Shooter Shoot Quotes

No matter how much crap you gotta plow through to stay alive as a photographer, no matter how many bad assignments, bad days, bad clients, snotty subjects, obnoxious handlers, wigged-out art directors, technical disasters, failures of the mind, body, and will, all the shouldas, couldas, and wouldas that befuddle our brains and creep into our dreams, always remember to make room to shoot what you love. It’s the only way to keep your heart beating as a photographer.

In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock.

When shooting a story about someone, their hands should always be on your list to shoot.

We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of situations. Here is one: 100% of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn't have guns.

Surrender is no guarantee that an armed police officer will not shoot you.

He'd possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn't happen more often.

His fear-inflamed mind sent the control-signal to his finger-joint to fold back. The trigger sliced back. The blast seemed to lift the booth clear off the floor, drop it down again. A pin-wheel of vacancy appeared in the glass, flinging off shards and slivers.

We teach children: Leave a mark on the world. What leads a man to shoot up Souls but the desire to mark Up the globe?

Take a little thought experiment. Imagine all the rampage school shooters in Littleton, Colorado; Pearl, Mississippi; Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Jonesboro, Arkansas; now imagine they were black girls from poor families who lived instead in Chicago, New Haven, Newark, Philadelphia, or Providence. Can you picture the national debate, the headlines, the hand-wringing? There is no doubt we’d be having a national debate about inner-city poor black girls. The entire focus would be on race, class, and gender. The media would doubtless invent a new term for their behavior, as with wilding two decades ago. We’d hear about the culture of poverty, about how living in the city breeds crime and violence. We’d hear some pundits proclaim some putative natural tendency among blacks toward violence. Someone would likely even blame feminism for causing girls to become violent in a vain imitation of boys. Yet the obvious fact that virtually all the rampage school shooters were middle-class white boys barely broke a ripple in the torrent of public discussion. This uniformity cut across all other differences among the shooters: some came from intact families, others from single-parent homes; some boys had acted violently in the past, and others were quiet and unassuming; some boys also expressed rage at their parents (two killed their parents the same morning), and others seemed to live in happy families.

Police Officer Angry Aggression Theory (POAAT) is why you need to video record the police before they shoot you. Always start the video camera at the first contact, as it can go sour at any time and without warning.

the fact that a police officer on TV said what used to be a fist fight or road rage is now a shooting, and what used to be a domestic dispute is now a gun rampage, and what used to be a tardy or disruptive student is now a school shooter, the fact that the police aren’t much better themselves, the fact that what used to be an arrest or a warning is now a split-second execution

I think the shooter is Kevin Burns. I know him pretty well. Maybe I can talk him down." "Are you nuts? He’s crazy. Everyone knows he’s a lunatic. No one can talk him down. Get out of there!" "I can’t sit around and do nothing. I have to do something. Remember what Mom and Dad told us after Father Gerry? If you have a chance to save or protect innocent people, you have to make that sacrifice. I won’t let another predator get the best of me." "That’s not what they meant, you idiot! Get the hell out of there and let the police handle it. I’m sure they’re on their way!" "If anything happens to me, I want you to know you’re the best little brother a guy could hope for, squirt. Take care. I love you." "I love you too. Please don’t do anything stupid." "We’re going to get out of this together. Understand? We’re best brothers, forever." "Forever, bro . . .

Chris handed Caleb the knife. “Here. If they come back, arrest them.” “Fuck that, I’ll just shoot ‘em. If I’m gonna do paperwork, might as well make it count.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

I marry Colonel William D. Fair, a lawyer. Lawyers tell you what’s wrong, what’s right. The colonel shows me that if I don’t do what he wants, he’ll kill himself. Phooey. Two years later he shoots himself in the head with a Colt six-shooter. Am I supposed to feel guilty? Second fantasy.

eight out of ten of the officers she surveyed experienced tunnel vision during their shootings. This is sometimes referred to as perceptual narrowing, and as the name implies, under extreme stress, such as occurs in a shooting, the area of visual focus narrows as if the officer were viewing the situation through a tube. Christensen and Artwohl tell of one police sergeant who says that as a suspect fired rounds at him from his handgun, his eyes focused totally on a ring the shooter wore on a finger of his gun hand.

That’s not shooting,” Dov said. “That’s violence. A little girl hitting a violent predator with a log is hand-to-hand combat and that’s honest. A man, who is represented by a hand, shooting a series of unknown henchmen is dishonest. It’s not violence that I hate anyway. It’s lazy games that act as if the only thing you can possibly do in life is shoot at something. It’s lazy, Florian. And the problem with your game is not that it’s a shooter, but that your game isn’t any fun to play. Let me ask you a question: Did you play

When the members of the Frontiers of Science discussed physics, they often used the abbreviation “SF.” They didn’t mean “science fiction,” but the two words “shooter” and “farmer.” This was a reference to two hypotheses, both involving the fundamental nature of the laws of the universe. In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys. A scientist turkey, having observed this pattern to hold without change for almost a year, makes the following discovery: “Every morning at eleven, food arrives.” On the morning of Thanksgiving, the scientist announces this law to the other turkeys. But that morning at eleven, food doesn’t arrive; instead, the farmer comes and kills the entire flock. Wang

Twenty years ago, I saw a shooter, went by the name Kid Crossdraw, I believe, though everyone just called her ‘The Kid.’ ” Tracy stopped. The Banker smiled and continued. “I saw her in Olympia. Best shooter I ever saw, until today. Never saw her again after that, though. She had a father and a sister that were pretty good too. You wouldn’t happen to have heard of her, would you?” “I have,” Tracy said. “But you’re mistaken.” “What about?” “She’s still the best shooter.” The Banker played with an end of his mustache. “I’d love to see it. Do you know where she might be competing next?” “I do,” Tracy said. “But you’re going to have to wait a bit. She’s shooting at higher targets now.

Like many in his generation, Billy had grown up playing first-person-shooter video games. He decided to take that experience a few steps further and resolved to join a SWAT team and shoot bad guys for real. He visited the local police station to find out what requirements and training were necessary to become a SWAT team member. He found out that the process was a lot more involved than he expected. He first needed to attend a police academy and become a police officer. Afterwards he would have to work his way onto a SWAT team over time. There were no guarantees. During his visit to the police station he learned that many SWAT members were former Marine Corps snipers. During that same visit the cops ran Billy’s plates through their criminal database and learned that he had outstanding warrants for speeding tickets. They unceremoniously arrested him and tossed him into jail.

