neighboring Parkland, so the Coral Springs operator must waste precious minutes transferring the call to the Sheriff’s Office.

(Meanwhile, Deputy Scot Peterson is hiding himself outside Building 12, listening to the sound of gunfire inside the school.)

There were heroes on that day. Here’s the unpopular detail no one wants to admit: they were heroes, but they were ill-prepared. Rushing headlong into danger is brave, but doing it with no plan and no training tends to lead to exactly what we saw take place – the deaths of those heroic men. Men like the athletic director, Chris Hixon, and Aaron Feis, the campus monitor and football coach.

2:26:07 P.M.: [Four] more deputies [arrive and] hang back – even though they can hear gunshots.

And so it goes on.

You might be thinking it’s easy to Monday-morning-quarterback this kind of thing, and it is. But it’s also reasonable to be confident in your own abilities to behave differently if, God forbid, you should be faced with such a situation. This is why you should take the time and money to save up and take classes. There are high-quality active shooter interdiction classes being run at many locations including places like Gunsite Academy and Firearms Academy of Seattle. I can attest to the thoroughness and value of their courses.

Now, how does this help your kids? By increasing your own understanding of tactics and honing your skills, you are able to help should the situation ever arise. And you are also able to speak to your kids – how you talk to them varies by age and by child – and give them an educated, reasoned plan to follow if their school is ever under attack.

Some people feel this engenders fear and you will only terrify your kids. My opinion is that sheltering your kids from reality helps no one and could one day cost them their lives.

Choose your words wisely. Understand your particular child’s needs and capacity to process information. But for heaven’s sake don’t leave them in the dark and just hope it sorts itself out. Do you have a family plan regarding what to do if the house is on fire? This is the same thing.

There is a great deal I’d like to say but I’ll leave it at this. It is our responsibility as parents to protect and teach our kids. You simply can’t rely on others doing it.

In this day and age, that includes teaching and training them self-defense – heck, in any day and age that’s a given – and what to do in case a murderer enters their school. If hiding and throwing books are the extent of their school’s plan and their own plan, you have a problem.

There are many facets to this I haven’t listed, but you can likely figure it out on your own. Remember, it isn’t only you who are on your own. Your kids are on their own, too, even at school. Give them the tools necessary to survive.

 

 

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87 COMMENTS

      • Runcie is 0bamas wonder kid from Chicago who brought Broward County the brilliant plan of not charging kids for crimes committed on campus but giving them ‘counseling’ instead. The idea was to keep black kids out of prison. But they had to extend this privilege to some white kids in a bid to disguise the overt racial favoritism. Incredibly this is part of a government program where the school gets money for looking the other way. Makes perfect sense and is great public policy…if you’re a Democrat.

    • For those people who see a bunch of words and don’t say TL;DR:

      http://www.trbas.com/media/media/acrobat/2018-12/70135058816260-12074125.pdf

      It’s one of the reports about the Parkland shooting. You can read it for yourself rather than reading what the corporate media wants to feed you. You can learn a lot… The information within should help you understand what not to do and the warning signs of a mass murderer.

      When someone tries to use the MSD shooting to argue for government infringements of the people’s rights you can retort with a ridiculous amount of facts regarding everything about it. I don’t see how they could win a debate against you without exposing themselves as a bunch of tyrants seeking power. Everyone will see they actually don’t want to protect the children, they just want to use them or literally sacrifice them for their personal aspirations. Then you can offer an actual solution to save people. If people don’t want to do what works, it’s all on them when the next school shooting happens and many kids die. Obviously they will try to reassign blame again, but it’s hard to do that when they are the ones refusing to do what works and are only offering more restrictions on liberty. Maybe at that point the kids will start to realize who is the problem.

      • Thank you for posting this. I am still reading it. It is the most tragic “comedy” of errors that should have never happened. Innumerable procedural errors that have nothing to do with firearms, except not recognizing the sound of firearms. And yet, law abiding firearms owners are being held responsible.

  2. What, the people responsible for the education and safety of the students are still employed. They allowed the deaths of 17 people and only get re-assigned? Get a job in civil service and you will have a lifelong career and the idiot kids are going along with it. And how about a little detention for the juvenile delinquents for walking out of class. You also have to ask who organized the walk out and allowed it to occur. Seems the admin is still failing to do the job they were hired to do.

    • Keep your unvaccinated disease vector children away from healthy people then, you willfully ignorant tit.

        • exactly FEDUP. They pose no threat to vaccinated kids, in fact from some of the studies i have seen recently vaccinated kids and adults pose a far greater threat to others than not being vaccinated due to what is known as shedding. For example if recently vaccinated you should not be going anywhere near someone with compromised immune system EG cancer patients.

  5. Overwhelmed? A platoon of helmeted dudes with weapons of war overwhelmed by one loonie?

    Fuck the broward county sheriffs department.

    • Then why don’t YOU become a police officer and show us all how it SHOULD be done? Put up or shut up.

      • Read the news, numerous non-LEO, stop events like these before they escalate. Put on your huevos before you put on that badge or don’t bother. Harassing motorists and illegally entering private property is not why we hired you.

