We'd rather kill our own child than surrender a gun. Family Values in the USA. Full disclosure: my brother, a wealthy practicing attorney who was also an alcoholic with bipolar disorder, killed...
We'd rather kill our own child than surrender a gun. Family Values in the USA.
Full disclosure: my brother, a wealthy practicing attorney who was also an alcoholic with bipolar disorder, killed himself with a firearm. I'm not particularly sympathetic to our current 2A interpretation of 'well-regulated' (my state still doesn't have a single Red Flag law on the books).
IMO, Red Flag laws should be nationalized. Furthermore, individual law enforcement officers and chiefs of police or county sheriffs should be criminally and civilly prosecuted for failure to...
IMO, Red Flag laws should be nationalized.
Furthermore, individual law enforcement officers and chiefs of police or county sheriffs should be criminally and civilly prosecuted for failure to enforce them. If found guilty, penalties should include loss of retirement/pension benefits and being barred from law enforcement, private investigation and security work for life.
I’m done with police deciding which laws to enforce with impunity.
I was with a group of friends recently, and we started talking about active shooter trainings. I started having to do them in 2013, after the Sandy Hook shooting, but I assumed that they were...
I was with a group of friends recently, and we started talking about active shooter trainings. I started having to do them in 2013, after the Sandy Hook shooting, but I assumed that they were primarily for schools. I was kind of taken aback when almost everyone else there said their workplaces also did active shooter trainings, and none of them worked in schools like I did. I hadn’t realized that they were so common.
It’s a damning indictment of our country’s inaction on mass shootings that the biggest step we’ve taken is preparing workplaces (and especially kids) for what to do when the shooting starts.
For the other Americans here: does your workplace do active shooter trainings? If so, when did you start doing them?
I started having active shooter training when I started a job at local grocery store in 2011. The content for that course was quickly covered in about 30 minutes and really didn't go that far in...
I started having active shooter training when I started a job at local grocery store in 2011. The content for that course was quickly covered in about 30 minutes and really didn't go that far in depth; a la just call 911 and don't try to intervene.
Fast forward to 2018 and beyond, corporate America has made it into an extensive online training extending 1hr plus. Run.Hide.Fight. is peppered all through it with intense filmed reenactments. Some trainings have gone as far as actually including audio samples from past active shooting incidents like the El Paso Walmart shooting. I'll be honest, that type of training is straight up traumatizing and really makes the situation a whole lot more dire.
We had some really intense ones at the beginning. They’ve toned them way down. The first one I ever did (staff only, no students) wanted to convey the ineffectiveness of a lockdown, so we did our...
We had some really intense ones at the beginning. They’ve toned them way down. The first one I ever did (staff only, no students) wanted to convey the ineffectiveness of a lockdown, so we did our normal lockdown procedure while masked police officers posing as shooters came through and shot us with airsoft guns. It was… difficult. We’ve also watched lots of videos and heard lots of recorded 911 calls.
We also had one (this time with students) where the person making the announcement forgot to say that it was a drill. We all knew we were supposed to be having one sometime soon, but part of the drill was “being ready at any time”, so even staff didn’t know when specifically it was happening. There were several nerve-wracking minutes where we weren’t sure if it was real or not.
At the end of that day, during an emergency staff meeting, the administration chastised us for not telling the students it was a drill. A lot of the kids were obviously traumatized and a lot of parents were angry. When we brought up that we didn’t know it was a drill either we were told, coldly, we “should have known”. I no longer work at that school.
Run Hide Fight is incredibly triggering for me. I work in higher education and I already think far too often about what I'd do in an active shooter situation. And fwiw, I'm probably getting shot...
Run Hide Fight is incredibly triggering for me. I work in higher education and I already think far too often about what I'd do in an active shooter situation. And fwiw, I'm probably getting shot in the process of trying to protect students.
And I've never personally experienced a shooting. I've known victims of gun violence but I just have a very strong ability to visualize and then empathize and it's a great way to make me shut down for the rest of the day.
At my previous company (back in 2016 or so) they began doing annual trainings about what to do in an active shooter scenario. They weren’t drills but they were mandatory seminars and brought in...
At my previous company (back in 2016 or so) they began doing annual trainings about what to do in an active shooter scenario. They weren’t drills but they were mandatory seminars and brought in local law enforcement and the company’s security task force and talked about the run/hide/fight methodology and “see something, say something” stuff. I distinctly remember sitting in those trainings and thinking about how surreal it was that we had to do this. I grew up doing the drills in school but didn’t realize how absurd it is until sitting at a corporate training essentially going over the same stuff.