If you talk to these extraordinary people, you find that they all understand this at one level or another. They may be unfamiliar with the concept of cognitive adaptability, but they seldom buy into the idea that they have reached the peak of their fields because they were the lucky winners of some genetic lottery. They know what is required to develop the extraordinary skills that they possess because they have experienced it firsthand. One of my favorite testimonies on this topic came from Ray Allen, a ten-time All-Star in the National Basketball Association and the greatest three-point shooter in the history of that league. Some years back, ESPN columnist Jackie MacMullan wrote an article about Allen as he was approaching his record for most three-point shots made. In talking with Allen for that story, MacMullan mentioned that another basketball commentator had said that Allen was born with a shooting touch—in other words, an innate gift for three-pointers. Allen did not agree. “I’ve argued this with a lot of people in my life,” he told MacMullan. “When people say God blessed me with a beautiful jump shot, it really pisses me off. I tell those people, ‘Don’t undermine the work I’ve put in every day.’ Not some days. Every day. Ask anyone who has been on a team with me who shoots the most. Go back to Seattle and Milwaukee, and ask them. The answer is me.” And, indeed, as MacMullan noted, if you talk to Allen’s high school basketball coach you will find that Allen’s jump shot was not noticeably better than his teammates’ jump shots back then; in fact, it was poor. But Allen took control, and over time, with hard work and dedication, he transformed his jump shot into one so graceful and natural that people assumed he was born with it. He took advantage of his gift—his real gift.   ABOUT

Barrel shrouds were listed. Barrel shrouds are just pieces of metal that go over the barrel so you don’t accidentally touch the hot part. They became an instantaneous felony too. Collapsible stocks make it so you can adjust your rifle to different-size shooters, that way a tall guy and his short wife can shoot the same gun. Nope. EVIL FEATURE! Pistol grip sounds scary, but it’s just a handle. It’s simply how you hold it. Having your wrist straight or at an angle doesn’t make the weapon any more dangerous. This nonsense has been a running joke in the gun community ever since the ban passed. When U.S. Representative Carolyn McCarthy was asked by a reporter what a barrel shroud was, she replied, “I think, I believe it’s a shoulder thing that goes up.”5 Oh good. I’m glad that thousands of law-abiding Americans unwittingly committed felonies because they had a cosmetic piece of sheet metal on their barrel, which has no bearing whatsoever on crime,

God is not dead— She has forsaken us. We wipe our angry, hate-filled tears after another shooting, as a man polishes his gun outside a mosque. All those stolen lives—we scream for justice! But God has quietly left our temples and churches. She will not return, for what WE have done is much worse. We have murdered humanity. God has deserted even the devout of us who save our love and compassion for those good and righteous, as we abandon the bigots brimming with hate. Yes, those least deserving of love, but the most in need of it. God’s agony rings in our hearts. She wails for the future shooters. Though we reject them, God greets these cracked and confused creatures— the least deserving of compassion but the most in need of it! We’ve read their spiteful tweets, but when we pass them in classrooms, in trains and markets, we dismiss those seemingly small opportunities for kindness. We don’t know—and how ignorant we are— that every time we ignore them, we sharpen our daggers and stab humanity in its pink raw flesh, not in dark alleyways. No, we do this openly in broad daylight, for hating them shows how loving we are. For condemning them proves how moral we are. But every shooting illumines the failure of our collective duty to love as God loves, to be compassionate as God is compassionate. Your prayers heal, yes, but for God’s sake, let God be. I say: First, resurrect your humanity!

I got back into my car and followed the trucks; at the end of the road, the Polizei unloaded the women and children, who rejoined the men arriving on foot. A number of Jews, as they walked, were singing religious songs; few tried to run away; the ones who did were soon stopped by the cordon or shot down. From the top, you could hear the gun bursts clearly, and the women especially were starting to panic. But there was nothing they could do. The condemned were divided into little groups and a noncom sitting at a table counted them; then our Askaris took them and led them over the brink of the ravine. After each volley, another group left, it went very quickly. I walked around the ravine by the west to join the other officers, who had taken up positions above the north slope. From there, the ravine stretched out in front of me: it must have been some fifty meters wide and maybe thirty meters deep, and went on for several kilometers; the little stream at the bottom ran into the Syrets, which gave its name to the neighborhood. Boards had been placed over this stream so the Jews and their shooters could cross easily; beyond, scattered pretty much everywhere on the bare sides of the ravine, the little white clusters were multiplying. The Ukrainian “packers” dragged their charges to these piles and forced them to lie down over them or next to them; the men from the firing squad then advanced and passed along the rows of people lying down almost naked, shooting each one with a submachine bullet in the neck; there were three firing squads in all. Between the executions some officers inspected the bodies and finished them off with a pistol. To one side, on a hill overlooking the scene, stood groups of officers from the SS and the Wehrmacht. Jeckeln was there with his entourage, flanked by Dr. Rasch; I also recognized some high-ranking officers of the Sixth Army. I saw Thomas, who noticed me but didn’t return my greeting. On the other side, the little groups tumbled down the flank of the ravine and joined the clusters of bodies that stretched farther and farther out. The cold was becoming biting, but some rum was being passed around, and I drank a little. Blobel emerged suddenly from a car on our side of the ravine, he must have driven around it; he was drinking from a little flask and shouting, complaining that things weren’t going fast enough. But the pace of the operations had been stepped up as much as possible. The shooters were relieved every hour, and those who weren’t shooting supplied them with rum and reloaded the clips. The officers weren’t talking much; some were trying to hide their distress. The Ortskommandantur had set up a field kitchen, and a military pastor was preparing some tea to warm up the Orpos and the members of the Sonderkommando. At lunchtime, the superior officers returned to the city, but the subalterns stayed to eat with the men. Since the executions had to continue without pause, the canteen had been set up farther down, in a hollow from which you couldn’t see the ravine. The Group was responsible for the food supplies; when the cases were broken open, the men, seeing rations of blood pudding, started raging and shouting violently. Häfner, who had just spent an hour administering deathshots, was yelling and throwing the open cans onto the ground: “What the hell is this shit?” Behind me, a Waffen-SS was noisily vomiting. I myself was livid, the sight of the pudding made my stomach turn. I went up to Hartl, the Group’s Verwaltungsführer, and asked him how he could have done that. But Hartl, standing there in his ridiculously wide riding breeches, remained indifferent. Then I shouted at him that it was a disgrace: “In this situation, we can do without such food!

