I hesitate to write about the school shooting at Abundant Life school on Madison’s Eastside because I don’t have any special insights or anything new to share.
Here are a few things that should be obvious to any observer.
Madison’s first responders performed very well. Madison police were on the scene within minutes and they entered the school immediately. Madison paramedics arrived minutes later and may have saved lives. It was the opposite of the awful situation at Uvalde. All Madisonians should be proud of our police and fire departments. There’s a long-established culture of excellence there.
Police Chief Shon Barnes provided as much information as he could and he conveyed competence, calmness and determination. Unfortunately for Madison, this may seal the deal for the Seattle job for which he is a finalist.
Barnes reported that it was a second grader who made the first call to 911. “Let that sink in for a moment,” he said. Yes, let us. We live in a society where a six or seven-year old must have the presence of mind to dial 911 when someone opens fire in his school. It’s come to that.
Statements from local, state and national officials were mostly just pablum, but if I were in their position I’m not sure I could have come up with anything better. What can you say that’s new? Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and prayers.
Obviously, there are too many guns and too many of those guns are too easily accessible to people who shouldn’t have them. But if this country couldn’t stir itself to defeat the gun zealots and do something about that after Sandy Hook, I’m not sure what can be done now. We live in a gun saturated country and we’re just not going to do anything about that anytime soon and until we do second graders are going to be asked to call 911 when they see their teachers and classmates get gunned down. That’s our solution.
Despite what will surely be our continued inaction on guns, we can’t just throw up our hands and do nothing. We already have kids doing active shooter drills, which were used in this case. Parents are now sometimes being prosecuted for not keeping guns out of their children’s hands, though so far that doesn’t seem to be an issue here. I suppose more metal detectors make sense. Doing more to identify the potential shooters would be good, but I suspect human nature is just too complex and unpredictable to make that very effective. If you detect a level of frustration here, you detect correctly. We really need to get the guns and we just won’t.
Overall, from the first responders to everyone who dealt with the aftermath, it looked to me as if our entire community responded with as much professionalism and organization and compassion as any place has when faced with this situation — and there have been 400 school shootings since 1999.
Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos 
yes, a very terrible thing happened at that school, but what drove that young girl to do such an awful thing? we may never know the answer to that question.
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UPDATE: “Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said a second grade teacher called police at 10:57 a.m. to alert authorities to the shooting at the school, not a second grade student.” (bolds mine)
Barnes: “The call log was misread”
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With day-after clarity, it turns out that Chief Barnes actually did a very poor job of informing the public at his initial nationally-televised news conference.. Shooter’s age was wrong (later corrected). Number of dead was wrong (corrected several times with different numbers every time). And the biggest mistake of all, the peg upon which all the national stories were hooked, was that it was a second-grade TEACHER – not a second-grade STUDENT – who made the call to 911.
Most reporters soon learn that the first set of “facts” is often incorrect. But Barnes was too cavalier about reporting “facts” at the initial news conference. That won’t help him in his job hunt.
What is certain is that the first responders did an absolutely fantastic job of getting to the school and stabilizing the crime scene quickly.
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Fair enough. It was my experience that information coming out right after a chaotic event such as this was often wrong and I was surprised that Barnes was so forthcoming. I assumed he had his facts straight. He didn’t. I may have been too quick to praise him.
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everybody is in a hurry to get the facts right. well Barnes has egg on his face now
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There is an unfortunately hidden aspect to many of these utterly tragic events. In the cases for which information is known, the majority of the shooters are on some type of antidepressant/antipsychotic medication.
As this might be hard to imagine, I provide links to the definitive text on the subject and to reputable mainstream literature:
Deadly Psychiatry and Organized Denial, Dr. Peter Gotzsche:
https://www.deadlymedicines.dk/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/G%C3%B8tzsche-Deadly-Psychiatry-chapter-1.pdf
Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the Interface of Medicine and Law
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372&type=printable
Antidepressant-induced akathisia-related homicides associated with diminishing mutations in metabolizing genes of the CYP450 family
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3513220/
and a first hand account by someone who fortunately didn’t kill anyone, but held 24 students hostage:
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1641854253496156163/vid/540×360/t2B0ygOh8ZiEC1wH.mp4?tag=14
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Oh come on! Now we are rating the response of people who enter a traumatic scene and situation? Like armchair quarterbacks. The only thing that sickens me more than the shooting is all the after talk about it. AFTER being the key operative here. Also, the adults in the rooms with the shooter, a child, who had access to guns, who had TOO MUCH access to social media such that she was communicating with a 20 year old male across the country, etc., And then we all act shocked and we send money and hold vigils but what we aren’t doing is paying attention to our kids, monitoring their access to social media, spending time with them, enacting meaningful gun reform or anything proactive. It’s like people feed off these events. It’s sick. In other countries they do not name or glorify the perpetrators of these crime. Not in America. The only place on earth with this level of this type of problem. It’s all super sickening. And reading the ill informed post here, by someone so far removed from the events, likely reclined in his own warm, soft home, judging them, just couldn’t enrage me more.
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UPDATE: CA Man Arrested For ALLEGEDLY PLOTTING ATTACK With Madison School Shooter
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