#Apalachee High School Shooting

[fag3t]

APALACHEE HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTING

reports of the shooting started 9:30 am, september 4th 2024, but the school was only placed on lockdown at around 10:20 am

the location was apalachee high school, winder, georgia.

suspect was identified as 14 year old colt gray. he is currently in custody of police. supposedly when he was confronted he surrendered immediately.

sources :

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Oliver Willis at Daily Kos:

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is being criticized by Vice President Kamala Harris and gun violence survivors for his comments in the wake of Wednesday’s school shooting near Atlanta. Four people, including two children, were killed at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and nine more were injured. The suspect, a 14-year-old male student, is in custody. According to law enforcement officials, the gun used in the attack was an AR-style assault rifle. Speaking on Thursday at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, a reporter asked Vance to comment on the shooting and to detail his policy recommendations to prevent these attacks.

[JD VANCE: Now look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding American citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do. But we have to ask ourselves—we actually have been able to run an experiment on this—because you’ve got some states with very strict gun laws and you’ve got some states that don’t have strict gun laws at all, and the states with strict gun laws, they have a lot of school shootings. And the states without strict gun laws, some of them have school shootings too, so clearly strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem. What is going to solve this problem, and I really do believe this, is look—I don’t like this, I don’t like to admit this, I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you’re—if you are a psycho, and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools so that a person who walks through the front door— We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to.]

What a jerk JD Vance is for saying that school shootings are a “way of life.” Dear Mr. Vance, school schools are a “way of life” thanks to cowardly politicians paid off by the gun lobby who don’t want to solve the gun violence epidemic.

See Also:

AP, via HuffPost: JD Vance Laments School Shootings As 'Fact Of Life,' Says Schools Need More Security

The Guardian: Backlash for JD Vance after calling school shooting a ‘fact of life’

[orchidvioletindigo]

I found three more GoFundMes for the families of the Apalachee High School shooting victims.

This one is for the other child, Christian Angulo.

This one is for one of the teachers, Richard Aspinwall.

This one is for the other teacher, Cristina Irimie.

Here's the one for Mason Schermerhorn again, just so they're all here.

You can read more about each of them here.

[seunghuibro]

a larger picture of Colt Gray’s mugshot (sorry for the watermark!)

[liberalsarecool]

SAY THEIR NAMES:

Richard Aspinwall, dedicated math teacher.

Mason Schermerhorn, a bright 14-year-old student.

Christian Angulo, a beloved 14-year-old student.

Christina Irimie, cherished math teacher.

This is a heartbreaking tragedy.

Rest in power.

Please remember these victims of AR-15 terror in every election.

[dollielliot]

﹒　　➻　　◯　　︵　　info of events that took place b4 the apalachee shooting　

A week before the shooting, all teachers at the school were issued a form of ID called Centegix, which includes a panic button for any potential active situation in the school. The technology also includes a "dynamic digital mapping with real-time locating capabilities". Classroom doors at the school lock automatically once shut and require someone to open the door from inside if the person does not have a key. Before the shooting, a call from an unknown source was placed to Apalachee High School stating that five schools would be targeted and that Apalachee would be the first. A second call, from Gray's mother, allegedly warned of an "extreme emergency" and requested administrators locate Gray, but they were unable to do so. This was while Colt's mother, Marcee Gray was at her father, Charles Polhamus's home in Georgia on Wednesday morning when Colt texted her to say: “I’m sorry, Mom.”

[victusinveritas]

Half my family teaches or has taught, I work in education administration...

Another part of my family is in the army.

I worry more about the teachers than I do those serving under arms.

[pariahdonna]

fast facts for the georgia high shooting:

14 year old Colt Gray is confirmed to have been the shooter, and is in police custody. he is to be charged as an adult for murder.

no connection has been found between Gray and the victims.

4 have been confirmed dead (2 students, 2 teachers), and 9 are currently hospitalized — including apalachee high school's special education mathematics teacher David Phenix, who, according to his daughter, was shot in the hip and foot. he is currently stable and has already been through surgery for his wounds.

the school year at AHS started on august 1, which makes this week just the 5th week of school for the students.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Marin Cogan at Vox:

At least four people were killed, and nine were injured after a shooter opened fire at Apalachee High School in northern Georgia on Wednesday, the latest in more than 250 mass shootings that have taken place in the US in 2024. By Friday, law enforcement had charged both a 14-year-old boy and his father in connection with the shooting. The suspect, police say, used an “AR-platform-style weapon” similar to the types of guns commonly used by mass shooters. The FBI revealed that law enforcement had interviewed the suspect and his dad in 2023 over school shooting threats the boy had allegedly made on the social media platform Discord but were unable to substantiate them or take further action. Sometime after that, law enforcement sources say, the boy’s father gave him an AR-15 style rifle as a gift. The boy’s extended family has since revealed that the alleged shooter was experiencing family and mental health issues in the months leading up to the attack, and that they had tried to get him help, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the attack.

The details of the Barrow County shooting are familiar. The fact that law enforcement knew of alleged threats from the shooter over a year ago and was still unable to stop the shooting or prevent the suspect from getting a gun points to how difficult it is to prevent mass shootings. And while mass shootings make up just a small percentage of the large number of gun deaths that happen in the United States every year, they are the most attention-grabbing and obvious manifestation of the country’s unique problem of too many guns.

The problem of mass shootings will likely be with us as long as we have more guns than people. “There’s no easy solution,” says Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. The ubiquity of guns makes preventing a mass shooting extremely difficult. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to prevent mass shootings. “One of the big stereotypes, or myths we have about mass shootings in general, is that perpetrators who do this go crazy and just snap,” says Mark Follman, author of the book Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America, and an editor at Mother Jones. “That’s not the reality at all of how this works.”