Good to know,” Reacher said. “Tell your uncle no laws have been broken. Tell him he’s been paid for the room. Tell him I’ll see him later.” The guy on the right uncrossed his arms. The guy on the left said, “Are you going to be a problem?” “I’m already a problem,” Reacher said. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?” There was a pause, hot and lonely in the middle of nowhere, and then the two guys answered by brushing aside their coats, in tandem, casually, right-handed, both thereby showing black semi-automatic pistols, in pancake holsters, mounted on their belts. Which was a mistake, and Reacher could have told them why. He could have launched into a long and impatient classroom lecture, about sealing their fates by forcing a decisive battle too early, about short-circuiting a grander strategy by moving the endgame to the beginning. Threats had to be answered, which meant he was going to have to take their guns away, because probing pawns had to be sent back beaten, and because folks in Mother’s Rest needed to know for sure the next time he came to town he would be armed. He wanted to tell them it was their own fault. He wanted to tell them they had brought it on themselves. But he didn’t tell them anything. Instead he ducked his own hand under his own coat, grabbing at nothing but air, but the two guys didn’t know that, and like the good range-trained shooters they were they went for their guns and dropped into solid shooting stances all at once, which braced their feet a yard apart for stability, so Reacher stepped in and kicked the left-hand guy full in the groin, before the guy’s gun was even halfway out of its holster, which meant the right-hand guy had time to get his all the way out, but to no avail, because the next event in his life was the arrival of Reacher’s elbow, scything backhand against his cheekbone, shattering it and causing a general lights-out everywhere.

Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I’d learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I knew that the PG County police had killed Elmer Clay Newman, then claimed he’d rammed his own head into the wall of a jail cell. And I knew that they’d shot Gary Hopkins and said he’d gone for an officer’s gun. And I knew they had beaten Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a collapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slamming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls. And I knew that they did this with great regularity, as though moved by some unseen cosmic clock. I knew that they shot at moving cars, shot at the unarmed, shot through the backs of men and claimed that it had been they who’d been under fire. These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again. At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George’s County. The FBI opened multiple investigations—sometimes in the same week. The police chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot in Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and someone might call the killer to account. But these officers had my body, could do with that body whatever they pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer returned. He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the stop.

You whom I could not save, Listen to me. Can we agree Kevlar backpacks shouldn’t be needed for children walking to school? Those same children also shouldn’t require a suit of armor when standing on their front lawns, or snipers to watch their backs as they eat at McDonalds. They shouldn’t have to stop to consider the speed of a bullet or how it might reshape their bodies. But one winter, back in Detroit, I had one student who opened a door and died. It was the front door to his house, but it could have been any door, and the bullet could have written any name. The shooter was thirteen years old and was aiming at someone else. But a bullet doesn’t care about “aim,” it doesn’t distinguish between the innocent and the innocent, and how was the bullet supposed to know this child would open the door at the exact wrong moment because his friend was outside and screaming for help. Did I say I had “one” student who opened a door and died? That’s wrong. There were many. The classroom of grief had far more seats than the classroom for math though every student in the classroom for math could count the names of the dead. A kid opens a door. The bullet couldn’t possibly know, nor could the gun, because “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t have minds to decide such things, they don’t choose or have a conscience, and when a man doesn’t have a conscience, we call him a psychopath. This is how we know what type of assault rifle a man can be, and how we discover the hell that thrums inside each of them. Today, there’s another shooting with dead kids everywhere. It was a school, a movie theater, a parking lot. The world is full of doors. And you, whom I cannot save, you may open a door and enter a meadow, or a eulogy. And if the latter, you will be mourned, then buried in rhetoric. There will be monuments of legislation, little flowers made from red tape. What should we do? we’ll ask again. The earth will close like a door above you. What should we do? And that click you hear? That’s just our voices, the deadbolt of discourse sliding into place.

who routinely hit 70 percent or more of their free throws tend to practice differently from those who hit 55 percent or fewer. How? Better shooters set technique-oriented goals such as, “Keep the elbow in,” or, “Follow through.” Players who shoot 55 percent and under tend to think more about results-oriented goals such as, “This time I’m going to make 10 in a row.

I picked out one of my favorite shooters that I could play alone. It was the best way I knew how to vent. Shooting people in the head can be very therapeutic.

Another shooter in Portland, also in June 2017, was likewise a Bernie supporter; he ranted against Christians, Jews, and Muslims but the enemedia reported his shooting of two people as an “Islamophobic... hate crime.”51

We look to statistics for reassurance in these types of case. Here is one: 100 percent of mass shootings have been enabled by access to guns. I can guarantee that even if there were a genotype shared by the mass shooters, which there will not be, none of the killings would have happened if they didn’t have guns.

T = Treat every firearm as if it is loaded. A = Always point the muzzle in a safe direction. B = Be certain of your target and what’s beyond it. K = Keep your finger outside the trigger guard until ready to shoot.

5 Things To Do After a Shooting When the Police Arrive Point out the perpetrator to the police Tell the police you will “sign the complaint” Point out the evidence to the police Point out witnesses to the police State you are willing to give full cooperation in 24 hours — After speaking with an attorney

Four plus One Immutable Rules of Firearms (including dry-fire) Follow these rules both during dry firing practice and actual shooting. 1.  ALWAYS — Treat every gun as it were loaded 2.  ALWAYS — Control the muzzle (keep it pointed in a safe direction) 3.  ALWAYS — Be aware of your target and what’s behind it. 4.  ALWAYS — Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. +1.  ALWAYS — Keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.

victim-resolved incidents result in far fewer fatalities than shooter-resolved incidents. Additionally, police-resolved shootings produce more casualties than victim-resolved shootings.

One of the people who’d cheered him tested the limits later when Trump referenced the recent Orlando nightclub shooting and made the case that Clinton wouldn’t help the LGBTQ community because of her ties to countries that openly discriminated against women and gays, all the while belaboring the shooter’s Muslim immigrant parents from Afghanistan. “And she’s no friend of L . . . G . . . B . . . T Americans,” Trump said. “She’s no friend. Believe me.