      • Well, we ALL know you don’t hang out in the parking lot admiring your gear when children are being shot to death inside. You don’t have to be an LEO to figure that out. Would I have stupidly run into the building unarmed? Hell no, I love kids but a useless sacrifice would not and did not save any of those children. It is a different story if you are armed with your own assault weapons AND wearing battle gear. They would have been more than a match for that POS if they only had the testículos to actually confront this punk. The Coral Springs police department did not have a parking lot reunion when they got on scene, they charged in straight away. EXACTLY WHAT THOSE BROWARD COWARDS SHOULD HAVE DONE!

      • Clark Kent,

        Why do I have to be a police officer before I can protect myself and the people around me?

        And what about people who are too old to be police officers? Do they forfeit their right to protect themselves and the people around them?

        I have a better idea — government and especially police agencies GET OUT OF OUR WAY: stop threatening us with fines and/or prison time for having firearms in “sensitive places” and let us protect ourselves!

  6. I simply do not believe the LEO agencies in Broward County are there to save anybody’s life. They are there to collect a paycheck. And they will prevent anyone else from replacing them such as volunteer teachers carrying guns.

    If the state of Florida cannot forcibly remove every official in Broward County responsible for this disaster then the State of Florida can’t protect any of its citizens.

    The Florida Second Amendment state organizations should be running ads and billboards across the state stating that you cannot rely on law enforcement in the State of Florida to protect you.

    Get a gun and get training because you are on your own.

    • Then why don’t YOU become a police officer and show us all how it SHOULD be done? Put up or shut up.

      • I hope you’re not a cop Billy Badass. You seem like the sort that forgot the “protect and serve” part and wants to get a check and call it a day after. They collected a check to be sheepdogs. They certainly weren’t and they certainly don’t seem to be actually getting held responsible in much of a meaningful way. I’m not a cop but if I fuck up on my job I am held responsible. I’m probably not even gonna get anyone killed if I fuck up on my job too.

        • CLARK KENT too many doughnuts , not enough balls to do a proper job when it comes to protect and serve. Parrot. Is a pigs prick pork ? A hickory horse does have a wooden dick.

      • I applied for the job, but I couldn’t do enough pushups to get past the first wash out.

        Another guy in my group was a recent college football playing grad, so he was really good at doing pushups, and easily became a cop.

        Now, he’s serving 263 years for 18 counts of rape while in uniform, and I haven’t raped anyone.

        Solid hiring practices.

      • Andrew Lias
        The police are not going to save the lives of innocent homosexuals. Its not personal. Its professional. They won’t save the lives of school children either.

    • @Chris

      The thing is, if you get good training, you’re likely to get BETTER training than the LEOs.

      I see a lot of security personnel and LEOs shooting at my range. I’m a better shot than most of them, because I practice more and am not being given limits on the amount of ammo I can expend. My training is also really high quality even as a civilian who can’t access the stuff they get. It’s actually rather appalling to see how poorly trained some of these guys are.

      My range, in the beginning, allowed people to draw from the holster to practice. They quickly stopped doing that because of the LEOs who couldn’t execute it safely. Now you have to pass through a rigorous training program and be personally certified by my teacher to be able to holster draw there. There were just too many problems.

      I’ve been told that budget limits on ammo, the lack of true tactical ranges, and changes in the way LEOs are being told to handle situations is behind a lot of this. I don’t know all the details but apparently they are being instructed to be much more hands-off in general due to lawsuits and liability issues. This doesn’t stop the good ones from doing their job anyway, but they also know they’re always at legal risk for doing their job the way it should be done. Not an excuse; but a reason.

      • Being able to out shoot 90% of law enforcement at my very popular local range is the norm so I have to agree with you there. Hell, they are also likely to have safety rules violations there too….repeatedly.
        I honestly don’t know how some of them are able to pass qualifications.

        • Thanks. Wow…makes a lot of sense.

          My city did this super dumb thing where they decided they needed a “green” range for the LEOs. So they built a green range. Well, guess what, you can only fire certain types of super expensive bullets at a green range. So what that means is lots fewer bullets and lots less range time for officers. Layers of dumbness, and actually my city is pretty good compared to a lot of others.

        • Elaine D
          Does your police man boy friend know this? When I read this back in 2009, that is when I got serious about training.

          From 2009: The criminals are training…are you?

          “Nearly 40% of the criminal attackers in this study had received FORMAL firearms training (mostly in the military). More than 80% of the criminal attackers regularly practiced with their firearms, with an average number of 23 practice sessions per year! They conducted these practice sessions in trash dumps, wooded areas…”

          https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/criminals-are-trainingare-you

      • The only limit on ammo is what they’re given for free. Nobody is stopping them from buying more. Mechanics buy their own tools, professionals pay for continuing education, teachers buy supplies, etc. If an officer needs more training than provided, they can pay for it. My uncle was a cop in the 70’s and 80’s, and he sold “practice” ammo to fellow officers, although his stuff was more like .38 +P that they weren’t officially allowed to have on duty.

  7. “I can attest to the thoroughness and value of their courses.”

