The Errors of Columbine Mike Rappaport

Tom rightly praises this article on stopping school shootings by Dave Kopel.  The first couple of paragraphs were so interesting to me that I thought I would quote them.  The standard line is that Columbine is the result of the American gun culture.  But the standard line misses a lot:

The good news is that, since Columbine, police tactics in school attacks have dramatically changed. At Columbine, the armed “school resource officer” refused to pursue the killers into the building, and kept himself safe outside while the murders were going on inside. Even after SWAT teams arrived, and while, via an open 911 line, the authorities knew that students were being methodically executed in the library, the police stood idle just a few yards outside the library.

To this day, the authorities in Jefferson County, Colorado, have successfully covered up who made the decision that the police would stand idle.

Comments

[James Wilson]

The Columubine crackpot's original plan was to place explosives and start fires around the school, with their firearm usage only secondary. It was a much better killing plan, but that bad old gun culture pulling on their little brains got in the way, and many lives were saved that day. Guns are a terribly inefficient way of killing large numbers of people.

[krm]

On the other hand, if all of the students had been required to have guns and been trained in their use - thethugs would have been stopped right away.

[Ron]

I can still remember thinking, what are the cops doing behind that fire truck? Why aren't they kicking the doors in and killing those rats. If your intelligent you have guns to protect your family against the random maniac but you have to send them to school where their lives can be snuffed out while the police are awaiting orders while hiding. You don't think that the Islamic Fascist knows this, that our children are like the ones in Belson are totally unprotected because of people like Rosie McDonnell.

[TheNewGuy]

So I guess enough time has passed that we can begin shamelessly second-guessing and criticising the men who responded to Columbine. How long before we start ripping on the airline passengers on 9/11 who didn't rush the cockpits?

I'm sorry, I'm normally a fan of Kopel, but he's gone over the line on this one. His perjurious characterization of the police behavior in the Columbine incident is unfair; the whole tone of this is disgusting.

The School Resource Officer didn't run away, he engaged in a gunfight with Harris and Klebold, saving two students' lives. He was correct not to run into the school after the gunmen. He would have been promptly ambushed, killed, and his weapon/ammunition/vest would have provided additional tools to the gunmen. A single officer who rushes in alone, with no SWAT training/gear, against an unknown number of adversaries inside a structure is a dead officer, and every cop knows it. He would have been one more casualty that you'd have had to rescue (or bury) later.

He "refused" to enter the school? Of course it's because he was a coward... probably sat on his fat behind and ate a donut while the kids were dying, right? The truth is that he, like any other soldiers or police officer, simply reacted the way he'd been trained.

Also, SWAT started to make entry at 20 minutes into the incident. That's actually not bad response time, particularly to a paradigm-breaking incident like this one. They cleared the structure from one end to the other, since they didn't know where the gunmen were hiding, the shooting had died down, and they had no idea the gunmen were already dead by their own hand. I would love to hear the critcisms if they'd rushed in, been ambushed, and their tactical armor and MP5s taken from them... I'm sure Kopel would have had some choice words about their rash, impulsive "Rambo" tactics.

Picture this: You are part of a 4-man stack entering a structure tens-of-thousands of square feet in size. Students are screaming and begging for rescue, you're stepping around the bodies of the dead and dying, the fire alarms and sprinklers are going, the water is ankle-deep, UXOs (mostly unexploded pipe bombs) are floating by along with student backpacks, you don't know the floor-plan of the school, and you're facing an unknown number of armed assailants. You've also been trained your entire career to contain and negotiate, not rush the beaches like the Marines at Iwo Jima.

What would you do?

Don't even try to make it sound easy and cut-and-dried... it is neither. As a former SWAT operator, I would never want to be in the position that those officers were in, and I won't stand by and let stand the inference that the officers just stood around smoking and joking while kids died.

For shame.

[krm]

TheMewGuy has a good point - just rushing in guns blazing may well have killed a lot more students. Response times ought to be better now, precisely because these kinds of deranged attacks are better pre-planned now. precisely because of the lessons of Columbine.