My current employer does a similar training but it’s all self study but since I’m fully remote, it’s not that big of a deal. I’ve often thought about using this dynamic as a legitimate reason why I don’t want to go back into the office. Im far safer at home and by the company’s own policy, the chances of an active shooter are real, even though the odds are small.
Honestly, there's probably a much higher chance you'd get killed in a car crash on your commute to and from work than get killed by an office shooter. If you ask me, though, that's now two good...
I’ve often thought about using this dynamic as a legitimate reason why I don’t want to go back into the office.
Honestly, there's probably a much higher chance you'd get killed in a car crash on your commute to and from work than get killed by an office shooter. If you ask me, though, that's now two good reasons not to go back into the office.
I haven't worked in an office since the plague, but before that, no, I have never heard of this. Do you live particularly close to one of the places where a shooting happened? Seems plausible it...
I haven't worked in an office since the plague, but before that, no, I have never heard of this.
Do you live particularly close to one of the places where a shooting happened? Seems plausible it could be the result of an "oh no that could happen here!" effect.
Yes, I guess? I’m not saying this to be flippant. I don’t live near one of the shootings we know by name (e.g. Sandy Hook, Pulse, Uvalde, Las Vegas, Parkland, I hate that there are so many that I...
Yes, I guess? I’m not saying this to be flippant. I don’t live near one of the shootings we know by name (e.g. Sandy Hook, Pulse, Uvalde, Las Vegas, Parkland, I hate that there are so many that I can list several just off the top of my head), but there are so many besides those that it’s hard for a lot of the country to say they don’t live near one.
A note on the map: it defaults to showing dots for all gun violence and can look a little misleading for what I’m saying, but if you toggle it to just “mass shooting” you can see they’re still surprisingly omnipresent. I actually just learned about one that did happen relatively close to me that I didn’t even know about.
As a USian who used to live in some neighborhoods with gang violence problems, you get used to it. Depressingly used to it. So used to it that you start asking people questions like "do you live...
As a USian who used to live in some neighborhoods with gang violence problems, you get used to it. Depressingly used to it. So used to it that you start asking people questions like "do you live particularly close to one of the places where a [mass] shooting happened?" and leave out the word "mass" because single murders don't really register anymore.
At my university they don't do active shooter drills that involve students/faculty/staff but they do have regular "drill" style training for the campus police. I'm actually surprised they don't...
I think half of it is to train the police.
At my university they don't do active shooter drills that involve students/faculty/staff but they do have regular "drill" style training for the campus police.
I'm actually surprised they don't have shooter drills for everyone on campus considering that it's located in a "rough" city with regular shootings. I even have a friend who suffers PTSD from a shooting she witnessed about two blocks away from campus.
No one on campus is actually all that worried though, probably because the school is sort of its own "bubble" that seems completely isolated from the city that surrounds it. In fact, I'd very surprised if more than a tiny percentage of students themselves owned guns (gun ownership is already much lower in our state than in other states).
Between this and the fact that our campus police is high quality, I'm much less worried about a campus shooting than I am about getting shot randomly while walking on the city streets.
When I was working in retail before and during college, yes. The videos are usually half-hour affairs that tell you to run, hide, only fight if there is no other option, and call emergency...
When I was working in retail before and during college, yes. The videos are usually half-hour affairs that tell you to run, hide, only fight if there is no other option, and call emergency services when you're in a safe area. Stores all have the expectation that someone will eventually shoot the place up. And beyond that, we actually had (multiple times) entitled middle-aged white guys threaten the women at the customer service desk with holstered guns when they weren't getting their way.
Now that I'm working in my actual profession (software engineering), it's not something any of the required training touches on.
I'm Canadian and we have had active shooter drills for several years now, but to be fair, I think it started because of an actual situation where an armed individual came to one of our offices...
I'm Canadian and we have had active shooter drills for several years now, but to be fair, I think it started because of an actual situation where an armed individual came to one of our offices (which is incredibly rare in Canada to say the least).
I was in one drill at my community college. In university the first year and last semester they did them on the days I wasn't at school, and work from home. The documentation is everywhere, though.
I was in one drill at my community college. In university the first year and last semester they did them on the days I wasn't at school, and work from home. The documentation is everywhere, though.