In a 2013 interview with academics who do research on gun control and gun-free zones, Jake Berry, a reporter with the Nashua Telegraph (New Hampshire) found: “On the whole, Lott’s colleagues—both in the media and academia—don’t dispute his findings.”31 The dispute is over why these attacks keep occurring where guns are banned: •​David Hemenway, a public health researcher at Harvard, explained: “I suspect that most places that mass public shootings could logically occur are ‘gun-free zones’ either determined by the government (schools) or by private businesses and institutions.” •​Similarly, Dan Webster, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, said: “Schools might be a likely target because that is where a mass of people congregate and those people involve a lot of troubled adolescents who may harbor bad feelings toward the people there who bullied them, were unfair to them, etc. The shooters in these instances didn’t say, ‘Hey, I’ll find a gun-free zone where I can shoot a lot of people.’ No, they went to a place for reasons wholly unrelated to gun-free zones.

One time I asked my father, who was super laid-back, if he believed in evil. We'd been watching the TV news when an awful story came on about some guy who went to a crowded movie theater and started shooting everyone, people he'd never met before, even kids. The lawyer for the shooter said he had severe emotional problems (which was, like, no kidding), but in my mind, that didn't account for how and why he devised a plan so awful and cold-blooded. And I remember Dad mulling my question for a few moments before saying that true evil was rare, but, yes, it was real. He also said that it didn't occur in any other species besides humans, and I believe he was right. Violence and brutal domination exist in the animal world as a means for survival, not as sport or sick amusement.

troubled, Alfred Allsworth (Fred) Thorp, Sheriff of Okanogan County approached the Lute Morris Saloon in Conconully Monday morning, November 9, 1909. Inside, a hard-looking stranger of medium height, with black hair and a mustache, who gave his name as Frank LeRoy, was playing cards at a table. Sheriff Thorp intended to question LeRoy regarding a safe blown in the A.C. Gillespie & Son store in Brewster a few days earlier and two residential burglaries in Brewster. A mild mannered Iowa farmer, Thorp came to the Okanogan in 1900, carried mail between Chesaw and Loomis, ran for sheriff. Armed with a six-shooter, Thorp feared only that some day, he might have to kill someone, which would compel him to resign, and this might be the day. LeRoy sat very still, watching the frontier sheriff approach the card table. “I’ll have to take you in, partner.” said Thorp. There must have been an unearthly silence in the saloon as LeRoy rose. Thorp drew his revolver, “I’m going to search you.” LeRoy turned as if to throw off his coat, and then jerked a pistol from a shoulder holster. The two opened fire simultaneously LeRoy dancing about to present an elusive target. LeRoy got off four shots. Thorp emptied his revolver, striking LeRoy’s right hand, causing him to drop his gun, and hitting the suspect in the shoulder as he bolted out a rear door. LeRoy staggered a few yards up Salmon Creek before hiding in some brush. “Look out, he’s got another gun” someone yelled from across the creek. Having borrowed a second revolver, the sheriff pounced, kicking LeRoy’s gun from his hand. LeRoy was rolled onto a piece of barn board and carried into the Elliot Hotel. There his wounds, including a punctured lung were treated. In LeRoy’s hotel room Thorp found two more guns, wedges and drills, and a supply of nitroglycerine. Two days later, LeRoy broke out of the county jail. Wearing only his nightshirt, a blanket for trousers, shoes and an old mackinaw taken from an elderly trusty who served as jailer, the desperado flew through chilling weather to Okanogan. Three days later, Thorp caught up with him in a fleld of sagebrush below Malott. LeRoy came out with his hands up commenting mildly he wished he had a gun so the two could shoot it out again. In January, 1910, at Conconully LeRoy was convicted of burglarizing the William Plemmon’s home at Brewster. Since this was his third burglary conviction, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the state penitentiary at Walla Walla as a habitual criminal. After serving nine years, LeRoy, in ill health, was released in 1919. He once met Fred Thorp on a street in Spokane. They chatted for a few minutes. While there were, in pioneer times, numerous other confrontations between armed men, the Thorp-LeRoy gun flght probably was the closest Okanogan County ever came to a HIGH NOON shootout.

The uniting philosophy in these cases isn’t religious, but patriarchal. Just as McVeigh envisioned a federal government emasculating the sovereignty of men, school shooter Dimitrios Pagourtzis saw his advances being rejected by a female classmate as a nullification of his masculine sovereignty, leading him to kill ten in the Friday, May 18, 2018, high school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas. Again, as men are taught that emotions are for women and the only acceptable means of communication is anger, their aggrieved entitlement is routinely finding an outlet in senseless violence.

In the shooter hypothesis, a good marksman shoots at a target, creating a hole every ten centimeters. Now suppose the surface of the target is inhabited by intelligent, two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, after observing the universe, discover a great law: “There exists a hole in the universe every ten centimeters.” They have mistaken the result of the marksman’s momentary whim for an unalterable law of the universe. The farmer hypothesis, on the other hand, has the flavor of a horror story: Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the turkeys.

With my own money, I bought a Bauer Super 8 camera, intent on putting my newly accumulated filmmaking knowledge to use. I would make a Peckinpah-style splatter pic with a few Old West nods to Leone and a killer title: Cards, Cads, Guns, Gore, and Death. The plot of this two-minute silent masterpiece-in-the-making was simple. Three cowboys are playing poker in a dusty saloon. One takes exception to the other’s winning hand and shoots the winner dead. Then the third guy shoots the shooter dead. A fourth guy, the sheriff, comes upon the scene and shoots the third guy from behind, killing him. Then he shakes his head in disgust, lamenting the waste of it all. The end. That was the easy part. The hard part was authentically portraying the carnage on a nonexistent budget. In my curiosity about filmmaking, I took to bending the ears of everyone with a specialized job on the sets I worked on. A special-effects guy gave me the intel on how they did gunshot wounds in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch.

His face didn’t change expression, but his eyes glinted. “That’s one of the chances I have to take,” he told her. “I can’t expect my clients to be loyal to me. They pay me money. That’s all.” She stared at him with a speculative look that held something of a wistful tenderness. “But you insist on being loyal to your clients, no matter how rotten they are.” “Of course,” he told her. “That’s my duty.” “To your profession?” “No,” he said slowly, “to myself. I’m a paid gladiator. I fight for my clients. Most clients aren’t square shooters. That’s why they’re clients. They’ve got themselves into trouble. It’s up to me to get them out. I have to shoot square with them. I can’t always expect them to shoot square with me.