    So if I understand correctly, given the context of the story here, your saying that you took a class, and were subsequently in an active shooter situation at a school, where you not only survived but helped others to as well?

    I’d love to hear about that in more detail, unless of course what you really mean was that the class you took massaged your emotions and made you feel good about how you imagine you’d react in an active shooter situation.

    Please elaborate…

  8. My daughter is in Kindergarten. Her school has a plan. It’s terrible and will only get people killed. I came up with a better plan for my daughter and we review it every day on the way to school. Plus, she has a bulletproof backpack insert. Provided she can keep her cool and doesn’t freeze in place, I like her chances.

    Moreover, I would say that the issue of mass shooters isn’t the issue. Parents should train their kids to handle any emergency. We drill for fires, kidnappings, and all the rest.

    • Sounds like a wonderful childhood. Do you live in Mogadishu? Are there brain eating amoebas in your bedtime stories?

    • Do what you think is correct for you and yours.

      I think its a good to teach as early as possible all things considered.

      • You can raise your kids however you want, but obsessing over something that unlikely is a sign of mental illness. Body armor on a kindergartner? Sounds like a bad SNL skit to exaggerate the threat of those evil guns.

        • It happened in my little town too. A middle school in the mid 90’s. Doesn’t change the fact that out of tens of millions of students who have attended school in the last 20 years the number who have been killed or injured by a school shooting would be measured in the low hundreds.

  11. The police were “overwhelmed”? By a single shooter. Something fails to add up here, or am I simply being a suspicious old man.

  12. The easiest solution is to home school! Then the teachers/parents can carry guns and even the responsible children, too. I don’t recall hearing about any school shootings in a home school situation. Parents are responsible for their own children. And if you can’t trust someone else to educate and protect your children then maybe you shouldn’t send them there?

    • yep and not only that they dont get fed any of the communist anti liberty, slave mentality brainwashing that they get in govt mandated education. teach them yourself and teach how to think for themselves not just what to think the latter being how teachers teach these days and heaven help the student that throws any hard questions at them especially if those questions call the whole basis of the teachers beliefs into question.

  14. So these are the knuckleheads tasked with enforcing all the new gun control crap headed our way…. Have no fear… The government will keep you safe…..

  17. The way it should have happened:

    2:19:54 Alarmed student approaches a designated campus monitor after seeing Cruz unpacking his AR. After intense campus wide training, students know how to find their campus monitors regardless of their location. Warning is given, Cruz’s approximate location is known and broadcast to specially trained armed school personnel throughout the campus.

    2:21:00 Campus wide alert is issued. Pre-recorded announcements are broadcast ordering classroom lock-downs. Amid rising panic, students, faculty, and staff immediately take cover behind locked doors.

    2:24:05 10th grade science teacher, Justin Baze, a former Marine with multiple Mid East combat tours, is one of several armed and trained faculty-special-deputies. Knowing that Cruz’s last location is close to his classroom, Baze arms himself with his official issue 9mm, locks his classroom, and goes hunting. The scene before him is surreal. He knows it’s his high school, his students, and colleagues that are threatened but he can’t ignore the fact that what he’s experiencing is exactly like that last day in Fallujah when he was hunting bad guys who’d just tried to kill him.

    Only this bad guy was coming for his students and he wasn’t about to let that happen.

    2:25.22 Thinking he is gong to have things work out just the way he’s imagined they would, Cruze enters the school hallway fully believing he can just walk into any classroom or gathering of students and just begin shooting. In his twisted mind, he’s already imagining how it’s all gonna play out. He’s really gonna show them!! He hated this school and he hated those students who’d humiliated him.

    He did not expect to round that corner and come face to face with an angry, determined, ex-Marine with more street-fighting experience than he could ever imagine. The shock at being found out slows Cruz’s reaction time but doesn’t slow Baze one bit. As Cruz starts to raise his AR, Baze hits him with a double tap to the chest and one to the head. Cruz is dead before he even hits the floor.

    As Baze watches Cruz fall, the memories of Fallujah are washed away to be replaced with an equally familiar cold-anger. That someone like, Cruz—like anybody, really—would come to his school intending to shoot and kill his students and the people he works with everyday . . . That. Wasn’t. Gonna. Happen. At least it wasn’t going to happen so long as people like Justin Baze were there and willing and able to fight back.

    The popular image of school teachers being totally against arming themselves is largely progressive propaganda. While there are plenty of school teachers who’d never think of arming themselves and fighting back against an armed spree-killer, there are also enough other teachers with direct combat experience, police experience, years of firearms experience who can competently defend their schools, their students, and themselves against people desiring to do them harm. Only armed citizens who are on the scene can prevent the carnage planned by spree-killers.

    • It appears majority of female teachers don’t want armed staff. Some don’t even want police resource officers because they don’t want the kids getting in trouble with the cops. Their solution is to ban all guns in North America.

      • NOT ALL WOMEN ARE THE SAME AND THANKFULLY NOT ALL OF US ARE LAME BRAINED WHEN IT COMES TO FIREARMS… THANKFULLY. I DONT TRUST THE COMMON CORE TRASH NOR THE LIES (INDOCTRINATION) OUR CHILDREN ARE SUBJECTED TO IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS SO HOMESCHOOL WOULD SURELY BE MY OPTION

      • @CZ

        I don’t think that’s the reason – from working with teachers.

