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It is a natural human reaction to go to extremes quickly when facing an unusual, strange and violent situation. All of that applies a thousand times over in school shootings. Until recent times, even the idea of someone shooting at unarmed, innocent children and teachers in a school was so strange as to almost never even be considered. The strangeness, the utter weirdness, has now become a common fact of American life, but the panic reaction endures. The general panic of these situations has spilled over into bad advice given to those who face such violence, advice that could cause more deaths. It was given because people didn’t know what else to say in such a difficult, deadly and sad situation.
The fundamental problem is that a person is using a gun and no one has any sufficient means to answer that violence immediately. Here is a fact, however: if the person shooting can be slowed, they can be stopped. ANYTHING that acts to distract, slow or threaten the shooter helps. It gives people a chance to get away from a confined situation and for help to arrive.
The people who shoot at children are, of course, mentally impaired in one way or another. They are not prepared for violence to be used back against them and, therefore, they are cowards. They can give out violence, but they often resort to immediate suicide when the police show up (they don’t want to face a trial and imprisonment for life, either).
PAINTBALL GUN
How could a paintball gun make a difference? First, if someone could get into a position to fire one at a shooter, it would distract and slow them. Second, it might also blind them so that they couldn’t see what to shoot at. If that were accomplished, they could then be stopped entirely, either by shooting the paintball guns in the eyes and face or by having the police arrive and take whatever action would be required.
Keep in mind, even if someone had a paintball gun in a school and was in a position to use it, they would be risking death. That, however, is a fair trade off if it means saving five, ten or more people from certain death. There would also be a certain amount of risk that the police could fire on the person with the paintball gun, but, again, that is generally, depending on your point of view, a risk worth taking.
No one should take a paintball gun into a school situation without advance permission or without being either a teacher, administrator or someone else in authority. Doing so otherwise could be taken as a threat in itself. However, protecting people against shootings is a very important issue. Shootings are less dangerous, statistically, than lightning strikes and car crashes, but we don’t hesitate to do what we can to protect against those events. We face a serious, on-going fad of school shootings, mass murders that have also occurred in other gathering places, especially at work.
One of the most important aspects of facing an emergency is to prepare mentally beforehand. BAM! The sound of gunfire means act right now in the way you have trained yourself and in a way that is appropriate to the situation. A school administrator who had a paintball gun stored in a desk and knew where the shooting was happening could rush immediately to try to stop it (tell someone else where you are going, if at all possible, so the police will know you are there; another option would be to open a cell phone circuit to the police and keep it open while you attempt to stop the shooting, placing the phone in a pocket or clipped to a belt.) A teacher equipped with body protection would be in an excellent position to have a chance to slow and then stop a school shooting.
The TerryReport will post other important facts, observations and ideas about how to escape violence or reduce school shootings in the near future.
The video below shows a simulated school shooting situation being played out with paintball guns and people wearing protective masks. http://terryreport.com
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