The School Shooting that Didn’t Happen

Dear Fellow Survivalist;

You’re probably as tired of hearing about school shootings as I am. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to stop them. The mainstream media makes sure that these animals get lots of press, meaning that they get their 15 minutes of fame, spreading their name all across the country. That’s often enough to motivate these murderers to commit their heinous acts.

Sadly, the success rates of these murderers has been all too good. A lot of that is due to schools being gun free zones. Yes, they have resource officers, but one resource officer for a school may not be enough to stop these shootings, especially if the shooter is better armed than the resource officer.

Nevertheless, every once in a while, things go right. Such was the case at Bostrom High School in Phoenix a week ago. Somehow, a 15-year-old student managed to smuggle an AR-15 and several boxes of ammunition into the school. While he shouldn’t have even been able to do that, it seems that’s as far as he managed to get. Someone noticed that he had the gun and responded correctly.

How correctly? The school was put in lockdown mode instantaneously and called the police. Law enforcement arrived within minutes, taking the young man into custody and securing the firearm and ammunition that he had in his possession. Nobody was hurt or even threatened by his actions.

The information available actually leaves more questions than it answers. To start with, it’s clear that the student who brought the firearm into the school did so illegally on several levels. He was not old enough to own such a firearm, so could not have bought it. That means that he either stole it or took it from a family member. Perhaps it belonged to his parents; but we don’t know.

The second big question is how he managed to get it into the school. The temperature that day was roughly 80 degrees, so there’s no way that he could have hidden it under his coat. About the only way I can think he would have succeeded would either be to take it apart and put it in a large backpack or he came in with it through a door that should have been secured.

Sadly, such occurrences are a part of the modern school scene. While this student didn’t kill anyone, his lack of success demonstrates just how important proper training for dealing with such situations is. He didn’t succeed because the school’s staff and students were properly trained. I hope that someone is analyzing the school’s actions and seeking out what they did right, so that they can pass that on to other schools, helping them to have the same sort of outcome.

So, what can we do?

While these shootings are largely a problem for the school’s administration to deal with, we can all get involved with the school’s PTA or the local school board, especially if we have children in school. They will listen to parental pressure, especially when we’re talking about the safety of our children. We can ask what they are doing to make the schools safer, research locking devices and push for our local schools to install them and be an active voice for school safety.

Looking at it from another viewpoint, we need to take care of our own children. That means making sure that our children know what to do, in the event that there is a school shooting or a potential school shooting. Children are often afraid to be “snitches” when they think that other children are doing something wrong. As parents, we can do a lot about that, encouraging them to do what is right and even acting as a conduit for them to pass information through, so that other students won’t realize that they were the ones who said something.

I’d also recommend putting a Kevlar pad in your kids’ backpacks, so that they have something to use for protection, should their school come under attack. Putting their backpack on backwards, with that pad in it isn’t guaranteed to stop rifle bullets; but it is certainly better than not having anything. Kevlar doesn’t weigh all that much and Spectrashield is even lighter.

Like aways, its’ all about being prepared; just like keeping your powder dry and your survival gear close at hand.

Dr. Rich

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