If anyone else who doesn't speak Dutch was wondering, "gotspe" appears to be a cognate of "chutzpah." So I guess the quoted sentence means something along the lines of "the 2nd amendment has some...
The 2nd amendment is a gotspe.
If anyone else who doesn't speak Dutch was wondering, "gotspe" appears to be a cognate of "chutzpah." So I guess the quoted sentence means something along the lines of "the 2nd amendment has some chutzpah!" which I think is a fun way to describe it.
I've only ever heard "fathom" used to mean "comprehend" as in "I cannot fathom the size of the universe." The dictionary has both definitions, though, so I guess both are legit. Maybe the British...
The first was fathom. That's a measure of distance between the tips of your fingers with your arms spread out.
I've only ever heard "fathom" used to mean "comprehend" as in "I cannot fathom the size of the universe." The dictionary has both definitions, though, so I guess both are legit. Maybe the British use your definition? They're known for some odd systems of measurements.
Fathom is a real English word, though. Gotspe appears to only exist in Dutch, so it seems more of a translation issue, maybe?
If you cannot grasp around something even with your arms spread as wide as they go, they are beyond your "fathom"- and this carries over to how it is used as a concept today, and not actual...
If you cannot grasp around something even with your arms spread as wide as they go, they are beyond your "fathom"- and this carries over to how it is used as a concept today, and not actual measurements of length.
We'd rather kill our own child than surrender a gun. Family Values in the USA.
Full disclosure: my brother, a wealthy practicing attorney who was also an alcoholic with bipolar disorder, killed himself with a firearm. I'm not particularly sympathetic to our current 2A interpretation of 'well-regulated' (my state still doesn't have a single Red Flag law on the books).
IMO, Red Flag laws should be nationalized.
Furthermore, individual law enforcement officers and chiefs of police or county sheriffs should be criminally and civilly prosecuted for failure to enforce them. If found guilty, penalties should include loss of retirement/pension benefits and being barred from law enforcement, private investigation and security work for life.
I’m done with police deciding which laws to enforce with impunity.
I was with a group of friends recently, and we started talking about active shooter trainings. I started having to do them in 2013, after the Sandy Hook shooting, but I assumed that they were primarily for schools. I was kind of taken aback when almost everyone else there said their workplaces also did active shooter trainings, and none of them worked in schools like I did. I hadn’t realized that they were so common.
It’s a damning indictment of our country’s inaction on mass shootings that the biggest step we’ve taken is preparing workplaces (and especially kids) for what to do when the shooting starts.
For the other Americans here: does your workplace do active shooter trainings? If so, when did you start doing them?
I started having active shooter training when I started a job at local grocery store in 2011. The content for that course was quickly covered in about 30 minutes and really didn't go that far in depth; a la just call 911 and don't try to intervene.
Fast forward to 2018 and beyond, corporate America has made it into an extensive online training extending 1hr plus. Run.Hide.Fight. is peppered all through it with intense filmed reenactments. Some trainings have gone as far as actually including audio samples from past active shooting incidents like the El Paso Walmart shooting. I'll be honest, that type of training is straight up traumatizing and really makes the situation a whole lot more dire.
We had some really intense ones at the beginning. They’ve toned them way down. The first one I ever did (staff only, no students) wanted to convey the ineffectiveness of a lockdown, so we did our normal lockdown procedure while masked police officers posing as shooters came through and shot us with airsoft guns. It was… difficult. We’ve also watched lots of videos and heard lots of recorded 911 calls.
We also had one (this time with students) where the person making the announcement forgot to say that it was a drill. We all knew we were supposed to be having one sometime soon, but part of the drill was “being ready at any time”, so even staff didn’t know when specifically it was happening. There were several nerve-wracking minutes where we weren’t sure if it was real or not.
At the end of that day, during an emergency staff meeting, the administration chastised us for not telling the students it was a drill. A lot of the kids were obviously traumatized and a lot of parents were angry. When we brought up that we didn’t know it was a drill either we were told, coldly, we “should have known”. I no longer work at that school.
Run Hide Fight is incredibly triggering for me. I work in higher education and I already think far too often about what I'd do in an active shooter situation. And fwiw, I'm probably getting shot in the process of trying to protect students.
And I've never personally experienced a shooting. I've known victims of gun violence but I just have a very strong ability to visualize and then empathize and it's a great way to make me shut down for the rest of the day.
