NRA's School Security Plan Cites Phony Shooting
The gun lobby's report on safeguarding America's school kids cites a terrible massacre—that didn't actually happen.
Is it a good idea to entrust the National Rifle Association with a role in shaping safety policies for schools? There are various reasons for answering that question in the negative (gun industry profits, for example) but a fresh one became evident on Tuesday when the NRA unveiled its plan for securing schools from shooters: Its strategy includes the use of fake evidence.
The centerpiece of the NRA's 225-page "Report of the National School Shield Task Force" is putting armed guards in America's K-12 schools. Deep into the report, a section on securing buildings makes the case for doing away with classroom windows that may be vulnerable to armed attackers. It cites a mass murder from three years ago:
For example, in 2010 a 16-year-old attacker killed six people hiding in a locked classroom in Hastings Middle School in Minnesota by shooting and subsequently stepping through a tempered glass window that ran vertically alongside the classroom door.
Horrifying—except it never happened. Here's what actually happened in 2010 at Hastings Middle School in Minnesota:
Brandishing a loaded handgun at teachers and students in at least two Hastings Middle School classrooms Monday, an eighth-grade student spread terror but fired no shots before being tackled and subdued by a school police officer.
"It was the closest thing to a school shooting without firing a gun," said Michael McMenomy, Hastings police chief. "We don't know whether he didn't want to shoot or whether the gun jammed."
Confronting one locked door, the student used the gun to break out a pane of glass, thrust his arm through the opening and unlocked the door. Again he pointed the gun at the class, but fled without shooting.
Fortunately, no one was injured in this frightening yet nonlethal incident. That's a less useful story for the NRA, though, whose modus operandi is to call for more guns by appealing to fear and fantasy. It's possible that the episode in question may have been a mix-up; its footnote cites a news story covering both the incident at Hastings Middle School and the massacre at Red Lake Senior High School five years prior, in which a teen assailant killed seven and injured five before committing suicide. But whatever the case, the bad info shows that the NRA is unreliable when it comes to assessing mass gun violence.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/nra-phony-school-shooting
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