There were about fifty or sixty big steers in the lead of our bunch, and after worrying them into a trot, we opened in their front with our six-shooters, shooting into the ground in their very faces, and were rewarded by having them turn tail and head the other way. Taking advantage of the moment, we jumped our horses on the retreating leaders, and as fast as the rear cattle forged forward, easily turned them. Leaving Joe to turn the rear as they came up, I rode to the lead, unfastening my slicker as I went, and on reaching the turned leaders, who were running on an angle from their former course, flaunted my "fish" in their faces until they reentered the rear guard of our string, and we soon had a mill going which kept them busy, and rested our horses. Once we had them milling, our trouble, as far as running was concerned, was over, for all two of us could hope to do was to let them exhaust themselves in this endless circle.

You need to use this as a lever to urge politicians to pass cautionary laws to put a stop to drones and especially robotics and artificial intelligence. People urge gun control after a school shooting, right? Well, we won’t have to worry about a school shooter in the near future because he’ll be cooking up a genetically engineered supervirus in his basement, and everyone on earth will be dead. You need to ensure that these technologies are treated like radioactive nuclear material, because that’s how dangerous this is, and—

Traveler: good. Darkness: bad. You: shoot anything that moves.

He groaned. She groaned. They both groaned as he played with the nipple. There were no words exchanged between them, nothing but soft pants and moans of pleasure. And the splash as something hit the water. Then another something. The faint echo of a gunshot froze him. Shit. Someone was fucking shooting at them. “Take a deep breath,” was the only warning he gave before yanking Arabella underwater where they’d prove a more difficult target. Wide eyes met his under the surface. Kind of hard to explain. Only his great-uncle Clive had ever inherited the famous Johnson gills. Hayder got great hair. Since he couldn’t explain why it appeared he wanted to drown her, he kicked off. With her in tow, he scissor-kicked to the deep end of the pool by the waterfall. Having explored this place many a time when working off some energy, he knew the perfect spot to shelter while he figured out where the shooter was. And then we’ll catch ’em and eat ’em. It seemed Hayder wasn’t the only one peeved at the interruption. But still… We don’t eat people. Such a disappointed kitty. But catch the hunter and we’ll order the biggest rare steak they have in stock. With the red sauce stuff? A double order of the red wine reduction, he promised. Lungs burning, Hayder dragged them to the surface, behind the filtering screen of water cascading from above. The little hidden grotto made a great hiding spot. The shooter would have a hard time targeting them, and the water would also slow the bullet and throw off its aim. He knew they were more or less safe for the moment, but she didn’t. Soaked and scentless didn’t mean Hayder couldn’t sense the fear coming off Arabella. She remained tucked close to him, for once not sneezing. Small blessing because one of her ginoromous achoos might have caused quite the amplified echo. “Was someone shooting at us?” she whispered in his ear. Kind of funny since nothing could be heard above the falling splash of water “Yes. Someone was trying to get us.” Which meant heads would roll with whoever was on duty for security today. Exactly how had someone made it on to pride land with a loaded weapon? What kind of cowards hunted shifters with bullets? The kind who thought it was okay to beat a woman. Grrrr. Man, not lion, made the sound. It was also the man who made sure to tuck Arabella as deep as he could into the pocket, using himself as a body shield just in case the gunman got a lucky shot. The crashing of water, not to mention the echoes created by the recess, made it impossible to gauge what happened outside their watery grotto. Did the shooter approach? Did he know where they’d gone? Would he stick around long enough for Hayder to hunt him down and slap him silly? Only one way to find out.

He groaned. She groaned. They both groaned as he played with the nipple. There were no words exchanged between them, nothing but soft pants and moans of pleasure. And the splash as something hit the water. Then another something. The faint echo of a gunshot froze him. Shit. Someone was fucking shooting at them. “Take a deep breath,” was the only warning he gave before yanking Arabella underwater where they’d prove a more difficult target. Wide eyes met his under the surface. Kind of hard to explain. Only his great-uncle Clive had ever inherited the famous Johnson gills. Hayder got great hair. Since he couldn’t explain why it appeared he wanted to drown her, he kicked off. With her in tow, he scissor-kicked to the deep end of the pool by the waterfall. Having explored this place many a time when working off some energy, he knew the perfect spot to shelter while he figured out where the shooter was. And then we’ll catch ’em and eat ’em. It seemed Hayder wasn’t the only one peeved at the interruption. But still… We don’t eat people. Such a disappointed kitty. But catch the hunter and we’ll order the biggest rare steak they have in stock. With the red sauce stuff? A double order of the red wine reduction, he promised. Lungs burning, Hayder dragged them to the surface, behind the filtering screen of water cascading from above. The little hidden grotto made a great hiding spot. The shooter would have a hard time targeting them, and the water would also slow the bullet and throw off its aim. He knew they were more or less safe for the moment, but she didn’t. Soaked and scentless didn’t mean Hayder couldn’t sense the fear coming off Arabella. She remained tucked close to him, for once not sneezing. Small blessing because one of her ginoromous achoos might have caused quite the amplified echo. “Was someone shooting at us?” she whispered in his ear. Kind of funny since nothing could be heard above the falling splash of water “Yes. Someone was trying to get us.” Which meant heads would roll with whoever was on duty for security today. Exactly how had someone made it on to pride land with a loaded weapon? What kind of cowards hunted shifters with bullets? The kind who thought it was okay to beat a woman. Grrrr>/I>. Man, not lion, made the sound. It was also the man who made sure to tuck Arabella as deep as he could into the pocket, using himself as a body shield just in case the gunman got a lucky shot. The crashing of water, not to mention the echoes created by the recess, made it impossible to gauge what happened outside their watery grotto. Did the shooter approach? Did he know where they’d gone? Would he stick around long enough for Hayder to hunt him down and slap him silly? Only one way to find out.

In fact the trick good shooters deploy is change of focus from long to short and vice versa. And that should happen fast. The modus operandi is an alignment – of long Focus (long term vision) with due validation with respect to current status (short term goals).

He ought to read Mr Roof’s manifesto. “I hate the sight of the American flag,” wrote the shooter, making its stars and stripes appear instantly brighter. In his statement about the shooting,

Why is it only in these gun-free zones that we see so many people killed? Attackers have good reason to target gun-free zones. As shown earlier, concealed carry permit holders have stopped many mass public shootings. In addition to the cases listed earlier, mass public shootings have been stopped in Pearl, Mississippi; Edinboro, Pennsylvania; Grundy, Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; and Salt Lake City, Utah. It has happened at colleges, in busy downtowns, in churches, in malls, and outside apartment buildings. Concealed carry saves lives everywhere. Mass public shooters avoid places where victims can defend themselves. After all, how quickly people can arrive with a gun to stop the attack reduces the number of likely victims and the publicity that the killer will be able to get.