        It’s because they already are overwhelmed. They are often supervising classes of between 20 and 30 adolescents. I’ve worked in middle and high schools quite a bit. Kids are smart, they observe everything about you, and they also easily team up into groups to get your stuff. Your phone, your keys, your purse, your wallet, whatever it is. Mostly it’s a joke on the teacher, but it’s not at all hard for that to happen when you have one adult and 20 or 30 kids who know that adult’s every move. You just cannot constantly keep your eye on everything all the time in those environments.

        Having a kid get your wallet is annoying. Having a kid get a gun would be a whole other thing. And I doubt that most teachers think the schools they work for, which are always cutting corners, would legally defend them if anything went wrong. It’s almost certain to fall on the teacher. That combination picture is just not worth it to them. Too many risks and essentially no benefits at all.

        • It’s hard to steal a teacher’s gun when it’s holstered under their clothes and has a lanyard connecting them to the gun. It would be totally irresponsible to leave the gun unattended or in some lock box that kids have access to.

          Female teachers will make any excuse they can think of to keep guns out of schools. I think these teachers are simply afraid of violence and the tools that can be used to commit that violence. It’s instinctual for them to be nurturing and risk averse rather than confrontational and violent. I think they are too loving to the extent they won’t be able to point a gun at a kid and pull the trigger.

          On the other hand, men have historically been very good at killing and don’t appear to be changing anytime soon. Seems male staff are likely to outnumber female staff when it comes down to actually carrying a gun at school although the education system has a large amount of female staff.

        • Elaine D
          I think people need to start asking the questions,

          1. Are female teachers capable of defending their class with a gun?
          2. Are they willing to do it?
          3. Are male teachers better suited to defend children in a class room with a gun?

          I understand these are uncomfortable questions. This is not a P/C zone here.

          I have included many stories of female teachers who CCW in class for my college paper. But these woman are not the norm. Everyone knows 90% of all elementary school teachers are female.
          Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut had an ALL FEMALE staff. I would say most schools at the elementary level do have all female staffs.
          Feminism is anti armed self defense. It is anti 2A. That is just the truth. Women shooters get, NO RESPECT, from the feminist leadership.

          “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink it.”

          We in the gun community have the answer. But are women teachers willing to take the steps necessary to defend children? I don’t believe they are. The world has changed. It is a very dangerous place. And most teachers don’t want to face the truth.

          There are about 55,000 schools in the USA. What if only 10% of them have a mass shooting every year. That’s not a great deal is it? 17 to 28 dead kids, times that 10%. I think we have 30 million students in the USA. What the yearly total? You do the math. I’m dyslexic. It would take me more time than you to get the correct answer.

          Since we have open borders I think the chances of a mass school shooting happening are going up.

          Liberals control these big city schools. Liberals ARE COMFORTABLE having a boy raped, or shot, or stabbed, by a school invader. To them it is better than having a school teacher who volunteers and is trained to defend his or her students is a classroom.

          The, “fly over country”, states of Utah, Arkansas, Kentucky, Idaho have had armed teachers for years now. But these are mostly rural and, RED, states. In California, Liberals disarmed the rural schools who had volunteer teachers who were CCW in the classroom.

        • I disagree that it’s that simple.

          Kids are physical. They grab and hug you all day long. It would take less than a day for them to figure out you’re carrying a gun on you. And then the punky ones have all the time in the world to figure out how to get it. Which they are going to do, because they are adolescents and that is the kind of stuff you can expect.

          It would not be hard at all for a few male students to take a gun from a teacher. Especially if the teacher is a small person regardless of gender. Boys in particular can be quite a bit bigger than the teachers. A few bad seeds could make a gun grab happen in less than two minutes. It would not be hard at all.

          Not to mention, every school has bad seed teachers that are hard to get rid of. In the very last one I was stationed in, the one I’ve written about previously, I was near 100% sure that one of the teachers working there was a pedophile trying to get his way with freshman girls. I heard numerous reports from students and repeatedly tried to get him in trouble or removed but it was not as easy as it should have been. Keep in mind that people who are sexually attracted to children will often choose jobs that place them around kids. And that the vast majority of pedophiles never get in trouble for their actions. I’m sure they’d be first in line to get a carry gun, you know, to protect the kids.

          And let’s say a kid gets a gun and threatens or harms another student. You have to allow for that very real possibility. How is that teacher going to be legally protected, or are they? Is the school going to stand behind them or bail out and let them lose their career and licensure? From my experience with schools, probably (b). No one ever wants to be responsible when something happens.

        • I also disagree that feminism is about women not having guns. Feminism is about women being able to do what they want to do without being restricted by men. Just because some feminists don’t like guns doesn’t mean that it is not a feminist issue. I see gun ownership as a very feminist issue indeed, and I’m not alone in that. And there are plenty of Red voting people who don’t like guns or the people who own them, and plenty of Red voting people who, every time someone does something they don’t like, say, “There should be a law against that!”