At my previous company (back in 2016 or so) they began doing annual trainings about what to do in an active shooter scenario. They weren’t drills but they were mandatory seminars and brought in local law enforcement and the company’s security task force and talked about the run/hide/fight methodology and “see something, say something” stuff. I distinctly remember sitting in those trainings and thinking about how surreal it was that we had to do this. I grew up doing the drills in school but didn’t realize how absurd it is until sitting at a corporate training essentially going over the same stuff.
My current employer does a similar training but it’s all self study but since I’m fully remote, it’s not that big of a deal. I’ve often thought about using this dynamic as a legitimate reason why I don’t want to go back into the office. Im far safer at home and by the company’s own policy, the chances of an active shooter are real, even though the odds are small.
Honestly, there's probably a much higher chance you'd get killed in a car crash on your commute to and from work than get killed by an office shooter. If you ask me, though, that's now two good reasons not to go back into the office.
I haven't worked in an office since the plague, but before that, no, I have never heard of this.
Do you live particularly close to one of the places where a shooting happened? Seems plausible it could be the result of an "oh no that could happen here!" effect.
Yes, I guess? I’m not saying this to be flippant. I don’t live near one of the shootings we know by name (e.g. Sandy Hook, Pulse, Uvalde, Las Vegas, Parkland, I hate that there are so many that I can list several just off the top of my head), but there are so many besides those that it’s hard for a lot of the country to say they don’t live near one.
A note on the map: it defaults to showing dots for all gun violence and can look a little misleading for what I’m saying, but if you toggle it to just “mass shooting” you can see they’re still surprisingly omnipresent. I actually just learned about one that did happen relatively close to me that I didn’t even know about.
Well, that's a depressing map.
As a Canadian, it just boggles my mind that people live like that and that nothing is being done.
As a USian who used to live in some neighborhoods with gang violence problems, you get used to it. Depressingly used to it. So used to it that you start asking people questions like "do you live particularly close to one of the places where a [mass] shooting happened?" and leave out the word "mass" because single murders don't really register anymore.
My office at a large company had this, it was just part of the standard “here’s what to do in a fire” type training during onboarding.
We practice then at my workplace, but we're a government building. I think half of it is to train the police.
At my university they don't do active shooter drills that involve students/faculty/staff but they do have regular "drill" style training for the campus police.
I'm actually surprised they don't have shooter drills for everyone on campus considering that it's located in a "rough" city with regular shootings. I even have a friend who suffers PTSD from a shooting she witnessed about two blocks away from campus.
No one on campus is actually all that worried though, probably because the school is sort of its own "bubble" that seems completely isolated from the city that surrounds it. In fact, I'd very surprised if more than a tiny percentage of students themselves owned guns (gun ownership is already much lower in our state than in other states).
Between this and the fact that our campus police is high quality, I'm much less worried about a campus shooting than I am about getting shot randomly while walking on the city streets.
When I was working in retail before and during college, yes. The videos are usually half-hour affairs that tell you to run, hide, only fight if there is no other option, and call emergency services when you're in a safe area. Stores all have the expectation that someone will eventually shoot the place up. And beyond that, we actually had (multiple times) entitled middle-aged white guys threaten the women at the customer service desk with holstered guns when they weren't getting their way.
Now that I'm working in my actual profession (software engineering), it's not something any of the required training touches on.
I'm Canadian and we have had active shooter drills for several years now, but to be fair, I think it started because of an actual situation where an armed individual came to one of our offices (which is incredibly rare in Canada to say the least).
I was in one drill at my community college. In university the first year and last semester they did them on the days I wasn't at school, and work from home. The documentation is everywhere, though.
If anyone else who doesn't speak Dutch was wondering, "gotspe" appears to be a cognate of "chutzpah." So I guess the quoted sentence means something along the lines of "the 2nd amendment has some chutzpah!" which I think is a fun way to describe it.
I've only ever heard "fathom" used to mean "comprehend" as in "I cannot fathom the size of the universe." The dictionary has both definitions, though, so I guess both are legit. Maybe the British use your definition? They're known for some odd systems of measurements.
Fathom is a real English word, though. Gotspe appears to only exist in Dutch, so it seems more of a translation issue, maybe?
If you cannot grasp around something even with your arms spread as wide as they go, they are beyond your "fathom"- and this carries over to how it is used as a concept today, and not actual measurements of length.