Mass public shootings have been the central focus of much of that change. As we showed earlier, there hasn’t been a significant increase in occurrences since the late 1970s. These are indeed horrible attacks, and something needs to be done to stop them, but the frequency and severity of these attacks hasn’t changed during the Obama administration. By themselves, these attacks can’t explain the change in the political atmosphere. What might explain the difference is President Obama’s relentless war on guns during his second term. Presidents have a huge megaphone, and gun control is an issue that has resonated with the media. In summary, mass public shooters differ from other mass killers in many systematic ways. They usually die at the scene of the crime. And over half are known to have suffered from mental illness prior to the attack. The killers also carefully plan out their attacks: almost all take place where civilians are not allowed to defend themselves. The typical attack involving so-called “assault weapons” is no deadlier than those involving other types of weapons.

One hour later, she didn't know what she was doing. She grabbed Peashooter, and started to make out. They had a baby! The baby was a Sun-Shooter, (or a Pea-Flower) which produces sun and shoots peas. But the thing was that each sun was small and each pea was worth ½ of a regular pea. Peashooter and Sunflower Loved their baby. Meanwhile,

In the aftermath of the shooting, John did not experience any sense of relief at having survived the lethal series of assaults. Nor did he gloat over his victory. In fact, he was horrified that he had caused such severe physical damage to another human being. It didn't help that some of his fellow officers seized upon this opportunity to call him "back shooter" and other phrases used in police humor as a way of dealing with the trauma of violence.

In a study that I did on the years 1995–2001, I found that children under ten were involved in an average of only nine such shootings per year.7 Overwhelmingly, the shooters are adult males with alcohol addictions, suspended or revoked driver’s licenses, and a record of arrests for violent crimes.

A good but plain-Jane drill you prob’ly know pits the shooter against two to four standard IDPA/ USPSA cardboard torso targets. Using a shot-timer like the PACT Club Timer III, from the beep, put two rounds in each, slow enough to assure all hits are in top-scoring zones. Check your elapsed times. Push faster until you start dropping rounds outside the sweet spots, then back off, slow down and work your way up again. Maybe you integrate a reload. It’s sound, but it lacks panache. Kick it up. Between and around those full-size cardboards, add in half-size*, and some 10" and 5" mini-torsos**. Vary your drills; don’t just shoot left-to-right and back again. Shoot the little guys first, then the larger ones or vice versa or “Connor-versa,” which appears to onlookers to be a spazz-pattern. It is actually coldly calculated — by a spazz. Me. The variety is healthy. You can snap-shoot the full and half-size targets, but the minis force you to concentrate, bear down and get squinty. Sure, program reloads in too, and switching from right to left hand. Now add more fun with malfunction drills: Say you have 10 identical 15-round magazines and six inert dry-fire rounds. In six mags, stagger placement of duds, like second round in one, sixth round in another, blah-blah. Then mix the mags up so you don’t know where the surprises are. And on the timer, give yourself no slack for correcting your malf’s. Now for the spicy stir-fry sauce: Between sweeps of the targets, while gripping your pistol in one hand, bring your other hand back, touch your thumb to your nose, waggle your fingers vigorously, and shout as loudly as possible “O ye sinners, now shall ye repent! Let the Great Slaying begin!” or, “For freedom, Fritos and chicken-fried steak!” or, “Back awaaay from the bulgogi and nobody gets hurt!” Note: Never mess with my bulgogi. Never. Or, try shouting “I love you and blood sausage too!” — but shout it in German; makes it confusing and terrifying. Ich liebe dich und blutwurst auch! Exercising exemplary muzzle control and strictly observing all range safety protocols, slump your shoulders, hang your head and slowly turn around, looking dazed, lost, spaced-out ... Then, by degrees, “recover consciousness” and smile. It’s unlikely anyone will be there by this point, so that smile can be very genuine. If any looky-lou’s are still present, they’ll prob’ly be frozen like deer caught in headlights. Perfecto! If you see me at the range and I’m munchin’ a sammich and sippin’ coffee, stop and say howdy. But if I’m shooting drills, well ... Trouble not, etcetera. Connor OUT

The feds say a novice shooter can fire three times in a second—and a trained man can fire twice that many,” Lucas said. “With four trained officers there, all shooting, twenty rounds total, they probably were firing for a second or so. Not as much as two seconds.” Frost was silent for a moment—taking notes, Lucas hoped—then said, “Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem fair, four policemen, behind their cars . . .” Lucas hesitated, then said, “Well, Janet, it wasn’t supposed to be fair. This wasn’t High Noon. The Woodbury officers were attempting to stop an armed bank robber who opened fire on them. This is not a video game where you get a do-over. When Kent opened fire, somebody was going to get shot, and the police officers involved were desperately anxious that it not be them. Go look at a gunshot wound sometime, and you’ll see why.

Those mass shootings that are happening need to be scrutinized for false flag clues, including CIA-mind control of the shooters. We

The London press often regaled readers with hair-raising stories from California and other western parts of America, and Colt’s guns were regularly featured in these. “Scarcely a week passes,” reported one London paper, “without some dispute, when revolvers and bowie-knives are immediately produced and someone is killed.” Stories of shoot-outs were not only entertaining, they confirmed what many in Britain thought about Americans, which is that they lived under barely civilized conditions in bullet-peppered air. Colt’s revolver fit perfectly into this portrait.

If gun control in the US proves impossible to get over the line, it may be time for architects to design new buildings with special lockdown alarms that divide buildings into six or seven sections, trapping potential shooters and denying them access to everyone in an entire school, workplace or place of worship.