        • @Elaine D

          Sounds like you are saying some large kid is going to attack a teacher and disarm them so he can shoot everyone. Technically, that is a possibility. What are the chances that a student is larger, stronger and willing to go through with that? I think the probability is lower than being attacked by a Muslim terrorist in America.

          When I was in high school the very large kids were on the football team and none of them were the school shooter type. The gangster kids weren’t that big and they had their own guns, but they too were not the school shooter type. Most of the kids in high school, at least at the four high schools I been to, were not very big nor strong. The strong kids are not the type of people that would be so beaten down they would want to murder people. The fat kids could be, but they are not really good at physical things, such as disarming an adult. School shooter types tend to be out of shape and/or small kids that get bullied and can’t stand up for themselves; they are very passive or passive aggressive.

          The kids in my first high school that could be the ones to commit a school shooting were frail and pale. They weren’t violently aggressive to non family. They weren’t conflicted enough to actually go through with such an attack on a school — not that during their lower points they didn’t fantasize it happening — they just didn’t want to feel bad anymore. They would hurt themselves instead or try to commit suicide in a way were their parents would find them. If anything, they would kill their parents. Usually these kids find others like them to hang out with and they eventually get through high school in their way. Majority of kids I knew like this were female.

          If a kid is problematic and dangerous you likely already know who that is by the time they get to high school. In some school districts, they would have already sent that kid to a school for trouble makers, which is usually smaller than the original school. These schools have a different environment, in this environment maybe teachers won’t be armed because the school usually has cops on campus for the gang members and violent kids. When I was at such a school, it was a lot more relaxed than you would think because the system was more setup for these types of kids than their original school and the kids can relate to each other. It feels like you are there to hang out more than you are to work. You can even ask to come in half day if you agree to do a lot of work at home. So if you are stressed out in the school environment, you have the option to spend as little time necessary at school to graduate, you could even graduate early if you take on more work.

          School shooters usually plan their attack for years and wait until they can buy their own guns. If they can’t buy guns they steal them from family. These kinds of kids are not as dumb as people think. I don’t really see these kids planning to attack a teacher who is armed and steal their gun to use it in a mass shooting. Such a plan is too risky for them. Their whole point of doing a school shooting is to make them feel like God and to do a better job than the last kid. They need to be hyped up, they need their equipment, they need people to be defenseless, they need to plan who and what to attack.

          The kids that are dumb or emotional enough to attack you in an attempt to take your gun and use it are usually a different type (or phase) of problem child. They are likely younger and easier to physically deal with. They are still in a normal school because they have yet to do anything troublesome enough to get sent to a problem child school. They could be a school shooter in the making if you let it happen by not dealing with them until it’s too late. They have yet to get to the point were they can be as effective and they are lashing out for help. They might do it knowing it’s futile just so they can get the attention they need.

          If a kid does plan to disarm a teacher and can actually accomplish that plan, you can’t forget that right next door is another teacher and there is security patrolling around on bikes or golf carts. It’s not like you are on your own while waiting for the police department to get the 911 call to save you. Some kids might even help you out or at least run for help and safety. I don’t recall ever seeing a kid fight with a teacher and no one ever show up or show up very late. It’s not like a prison…

          People just like to make excuses and come up with the most extreme scenarios to justify inaction or cast off responsibility.

          In the case of school shootings, not trying is failing. If you do nothing it will happen again because it can. By the way, arming staff isn’t the entire solution, it’s the first step and the quickest. We must be pragmatic… When someone is coming to attack people we must have the ability to attack back. The only way you can realistically fight off a gunman is with a gun (my ancestors found that out the hard way). Then we can fix our messed up culture/society we created for our children, which is going to take a long time.

        • @Elaine D: “I’ve worked in middle and high schools quite a bit. Kids are smart, they observe everything about you, and they also easily team up into groups to get your stuff.”

          Whenever you make a definitive statement about anything there’s always going to be a “but in my village” rejoinder. Here’s mine. I’ve taught a all levels of public and private education, mostly college, and was a principal for a short while until I decided I like teaching better than administering. I can truthfully say that in 40 plus years of teaching, the behavior you describe never happened in any of my classrooms. Not once. It didn’t happen because I was very, very good at classroom management. I was so good, in fact, that even in the rough inner-city school I started out in, the kind of classroom culture you describe never developed. Those kinds of kids certainly pulled stuff like that in other people’s classes but not in mine: they wouldn’t have dared. In all that time, I never once had to seek administrative help to resolve a classroom conflict. As a principal, I was mostly called in to help when teachers, usually but not always women, lacked the ability to maintain the kind of classroom discipline that I knew how to maintain.

          I don’t mean for my comments to be a criticism of female teachers. Rather it is a criticism of the kinds of people who enter the teaching field at all levels. Usually, its tentative, insecure, non-assertive people who get caught up in the kinds of classroom confrontations you describe. These can easily be male teachers as well as female teachers. One thing you’ve alluded to: students have a very accurate weak-teacher-weak-principal radar that’s 100 percent accurate. That said, I’ve worked with numerous female teachers over the years—my wife being one—who were even better at classroom management than I am. If some “team” tried to grab their purse or wallet in their classroom they’d tear their heads off. Again, the students in their classes would not have dared try something like that.

