Santa Fe: Yet Another Shooting.

Barely three months after the shooting at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, We have yet another mass shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, 40 kilometers south of Houston, Texas. There is little we can say or do right now, except let our thoughts be with the families of the murdered and our prayers with those injured and their relatives. As usual, the president has sent in condolences and tons of promises to rectify an enduring, odious and cancerous phenomenon. We can do better than take him for his words. It is a bit difficult to sift through reports now but one suggested(it may be altered yet) that a boy saw the shooter walk in with a shotgun and managed to trigger the fire alarm. This singular act of bravery and vigilance may yet turn out to be what will limit the casualty figures.
It is a vigilance we've been advocating on this forum. Gun controls and outright abolition are vital but a determined mass murderer will always get the weapons to perpetrate his evil. In the same way that the Prohibition did not deter guys intent on quaffing their whisky or bourbon. Gun legislation need to be tweaked, very fast, so also are privacy laws. That dictum of aloofness "It ain't my business" doesn't sound all that musical again when horrors like these crop up. Safety is everyone's business. Those who commit these evils do so with detailed planning and in most cases a vigilant mother or grandmother or friend or girlfriend, acquaintances or even curious, not nosy, neighbors could have prevented the carnage as a result of filial intervention or simply tipping off law enforcement agents. Nothing is private again when shots ring out.  

Between Parkland and France: Vigilance, not Rallies, is the Key(And a bit of heroism)

Across America, and elsewhere in the world, people are naturally rallying against violence in the society, especially mass murders perpetrated by gunmen. The events were precipitated by by the Parkland school mass shooting in which 17 young, innocent and fantastic lives were lost and since then several measures have been put in place to prevent a future recurrence. The state of Florida has raise the age at which people are legally allowed to possess weapons and President Trump is seriously, for once, mulling the banning of bump stocks, devices that enable semi-automatic guns to be converted to far deadlier assault weapons.
Heinous gunmen like Nikolas Cruz are pretty on our minds now but to underscore the overall danger our societies increasingly face, terrorists struck again in France yesterday, a lone gunman wreaking havoc in the south of France. By the time the Islamist gunman, Redouane Lakdim, was shot dead in a supermarket, another three innocent souls had been lost. A police officer was to later die of injuries sustained in the whole sordid ordeal.
The focus is now on guns but, as the events in France have shown, eventually our attention will have to eventually settle on people, on ourselves. Controlling gun possession is not the ultimate solution, and in this, the National Rifle Association is right. France do not have a gun culture as we have in America but it did not prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons and killing people in scores. A determined mass murderer will always obtain his weapons. Imagine a boy who had just dropped his sister at school coming back home, delving into his cache of arms and then embarking on a shooting spree. It was an act a more vigilant mother could have stopped. Or a more observant sister or sibling. This may sound a bit awkward but the duty of protecting our own societies will ultimately have to fall on us. Perhaps those two fantastic individuals who tried to alert the police and the FBI about Nikolas Cruz realized this. But, in truth, if the security agencies are not being negligent as in the case of the Florida school shooting, several other factors exist that will make it difficult to stop a felon intent on terror. Redouane was well known to the authorities in France but the country, as in most advanced western societies, are hampered by the liberal values they hold. In essence, such countries are eventually victims of their own sophistication. The contest soon ensues between giving up these values and making the most of the security difficulties entailed in retaining them. It is the uncertainties that naturally crop up in the contest that terrorists ruthlessly exploit. Laws in France, Belgium and other western societies go to elaborate lengths to protect the basic rights of their citizens. It is easy for those not acquainted with such societies to think such standards, tenets that really form the foundations of  those countries, to be laced with too much saccharine. Why guarantee the rights of a potential terrorist when he in fact has sold the same rights to the Islamic State? But it is really a vital ingredient of their culture and security agents have to live with the hindrances they portend.
But even if the police are always alive to their duties and the laws could be tweaked to stymie the rights of a budding terrorist, the facts remain that western societies are always very large, very sophisticated. Security agents are always going to be stretched and real duties of protecting our societies from mass murderers and societies will have to fall on mothers, grandmothers, sisters, siblings, friends, acquaintances and so on.
And if we are lucky, on brave and intrepid folks who are the antithesis of Deputy Sheriff Scot Petersen, Resource Officer at the M.S. Douglas High School, who had all the reason on earth to intervene while the shooting was going on but did nothing and went home. Folks like the French police officer, Arnaud Beltrame, who was sorely responsible for limiting the damage the Islamist terrorist could have wreaked yesterday. He was more than just a hero. He was obviously that, by taking all the risks he took. But foremost, he was a thorough gentleman. By agreeing to swap himself for the woman held by the gunman, a lady in distress, he has observed all the rules of gentlemanly chivalry. President Emmanuel Macron could have added more when hailing him a hero.

From Florida to Nigeria, Officers are not doing their Job.

This is a global platform in a world wondrously interconnected and there is a lot to think and write about but it is very difficult not going back to the tragic events in Parkland, Florida. Back to Deputy Scot Peterson, the Broward County deputy sheriff who arrived ninety seconds after the start of the carnage and failed to intervene when he had close to five minutes to move in and at least divert the shooter. He was the M.S. Douglas High School Resource Officer and it is easy to think he would at least have some responsibility to the kids under his watch. President Trump did not mince words in calling him a coward and he is evidently in the bad books of many.
Which his defense of his actions is not going to erase soon. According to him, he waited in inaction thinking the shooting was coming from outside the school. You would think it a bit odd that a fifty-four year old officer with more than twenty years of experience would find it difficult determining the direction sustained gunfire, any gunfire, was coming from. Then he left while the firing was still going on. In fact it continued for a further minute after he had left. So if the carnage was coming from outside into the school, the shooter would not have encountered anyone to confront him. In attacking Mr Scot, President Trump has been badly drawn and quartered in some quarters but it seems our president is now having the last laugh: even assuring that if he had been in the same situation as the Deputy, he would have certainly gone in to confront the Mr Nikolas Cruz. That doesn't sound much like a boast now. We are not really in any position to doubt our president now but paraphrasing James Hadley Chase, if you believe the excuses being bandied by Officer Scot, you would believe anything. Perhaps the three other Broward County deputies alleged by CNN to be also present in inaction while the shooting was going on were also crouching behind their cars with drawn weapons thinking the shooting was coming from outside. In this tragic situation, the law and its purveyors have been in serious remiss. It would have been far profitable if Mr Scot had not said anything at all, allowing us to tumble and tumble in our in distance-effected doubts and conjectures
Which brings us to another serious remiss, the recent kidnap of 101 schoolgirls from their hostel in the town of Dapchi in northern Yobe State by Boko Haram terrorists. You would think Nigerian security agents would have learned from their shortcomings in the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls a couple of years earlier. Especially in a large girls' school in a town just eighty kilometers south of the border with Niger Republic, a demarcation as porous as an old colander. Of course the police were at their illegal checkpoints collecting illegal duties from motorists and couldn't care a damn if all the women in Yobe were carted away by Boko Haram. The Nigerian police runs the largest extortion and debt collection agency in the world and safety of lives and property was going to be very low in the priority of its officers. And for a reason or reasons anyone in the army or government has not been able to relate even satisfactorily, a couple of weeks before the abduction, troops were withdrawn from Yobe, a hiatus Boko Haram did not hesitate to ruthlessly exploit.
From Florida to Nigeria, officers collect fat salaries and give very, very little in return.  And their excuses are even worse than their lapses.