Theo’s been teaching me to shoot.” Jules allowed her hoodie and coat to drop back into place, covering the gun. “He said I’m a natural.” “She’s a good shot,” Theo said without looking away from the display. He picked up several folding knives and handed them out. Even though Otto already had his, he accepted another. He had a feeling that it would be a good time to carry a spare. Unfolding her knife, Grace examined it before closing it again and slipping it into her pocket. “I’m not. I’m terrible. Hugh, tell Otto how terrible I am at shooting.” There was an underlying tension to her voice, to all their voices, that told Otto they were eaten up with worry for Sarah. Grace’s attempt at joking sounded forced, and he knew she was trying to distract them from the dangers they were all facing. “She’s bad,” Hugh agreed. “I’m not getting better, either,” Grace admitted. “Every time we go to the range, I get fewer and fewer holes in the target. It’s a little annoying, especially with Straight-Shooter McGee over there.” She jerked her thumb at Jules, who gave a tight smile.

As a mother, I found these school shootings devastating. With decades of mass shootings, we’ve now learned that there is no benefit for first responders to delay entry into a facility. Previously, they had assumed that a shooter had some agenda and that by not entering, police could convince them to stop their violence. After Columbine, police were trained in a new tactic: immediate action rapid deployment.8 Speed, in other words, could have saved those children. It is worth noting that years later, conventional wisdom has begun to change again. The new understanding is that students could know what to do if there was an active shooter if it was explained to them but that formal active shooter drills are less beneficial than once thought. The trauma to students, especially younger ones, outweighs any benefit they may gain.9

When the man went down, Marlow put another round in the back of his head. Marlow then leveled his Luger toward the male barber, who threw his hands up in a desperate gesture to calm the shooter. "Don't shoot. For God’s sake, don't shoot. Let's talk about this. What is it that you want?” “No witnesses,” said Marlow.

It gets worse. Much worse. In June 2017, a left-wing activist, armed with a rifle and a 9 mm handgun, walked up to a practice for the annual Congressional Baseball Game and started shooting at Republicans. Sometime before, he’d tweeted: “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.” My friend Republican Whip Steve Scalise was so badly injured he almost died. Matt Mikaf, a lobbyist and former legislative assistant, was critically wounded and underwent surgery. Another legislative aide, Zack Barth, was shot in the calf. Two Capitol Police officers, David Bailey and Crystal Griner, were injured just before they took down the shooter.

Forty-three percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals prior to their shootings (Figure 15). The New York Times came up with a slightly higher number when it analyzed mass public shootings from 1949 to 1999.46 The results confirm something that we have known for a long time — it is very difficult for psychiatric professionals to know who will actually commit mass murder.

Tears filled his eyes. He let go. “I don’t want to be a wringer. But everybody else is a wringer when they’re ten, and I’m going to be ten in seventy-one days, and then I’m going to have to be a wringer too but I don’t want to. So what kind of a kid am I? Everybody wants to kill pigeons but me. What’s the matter with me?” He said it all. He said things he had been thinking and feeling for years. He said things he didn’t even know he had been thinking until he heard them come out of his mouth. He told her how he hated the golden bird, the trophy his father had won one year for shooting the most pigeons. He told her it confused him. How could one person be both a shooter of pigeons and a loving father?

at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh in the worst anti-Semitic attack on U.S. soil. Outside Louisville, Kentucky, a man attempted a similar assault on a black church, yanking the locked doors to try to break in and shoot parishioners at their Bible study. Unable to pry the doors open, the man went to a nearby supermarket and killed the first black people he saw—a black woman in the parking lot headed in for groceries and a black man buying poster board with his grandson. An armed bystander happened to see the shooter in the parking lot, which got the shooter’s attention. “Don’t shoot me,” the shooter told the onlooker, “and I won’t shoot you,” according to news reports. “Whites don’t kill whites.

Mass shootings are not an inevitable fact of American life; they’re preventable. Mass shooters are people who can be stopped before they do monstrous things.

96 percent of all homicides, and this extends to mass shootings—98 percent of mass shooters are male. The reasons men commit ten times more violence than women, both in America and around the world, are many and could fill an additional book.

for mass shooters in our database, murder was rarely their first violent act—63 percent had a previous violent history. Over a quarter of our sample, 28 percent, had a history of domestic violence, with engaging in physical or sexual violence and coercive control against their wives and families as a precursor to committing a public mass shooting.

A mass shooting is a matter of restoration: Although they are the ones who raise the gun and pull the trigger, mass shooters very often see themselves as the victims; they feel some great injustice has been done to them. Retired senior FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole describes mass shooters as “wound” or “injustice collectors,” people who stew in their anger. They never forget, never forgive, and never let go, nursing resentment over real or perceived injustices until, eventually, they strike back.

nearly 70 percent of school mass shooters had a known history of childhood trauma. Perpetrators with a history of childhood trauma killed significantly more people than shooters without trauma

Eighty percent of all mass shooters in our database were in a state of crisis in the minutes, hours, days, or weeks prior to committing their shootings.

Our data show that mass shooters don’t just snap, acting violently out of the blue. There’s a slow build over time, with air being added to the balloon little by little. Small failures and indignations add up, so the crisis is more than the sum of its parts. For some mass shooters, the final blow is a major loss, such as having their wives leave them, or being kicked out of school or the military. For others, it’s something smaller, like failing a class, being rejected by peers or coworkers, or experiencing paranoia that eventually becomes unbearable. For mass shooters, no matter the cause, reaching this crisis point makes them violently angry and hopeless that things will ever change.

The vast majority of mass shooters signal their intentions in advance, which is easy to see with hindsight but difficult to appreciate at the time.

We’ll never know if something as simple as a positive relationship with an adult could have turned around the lives of the mass shooters in our study, but we know the majority of them had no one to turn to.

70 percent of the time psychosis played no role in a mass shooting, meaning the shooter had no history of experiencing delusions or hallucinations either before or during the shooting. In other words, the data do not support blaming mass shootings exclusively on serious mental illness, as President Trump did. Doing so not only risks stigmatizing the millions of Americans who are affected by serious mental illness each year; it also misses other explanations and motiving factors.

The point here is that while many mass shooters are now household names, shooting victims, by comparison, remain anonymous. No Notoriety seeks to shine a spotlight on the real heroes: the victims and survivors, communities and first responders.

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

our data on 133 completed and attempted school mass shootings over the past forty years show that there were no differences in the number of people killed or injured between schools that regularly ran lockdown drills and those that didn’t. The number of casualties in school mass shootings has remained relatively steady over the past forty years, while our attempts at security have become more time-consuming, costly, and elaborate. In fact, evidence suggests that active shooter drills may do more harm than good.