There are two broad approaches that can help mitigate the threat of mass shootings: proactive efforts to identify threats in advance, performed by behavioral threat assessment teams; and targeted gun regulations like red flag laws and bump stock bans.

Identifying the threat

Mass shootings are almost never random, according to Follman. The vast majority of mass shooters don’t spontaneously decide to pull out a gun in public and start shooting. Learning to identify who’s most at risk for committing mass violence, identifying warning signs and finding ways to intervene, can save lives. That’s what behavioral threat assessment teams do. The process and composition of a team can differ in various contexts, including educational, corporate, and law enforcement settings, but the general idea is the same: the teams receive information from community members about behavior that is concerning. The teams investigate that behavior to determine whether someone is at risk of committing mass violence. Then, depending on their conclusion, the team finds a way to reach out to the person and try to get them support before they commit an act of violence. That contact can happen at the person’s home, but it might also happen at work, school, or another community setting. It’s difficult to prove the efficacy of these interventions, because there’s no way to quantify the number of mass shootings that didn’t happen because someone got help. But experts and mental health advocates say the work has prevented people from carrying out violence, and Follman has reported on cases where law enforcement believes people were successfully diverted from committing acts of mass violence. [...]

Finding gun regulations that help prevent mass shootings

One appealing thing about behavioral threat assessment work is that it’s an intervention that can be done without butting head-first into the brick wall that is America’s intractable debate over gun control.

But make no mistake: a country with over 400 million guns in it, and with gun regulation so lax that almost anyone can carry a gun in public whenever they want, makes the work of preventing mass shootings much more difficult. Georgia doesn’t have safe storage laws, which in other states require guns to be locked up and kept away from children. The shooter’s father, when questioned by police in 2023, said that his son didn’t have “unfettered” access to his guns. A law requiring guns to be secured in the state might have made it harder for the shooter to have access to the weapon he used. There are other specific gun policies that can help prevent mass shootings and might be more politically feasible. Lawmakers and voters who care about reducing mass shootings have already helped push for their passage in states like New York, Florida, and California. For advocates who care about reducing mass shooting, they are a good place to start. One of the most important legal tools available to prevent mass shootings is extreme risk laws, commonly referred to as red flag laws. The laws, currently in place in 21 states, including several after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018, allow both family members and law enforcement to petition courts to temporarily confiscate someone’s firearms if they believe the owner is at a risk of committing harm either to themselves or others. Red flag laws, Follman says, are “a relatively new gun policy that is very important and very useful to the field of threat assessment.” Though critics have challenged the constitutionality of the laws, they have so far withstood legal challenges. Another common factor among mass shooters is their use of assault-style rifles, known for their capacity to rapidly fire bullets and to kill or injure large numbers of people in a short amount of time. Though research has shown that assault weapons bans can meaningfully reduce mass shooting deaths when they’re in effect, Republicans blocked an assault weapons ban when it came before Congress in December 2023, and polls show that while Americans generally favor more strict gun regulation, they are more divided on the question of whether to ban assault weapons outright.

Vox has a good story on the need to stop mass shootings before they happen.

[creamecafe]

To think about the fact that those two students most likely didn't get a chance to text their loved ones goodbye or many others who survived because of the phone policy that they're putting across America is heartbreaking but also frustrating that schools are still choosing the wrong issue to focus on.

[meetmeatthehouse]

gofundme made by victim christian angulo's family to cover funeral expenses

[bcofl0ve]

i don't particularly like to get political on here but man is terribly horrifically hard to be a school shooting survivor in this country. i found out about the new one because i logged into facebook and my feed was

someone i went to high school with posting about it

a survivor i know from a different community posting about it

a parent of a dead child i met through politics posting about it

someone in a support group saying not to watch the news

repeat. repeat. change the order. repeat.

i'm too wired to sleep because i don't know the kids that were in that building today but yet i do because i am them, because a part of me will always be 17 years old in my algebra three class hoping god would really forgive me if it came down to it. i just texted a friend from another survivors community that i haven't talked to years because he tweeted something that worried me. i've gotten a handful of those check in texts today myself. i hate flying because i'm terrified of plane crashes and don't feel the least bit comforted by statistics. i hate intercom systems and police sirens and going from a women's undergrad college to a co-ed law school was hard because i became very aware that the chance of it happening again ticked up. the shooting at my high school was my english teacher's second. i spent a week in dc after the uvalde shooting and all i could think as i looked at my friends is that the only thing that had changed in four years was that we all looked older. i had to leave the political sphere because i sat in meetings- with republican staffers and well-intentioned democrats alike- and just wanted to scream. nonprofits forced "gun reform not gun control" down our throats but it rotted on my tongue and i wish you could say repeal the 2nd in polite company but you can't. good survivors tow the non-profit respectability line. good survivors don't get blocked by shannon watts from moms demand action for years and only unblocked after being part of a direct action that made international headlines. good survivors aren't in the facebook support group for survivors that moms demand and everytown hung out to dry.

to live in this country as a school shooting survivor is to take every breath through a gaping open wound in your chest.

cut that always bleeds i wish i knew how to sew you up right. i wish the stiches didn't always pop. i wish this place was different and that america didn't leave a generation of children behind to just live with their neatly tied in a red, white and blue ribbon trauma or die trying. fuck it all. i'm so fucking tired.

[geminisee]

First hand account via abby.ayerss

(captions added by me)

[seunghuibro]

12-year-old Colt Gray after his first successful hunt with his father. the weapon is a legally owned Bushmaster rifle. (2023)

(for educational purposes only, not meant to be glorification!)