          At my last school (which I left in 2011) we had a discussion with the local police chief about arming faculty members. He was in favor of arming teachers, btw. There were more teachers arguing against armed faculty than arguing for armed faculty. The teachers making the argument for maintaining a “gun free zone” were—you guessed it—more tentative, insecure, and non-assertive faculty. And every damn one of them was a social-justice-warrior progressive.

          I’d love to see some 16 year old kid try to steal former marine Justin Baze’s handgun. Although he is a fictional character, I’ve worked with men and women who are just like him. They’d be the perfect candidates for a cadre of armed teachers.

        • Wow. What an elitist you are.
          I am sure that when you go to the mall or any place where there are children that you dis-arm and leave you firearm at home so that those sneaky kids don’t get your gun right?
          You say you don’t?
          Why because you are so much better than those unwashed teachers?
          Again all you have is your “feelings”.
          What about poor people?
          Maybe they shouldn’t have guns because they can’t afford a security system to keep there guns safe at night.
          Or maybe women shouldn’t be armed at all since most men are strong enough to take their gun from them
          And of course no one should open carry because they will just be shot first right?
          I see a good fit for you with the rest of the elites who feel no one should have guns except the police and military.

        • Elaine D
          Women have been shooting for competition for well over 100 years. This is not taught in school today. In fact this history was removed from the curriculum. I think a woman such as these are very capable of defending a classroom full of kids. But not the weak adult women you are describing.

          You are describing a teacher who can’t control their classroom. I have personally seen this type of teacher. This person wanted to be the “friend” of her students.

          The following are examples I used for my paper on teaching 2A in a classroom grades K thru 12. This is just a short list of what I used in my writing. My full female list is much larger. I stand by my statement that the feminist leadership of today, gives No Respect to woman shooters or the great women hunters of the past, or the present.

          https://www.outdoorlife.com/photos/gallery/guns/2010/10/womens-collegiate-rifle-teams#page-7

          https://drexel.edu/now/archive/2016/May/Womens-Rifle-Team/

          http://onthebanks.msu.edu/Object/1-4-67/womens-rifle-team-c-1920s/

          https://www.amazon.com/Two-Dianas-Alaska-Sisters-Hunt/dp/0811731316

          https://www.amazon.com/Two-Dianas-Somaliland-Shooting-Classic/dp/1331522129/ref=pd_bxgy_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1331522129&pd_rd_r=dc15ad7f-0cb6-11e9-a072-17decbef9670&pd_rd_w=HaaMZ&pd_rd_wg=FjTjY&pf_rd_p=6725dbd6-9917-451d-beba-16af7874e407&pf_rd_r=KGDKZEFY79DCE1CGXC3D&psc=1&refRID=KGDKZEFY79DCE1CGXC3D

  18. “Unprepared and Overwhelmed? Total BS. If it was a 30 member biker gang that would be one thing, but this was a SINGLE PUNK. A single armed teacher should have been able to handle this. There should be a public ceremony where Israel and the rest of his Keystone cops that were involved in this are all lined up in a row, and the governor of Florida physically tears of his badge and rank insignia from their uniforms. Then they should have to march through a gauntlet of angry parents hurling verbal abuse at them all while television cameras film it. They deserve it.

  19. For almost every cop, making it to a cushy retirement is the ultimate goal. All one has to do is look at the (in)action of the police officers during the last number of mass school shootings, where these “trained professionals” SAT ON THEIR HANDS while the carnage was going on. You can bet that us military veterans in such a case would be drawn TOWARD the sound of gunfire. Today’s human nature dictates that the person with all of the “training” (especially) law enforcement DOES cower in fear, while a 90 lb. armed teacher would reluctantly, but successfully take out the shooter. Being forced into a situation also forces one to act. There are many examples of persons, who one would normally think, would not be capable of acting in an extremely high-stress situation, but DO come out on top-stopping the threat, and saving lives. Sad to say, today’s police practices dictate that the cop’s life is MORE IMPORTANT than that of those he has sworn to protect despite the cops having statutory protections that do not apply to us ordinary civilians.
    All one has to do is look at the Medal of Honor recipients, who are almost always mild-mannered, initially reluctant to act, but DO act, and perform feats who most would think are normally beyond their capacity and capabilities TRUE bravery in the heat of battle. The same applies to those civilians who act during school shootings.
    Human nature has a habit of propelling (actually forcing) the normal, average person into a true hero and life saver, while showing the true (cowardly behavior) nature of those we assign to protect us. A good example of our protectors cowering in fear is the deputies who FAILED TO ACT despite having all of the equipment necessary and the preferential laws on their side (that protect them from lawsuits and liability).
    TRUE heroes ACT, while our so-called protectors (failed to) REACT.

  20. Until the Florida Legislature revokes their Gun Free Zone legislation, expect more of the same. A Gun Free Zone is not safer, but will have less legally carried arms by those who are compliant with law to respond to armed criminal threats by those who are not compliant with law.