Mass shooters without a history of childhood trauma more commonly experienced significant trauma as an adult. They were more likely to commit mass shootings at restaurants, retail establishments, workplaces, and other public locations than at schools or colleges, which equally implies that their will to murder came later in life.

[The biologist Richard] Dawkins defined memes as ideas that spread from brain to brain—a cultural analogue to genes that replicate and spread. The concept is mostly used now to describe funny or irreverent images that go viral online and then are altered to keep the joke or idea alive as it ricochets around the internet. But in a digital age, when attackers can upload their own words and deeds to social media rather than relying on TV to achieve notoriety, it has a darker connotation….Mass shooters are unique only in that they don’t want to live in the glory of their newly achieved social status and visibility. They want notoriety, to become legends in their deaths.

Active shooter NO drill Student? dk-pr. LUV-u pray4me Louder now.

The murder-suicide combination of school and other mass shootings is largely young white boys’ way of driving off the cliff at the end of mental health’s tortuous road. Consider three of the most notorious white male shooters: Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook), Elliott Rodgers (UC Santa Barbara), and Dylann Roof (Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston).

Though most mass shootings in the US have been committed by US-born White men, it is rare (if ever) that those shooters are identified by their religious affiliations.

It is but as yesterday," he claimed, "that darkness and solitude - cut off from the rest of mankind like the lepers of old - the dismal cell, the bed of straw, the iron chain, and the inhuman scourge, were the fearful lot of those who were best entitled to human pity and to human sympathy, as being the victims of the most dreadful of all mortal calamities.

Don’t inhibit your hearing. Auditory cues can be early warning signs. You can hear gun shots even when you can’t see the gunman. Sit in places that offer the best visibility of exits and others. Watch people for cues and indicators that they may be up to no good. Trust your intuition. That “gut” feeling is there for a reason, and you need to pay attention to it.

Loop When we talk about mental aspects, or the survival mindset, it is important to look at the decision-making process. A concept that was applied to combat operations in the military, and is also applied to commercial operations and learning processes, is the OODA Loop. It’s a concept that is important when reacting to an active threat. The OODA Loop, also referred to as Boyd’s Law, was developed by military strategist Colonel John R. Boyd (USAF). OODA stands for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action (Sometimes Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act). This was Boyd’s way of quantifying reaction times in combat.

If you aren’t completely appalled, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Though most mass shootings in the US have been committed by US-born White men, it is rare (if ever) that those shooters are identified by their religious affiliations. They are viewed and talked about as individuals, not as representatives of a racial, ethnic, or religious group.

Changing your mindset, acknowledging that shootings happen, and that one could happen to you, are also important. The loud noise may be a car backfiring or a balloon popping. But what if it is a gunshot? If you assume wrong, you could be dead. If you jumped up and shut your already locked door and prepared to deny access, escape or fight and it turns out that it was a balloon popping, what is the harm? A little embarrassment? You can live with that. The key word being live. If you are in a public place and hear something that might be gunshots, don’t rationalize them away as something else. I’d rather you be embarrassed because you immediately exited the building in the opposite direction from the sounds, than become a victim. Better to be embarrassed than dead.

Notably, trained law enforcement professionals when under the stress of a violent encounter often achieve less than a twenty percent hit rate according to the FBI. It is the author’s opinion that such statistics should not be interpreted as criticism of these departments’ professionalism. Rather, these facts underscore the realities of a violent, often surprise encounter. You can therefore extrapolate that if you must run, it is a fair assumption that you may reach safety unscathed.

Pulse shooter Omar Mateen does not seem to have received any direction or support from ISIS or any other international terrorist organization. ISIS inspired Mateen, but Mateen did not report to ISIS, even to the extent that there was any ISIS to report to. Mateen exemplified a new kind of international terrorist movement: a virtual movement that shared ideas and rhetoric rather than money and weapons. Just such a movement of international terror would kill hundreds of people worldwide in the Trump years, a movement of white racial resentment that often looked to Donald Trump as its inspiration and voice. The year 2019 suffered a peak in mass shootings in the United States, forty-nine shootings in total according to computations by the Associated Press, USA Today, and criminologists at Northeastern University. (The researchers defined a “mass killing” as taking four or more lives apart from the perpetrator’s.) The majority of those killed died at the hands of a stranger—typically a white male loner impelled by grievances against society.3 The deadliest mass shooting in US history (as of the end of 2019) occurred in October 2017. Stephen Paddock, a sixty-four-year-old white man, opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas from a thirty-second-floor hotel room. Paddock killed 58 people and wounded 413. More than 400 other people were injured in the rush to escape the attack. After firing thousands of rounds in only ten minutes, Paddock killed himself by a gunshot in his mouth.

Safety is much more than firearm manipulation; it is deciding what, when, and how to shoot. The entire shooting process is subordinate to safety and requires your mental presence. Do not rush yourself or others. When you don’t know something, stop and call for help. Nobody wants to appear foolish, and it will probably take a couple of months for your fellow shooters to forget that you had to ask for help to unload your own weapon. That is a small price to pay to avoid committing manslaughter.

My parents have given me some shocking nicknames. The first one was Poo Shooter because of my ability to shoot explosive poos across the room…when I was a baby.

Thus, the countersnipers are observers and can respond to a distant threat with their .300 Winchester Magnum—known as Win Mag—rifles. The rifle is customized for the shooter who is assigned the weapon. Each team is also equipped with one Stoner SR-25 rifle. Counter-snipers are required to qualify shooting out to a thousand yards each month. If they don’t qualify, they don’t travel or work.

In a 1982 study, psychologists Amos Tversky and Thomas Gilovich discovered that “there was absolutely no evidence of the hot hand. A player’s chance of making a shot was not affected by whether or not his previous shots had gone in. Each field goal attempt was its own independent event,” (Lehrer). However, some players allow a missed shot to affect their confidence, and they question their technique. When they question their technique, and shoot at a conscious level, they alter their technique, reducing consistency.

Forty-three percent of mass public shooters were seeing mental health care professionals prior to their shootings

Being an interstellar trouble shooter wouldn’t be so bad … if I could shoot the trouble!

There are two major types of memory and learning,” he says. “One type is Deductive Learning that comes from memory: You learn that Denver is the capital of Colorado by repeating this again and again. The second type is called Procedural Learning and it comes from repetitive actions and practice, like shooting a basketball over and over until you become good at it. One of the problems with video games is that you’re learning to kill repetitively in simulated situations. You get better at it and you get more desensitized to the process.