Ideological And Non-Ideological Active Shooters

“GET DOWN!.... SHHH!!!!.... GET DOWN! GET INTO A ROOM AND LOCK IT!!!!” This is the first thing our opposite crew heard as they walked into the ER with a patient last month. Should this crew have recognized the signs of an active shooter? Is walking into a hospital with an active shooter even a real concern? From 2000-2012, there were 154 hospital related shootings in the United States with 235 injuries or deaths. That’s more than 1 shooting a month. As QIC I will implement parts of the “Active Shooter Preparedness” from United States Homeland Security. Knowing exactly what Emergency Action Plans our hospitals have in place will help us know how to recognize and react to possible active shooter situations. Scene safety is constant with EMS.

The Aurora Colorado theater shooting is significant from both a behavioral and a security management perspective. From a behavioral perspective, Holmes’ incident reinforced the stigma of mental health as it correlated to mass shootings. The significance from the security manager’s perspectives is that it brought the threat of “active shooters” to the forefront of security prevention, preparation, response, and recovery.

Do you know what to do if an active shooter situation presents itself? Do you know an active shooter does not always have to be carrying a gun? The Federal Bureau of Investigation website defines an active shooter as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill in a populated area. In an event of an active shooter, there are three things you should do; run, hide and fight.

Gun violence has been a massive issue through the modern age of humanity and has created a sense of division regarding the solution to this epidemic. In Adam Gopnik’s essay “Shootings”, Gopnik addresses the issue of gun violence and demands a change in American government policy to prevent the tragic killings of innocent lives. Gopnik harnesses the tool of emotion and passion to drive his essay. In Charles Cooke’s essay “Gun Control Dishonesty”, Cooke takes the polar opposite of Gopnik’s approach by utilizing factual evidence to prove the futility of gun control.

Sitting through an hour-long lecture or waiting in line to speak with financial aid are some examples of an average day on campus. It is during these times when students are least expecting tragedy to strike. A student may hear a loud noise and think nothing of it until they realize that noise was the sound of a shooting rampage that has reached their area and by that time it’s usually too late. Campus safety is everyone’s responsibility and remaining on alert is the only way to ensure less people are victimized. One of the first, and most memorable, attacks happened on August 1, 1966. Charles Whitman, a former marine, took rifles and other weapons to the observation deck atop the Main Building tower at The University of Texas- Austin, then randomly opened fire on the surrounding campus and streets. Over the next 96 minutes, far longer than the average active shooter attack, he shot and killed fifteen people. Included in the death toll was one unborn child, and injured thirty-one others. The incident ended when police reached Whitman and shot him dead. During this event, civilians played a vital role in assisting first responders in the take down of Whitman and Allen Crum, a 40-year-old bookstore manager and retired Air Force tail gunner, accompanied police up the tower in pursuit of Whitman. While Crum was armed, it solely because officers handed him a firearm to assist in Whitman’s take down.

The relevance of gun violence has been on the rise today and often one cannot walk away from the news without hearing a story related to gun violence either being covered or displayed on the news ticker scrolling through the screen. This paper will analyze three sources: an article written by Dov Cohen, titled “Culture, Social Organization, and Patterns of Violence,”on the trends of violence based on location, a Ted Talk given by Dan Gross, titled “Why Gun Violence Cannot become America’s New Normal,”on the topic of gun violence and how it affected his life as well a proposition to ending violence in the U.S, and an article, “Analyzing Available Data Could Help Improve Background Checks Involving Domestic Violence Records,” written by the U.S. Government of Accountability Office(GAO) which covers the process of background checks within the sales of firearms. These three sources will be evaluated on the basis that they evoke a strong argument with the use of ethos, pathos, and logos within their pieces.

“Shooting massacres” in school settings, a new phenomenon within the past 50 years, are extremely rare events. Over 23 years, 1990-2012, 215 fatal school shooting incidents resulted in 363 deaths, equivalent to 0.12% of national firearm homicides during that time period …… Among these, just three shooting rampages – Columbine High School, Virginia Tech University, and Sandy Hook Elementary School – accounted for 72 (53.3%) of these 135 deaths. The frequency of random/ rampage shooting incidents in schools has remained within the narrow range of 0 to 3 episodes per year.” (Shultz, et al., 2013, p. 84)

M., & MacLeish, K. T. (2015). Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms.