  22. You are “unprepared and overwhelmed’ with the Broward SO budget (over $700 millions)? History has proven worldwide that when some politicians get too involved in wars, and perhaps law enforcement, it surely does not get better. Should we really be surprised? Wasn’t it in the very same Broward Cty that the Supervisor of elections lost a bunch of ballots? Of course it was.

  23. 1. Runcie introduces policies to stop “classroom to prison pipeline,” in other words, policies to keep violent students out of jail and out of NICS database.

    2. Armed security refuses to confront violent students.

    3. Jake “brady campaign” Tapper and Scott “set up a perimeter” Israel join others in blaming the NRA about violence in schools.

  24. Amazing that Peterson stayed put for 48 minutes you would think as school resource officer he would have felt some ownership.

    • The only thing that Peterson felt ownership of that day was his own slimy behind, which he protected with great alacrity.

  25. You have a responsibility to let your children know that there are bad people out there and what types of things they just might do to young teens. While you may just tell them that they could get “hurt” when they are 7 or 8, by the time they reach 13 or so, you need to be frank with them about what a rapist can and will do. You have to tell them that this is not normal, that it doesn’t happen all the time, but it does happen. We can’t make them scared of everyone, but we must make them be aware that they could be a target and what NOT to do.
    We also need to instruct them about guns, the ones the family has, and how to use them. How to call 911, what to tell the operator and to shut up when the LEOs get there so that they are not blamed for the problem.
    These are hard things to talk about, maybe the father should talk to sons and nephews and the mom should talk to the girls.
    You have to make sure to tell them that no one is 100% safe, that it could be the pastor, youth minister, the mailman or neighbor, or even someone in the family. Make sure to tell them that it is NOT okay and make sure to ask them if you suspect anything – they will not get in trouble, it is not their fault.

  26. A court recently ruled Law Enforcement does not have a responsibility to protect the individual from violent crime. Those people who failed these kids and their parents should all be fired for dereliction of duty anyway. The Law Officers are a disgrace to the badge. This was broad daylight and one punk with a gun. How many of us who carried guns for a living went into a darkened building to save others not knowing how many guns we faced. As for school security there is one vast well of resources being ignored. Retired Federal Law Officers. Under Federal Law, Officers of the D.O.J. are required to retire at 57 years of age. This is F.B.I., I.N.S., Bureau of Prisons and other enforcement agencies of the D.O.J.. They are highly trained in a wide variety of firearms in a wide variety of scenarios. Many have been carrying on duty in public for over 30 years. All are trained to carry in public setting and to interact with the public. Why not waive the post retirement employment wage caps for them and use them as school security. Offer the opportunity to each retiring officer to work as school security in their home school districts. These people have the training and the seasoning from experience to handle the job.

  27. My daughter was at the Route 91 concert in Las Vegas when all hell broke loose. The first shots fired she hit the dirt. Her friend asked her what the heck she was doing…it’s only fireworks. My daughter pulled him down and said “Don’t you know gunfire when you hear it?” My daughter told me later that me teaching her how to shoot probably saved her life…even though she was unarmed. I was in Vegas that night at my cousin’s house. He got a call from his coworkers on the strip that all hell was breaking loose…LEOs, first responders..lots of them were zipping around the strip. We got on the police scanner and heard what was REALLY going on. The first videos…some from my daughter that she found on Youtube described something different than what you were told. My cousin and I stayed up until 3 am listening to the chaos. In the days that followed, we watched as lots of videos were deleted from Youtube and the “Machine” wrapped up the “incident”. We heard things that would brand us as conspiracy nuts if we were to talk about them now. We followed multiple bands of police and rescue, and a LOT of stuff was going down all over the place. My daughter and her friend are ok, sadly lots of others didn’t make it.

  28. As a former armed Security Officer who has worked at private schools ranging from preschool to a university level my fellow Officers and myself always asserted that we would run towards an active shooter so that we could protect the students and faculty. The few exceptions to that were moved to other posts when we made our management aware of their assertion that they would go the other way when they heard gunfire. Most of us were former Military or Law Enforcement, the rest were Police Academy graduates. Remember bravery is not the lack of fear, it is being able to do what is necessary despite the fear! And for those that will ask, yes I have been shot at more than once in my life so I do know what it feels like to be afraid and do what is necessary.

  29. OK, I just finished reading the MSD Public Safety Commission report. I read all of it.

    Here’s my observations:

    1. The failures of competence start in how Parkland/BSO decided to route 911 calls. Why would a 911 response center take landline calls and route cellular calls into a neighboring 911 call center, only to need them forwarded back? This is monumental stupidity – by design.

    2. Failures of Parkland and BSO continue with their selection, programming and use of radio systems.

    This is a discussion for another time, but for POTG, you should realize that some of the most significant delays in “getting help” (whether that help is a LEO, FD, EMS, whatever) happen in the radio and dispatch areas of “first responder networks.” You need to realize that, in some situations, the time you spend on the phone with a dispatcher is wasted time during which you could be doing something to save lives.