Most of the recent shootings seem to be contagious as their shooters’ plans and motives are almost all quite alike. These shooters have set a “stereotypical shooter” profile. They are typically male, white, and around the age of 20. Of all the mass shootings, only one was done by a woman (Mass Shootings in the U.S.). They are usually quite smart, part of a middle class family, and are normally quiet, lonely, and introverted. They are almost always socially awkward and have few-no friends. Yet, no one expects them to kill others as they are quiet. These shooters keep everything to themselves which may be one of the reasons why they are full of hatred. Often, they consider suicide, yet they refuse to talk to any sort of counselor. They are almost always constantly on a computer, frequently playing violent video games. Their shooting plan is almost always pre-meditated far in advance. They plan to make their shooting “great” and to ‘gain fame’ for their mass shooting. After the shooting, most commonly, they kill themselves.

One of the many misuses of firearms are the mass shootings that seems to becoming a normal tragedy in the United States schools. Mass shootings that occur usually have a motive or some kind of emotional tie to why these types of murderous actions took place. Phillip Cook and Kristin Goss explains emotional ties of the killers and what drives them to murder:

The tragic events at Virginia Tech in April of 2007 and Northern Illinois University in February of 2008 have policymakers, campus officials and citizens looking for solutions to prevent future attacks (Dickerson). Violent shootings that have occurred on a few college campuses in recent years have provoked a debate over

It is without a doubt that there has been an increase in violent crimes in schools throughout recent years. School shootings continue to become more and more common, especially in North America. Safety concerns for any and all students and staff in schools are at all all time high due to the high number of fatal and non-fatal occurring incidences. Since 2013 to the present, it is estimated that the United States has seen approximately 205 school shootings. Weekly, that is a shocking one shooting on average. Many of these shootings have resulted in the injuries and deaths of multiple of students and staff members. (Everytown Research, 2017) Evidently, school shootings are tragic events that affect so many more people than just the victims. However, these events are also interesting to look at from the psychological and sociological point of views. Through much research, it can be concluded that school shootings are a complex problem that are caused by a mix of improper brain development and societal and media influences which motivate school shooters to emerge. Psychological factors may include struggling with mental illnesses and/or abuse that leads to damaged brain development. Additionally, being bullied and/or the role of the media are examples of sociological factors.

Some of the personal risk factors that can lead to school violence are attention deficits, hyperactivity or learning disorder; history of aggressive behavior; association with delinquent peers.5 Evidence has suggested that mental illness or mental health symptoms are nearly universal among school shooters.6 An example of this would be a Virginia Tech student named Seung Hui Cho who shot and killed thirty two staff members and students. He was diagnosed with depression and anxiety after he committed suicide. A 2002 report by the U.S. secret service and department of education found evidence that the majority of school shooters that were mentally ill had not received any help.7 School shooters who are mentally ill tend to blame others for their problems. They also felt like failures in their lives and envied their peers who were happier and more successful than they

Research in school shootings have been administered in many categories, including sociology, psychology, and etc. past studies, and direct later studies in school shootings, offers a sociology stand point for understanding the differences of school shooting incidents, including rampage shootings, mass murders shootings, and examining the mass media dynamic of school shootings; as well as presenting a combination of causes said in the research, including those on the individual, community, and social levels. Suggestions for studies in the future in school shootings are still yet to be explored.

Sea turtles are another species which is drastically effected by longline fishing being caught as another bycatch. The two sea turtles who are accidentally caught more often are the loggerhead sea turtle and the leatherback sea turtle. Both of these sea turtles have been known to be on endangered lists and unless we can change our fishing methods these innocent organisms could be lost in the near future. In a study by R. Lewison, et al. (2004) they were able to estimate the regions which both of these sea turtles are caught in the world. The loggerhead sea turtle is accidentally caught more often in the regions of the Mediterranean and Pacific Ocean. The leatherback sea turtle is accidentally caught more in the Pacific and