    I should NB that Broward County is crowing as of this past year about having installed a new comm system for their first responders – at a cost of $59 million. Part of their bragging on this system is “higher towers.” Frankly, I rather doubt that tower height had any impact on their lack of ability to communicate.

    3. The BSO’s lack of preparation and training shows. They obviously have not been really training for any emergency, never mind a MCI/mass murder like this one. They’re only been sitting in classrooms, doing chalk-talks. The failure to set up a command post and establish a clear incident command is the most damning evidence of this. Some say Peterson’s failure to enter and pursue is – but I disagree. Peterson is just one individual. There was a clear and obvious failure on the part of BSO to set up an effective CP/incident command on the scene – by not one, but two BSO people.

    The failure to establish a clear IC and for that IC to start splitting traffic off their main radio channel is part of the reason for their failure of their radio comm system.

    4. Want to know how I can spot that Broward County’s bureaucrats don’t know jack about radios? This is how:

    “8. Coral Springs has expressed concern over the county’s radio replacement plan and has no plans to join the regional communications system even when the new radio system is in place.” (see p. 214 of the draft report) This, coming from the police/fire departments that acted quickly and competently is all the evidence you need to know. CSPD’s radios never throttled, they never exceeded 50% utilization, CSPD and CSFD could communication as they needed, and they had their act squared away.

    When someone who has their act squared aware and has a working radio system refuses to join the new “grand scheme” radio system? It’s a sure sign that they know the new “grand scheme” radio system is a steaming pile.

    5. Then we get to the personnel from BSO. There are clearly “issues” in their recruiting. To have so many people from BSO who utterly failed at their jobs is astounding. We’ve all seen large organizations with “bad apples” or “shirkers” in their ranks. Unless you run a selection and induction screening on par with military special forces, it’s inevitable that some screw-ups are going to get by. But the BSO? They really have almost no one who comes out of this AAR with any indication of competence. CSPD, however, comes out of this looking like an organization that has their act together, their training is working, and it showed on that day. Sadly, it showed too late, but that wasn’t CSPD’s fault. It wasn’t even their jurisdiction – they ran to the sound of gunfire even when it “wasn’t their job.”

    BSO’s officers took active shooter training. They utterly failed to implement almost anything that is taught in active shooter training today. They also showed a complete failure in command/control operations; ie, they need to take ICS-100 and ICS-700, at a minimum, to learn how to set up a response to a major incident and learn how to interoperate with other agencies on scene.

    One thing that beggared belief is the BSO’s obsession with setting up a “perimeter.” WTF does a “perimeter” matter when all the shooting and dying is happening in the building right in front of you? The obsession with a perimeter outside the school and “overwatch” is just mind-boggling to read in Chapter 6 of the report.

    6. Finally, we get to a larger issues in Broward County. These idiots cannot respond to a MCI, and they can’t even run an election, which is a relatively simple issue in most other counties in the US. In both widely-publicized failures of public officials, I believe the underlying reason is that public officials are chosen/promoted based on criteria other than competence.

    It’s pretty sad reading. Israel losing his job isn’t sufficient here. There needs to be a wholesale cleaning-out of many of BSO’s people, and probably a bunch of political hacks high in the Broward County offices as well.

    • “Frankly, I rather doubt that tower height had any impact on their lack of ability to communicate.”

      It *potentially* could, and here’s why –

      The RF ‘coming in down from above’ has to pass through less building materials instead of a lower-on-the-horizon signal needing to punch through a few buildings to get where it’s going.

      Tall emergency service comm towers are particularly pricey here in Florida, adding in the CAT-5 hurricane wind loading requirements for construction, so I can understand how a municipality could balk at the purchase price and opt for a cheaper, shorter tower…

      • Yes, yes, I get the theory, and agree with you. I was an EE after all.

        Where I doubt that it mattered in this instance is that their incompetence in using and prioritizing radio traffic was so epic, worrying about propagation issues as a cause of failure to communicate is pretty far down their list of worries…

        Reading the report on the issue of radio comm by BSO was utterly infuriating. It is incompetence stacked on top of indifference stacked on top of mendacity.

  30. The abundance of incompetence might be a factor of training and evaluation, not recruiting. They attended active shooter training, but did management emphasize that it was important, or was it treated like a check box? Was there followup training or testing? Emphasis on a perimeter seems like a lack of training. That doctrine went out the window after Columbine.

    On another topic, why is Feis a hero? He f#cked up by not calling a Code Red. Was it bravery or fallout from his incompetence that led to his death? If kids had run away because of a Code Red alarm, would he have needed to shield them with his body? He was fixing his own mistake. Would a submariner get an award for pulling sailors from a flooding compartment after his lack of sound discipline gave away their position?

  31. Geez, if these are the people that we’d be fighting against in civil war or a revolution, we have way too much ammo. 😀

    One kid with an AR put them into the fog of war.

    Maybe a fog machine and audio recordings of fully-automatic weapons would get them to surrender.

    Police Academy or the Keystone Kops?

  32. The cowardice of the Broward county police was amazing. they should all be fired and stripped of their benefits. So much for protecting and serving. What an unreal joke.

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