#meanwhile the news: people are saying this shooter was bullied and had no friends and thats why he killed!!!

[snekdood]

listen, all im sayin is its pretty funny to me when the same person whos all like "my uwu baby!!!" toward a serial killer in some show also apparently lacks empathy when people who've done far less shit just simply exist and they dont want them to

how do you fail to extend empathy to actual humans but its so easy for you to do with this guy that if he was real would be entirely irredeemable in every capacity?

[schiste-argileux]

Idw Prowl is an evil SOB (took him two years to send the Wreckers to Garrus-9 and help Maxy (who was protecting all the war crimes the Bots did), put Maxy’s torturer and a war criminal on board the Lost Light cuz why not, sent Pharma to Delphi knowing it was DJD territory)

Prowl... Prowl’s creation and competence in his area of work is astounding. He is brilliant, creative, and defiantly apathetic of this world. But, he is very human in his own way. IDW Prowl is selfish, yet not. He is a unique in that aspect because most people make decisions like his for the sole reason of benefiting themselves. But Prowl’s sole reason of existing is to create PEACE. 

Peace. Peace can only be done when people are complacent, happy, and satisfied. When things are stationary. Stable. 

But life is never stable. Elements desire to form bonds, yet are almost always leaning towards to instability... Prowl’s form of PEACE is a world where there is no fighting. But everything sentient requires to fulfill its desires. As long as there is desire, people will fight. 

A world of PEACE would be a world of full control, there are no surprises, no change. Safety, routines, and constants. No creativity, no development... nothing. stagnant. 

But I must admire Prowl’s tenacity and dedication to this world! 

He sacrifices everything for the sake of the directive, preserve cybertron, PEACE. He sacrifices his morals (Robot Gets Bullied By a Human), his dignity (Recent News, Cop Accepts Orgy For The Means of Establishing Peace, his body (Recent News, Cop gets Molested by A Spider for The Autobot Cause), and of course, thousands of lives (Not Recent News). :D Prowl respects and understands that there will always be chaos and instability, and he is so very flexible around it all! He literally can maximize everything and anything he has. He is the embodiment of consequentialism with a lil dash of politics. I wish my group project members were 1% as productive as him! Prowl tries to put everything black and white, and he gets upset when things get far more tricky, and wants to get everything in control so people can stay safe and remain in peace and not fight! And that’s a respectable goal! Control can be good, it means one understands and is able to retain themselves and the thing they are controlling. But Prowl doesn’t want to accept that there are things out of his control. And Prowl likes to think he’s justified when he controls the uncontrollable. 

I mean, yeah, if he didn’t do what he did, the autobots would have been six feet under A LOT EARLIER. Optimus is not a good leader, preserving organic life over his own soldiers? Psh. Look at Spike, he’s got valid points and can I understand why he left the ‘bots. Prowl’s probably thinking everyday, DAMN, OP, WHY R U SO DUMB. LISTEN WE NEED TO FEED OUR SOLDIERS AND PRIORITIZE OUR SPECIES LIVES INSTEAD OF THIS FUCKING CARBON BASED CIRCLE. HELLO??? And literally Prowl could have been like I’m gonna get ya assassinated so I CAN HAVE IT MY WAY. But Prowl was BORN for the RULES. To follow, to MAKE PEACE. Killing the prime figurehead is against that, even if it would make his life way easier! (hence, not that selfish and also sad that your life is the rules. That’s a short leash, but he makes due)

Honestly I feel bad for Prowl. Must suck to be so big brain that everyone hates you when you say the truths (but also you could learn some more tricks from Jazz to be nicer and hide the truth, but that’s scary because a nicer prowl means more people he can trick and use. Thanks Prowl for being so straightforward! Now people can avoid you easier). He's so straightforward about things that need to be done, he’s in constant denial about the grey area of life!

That’s why when Spike slapped Prowl with reality slaps, Prowl lost some of his shit. Remember, nearly everyone had the edgy depressed time in their teens or young adult years where you realize the world is truly unfair and nothing is black and white? Yeah. Slap that on a 6+ million year old robot with a battle computer and is capable of big brain CPU-age, and was literally built for the sole purpose of enforcing rules and making peace? And no one really cared about Prowl enough to understand him and his background. So Prowl goes through his angst moment alone with his huge titties, frustrated. THIS. IS. WHY. YOU. COMMUNICATE. YA DINGUS. 

Prowl doesn’t become a school shooter like Pharma cuz hes got bigger brain and a lot more power and control over himself, but he literally becomes Shadow The Hedgehog (Even if the world’s against me I’ll fight like I’ve always have). HE’S GONE ROGUE. MA’AM, SIR, THE FUCKING OREO COOKIE HAS TRANSFORMED AND ROLLED OUT.  like. OP was the one thing holding prowl back, which was good! But now prowl’s on the roll and bumblebee is too nice and passive to hold him back. + the bombshell brainwash? feels so bad. being prowl sucks. because Prowl is a necessary evil. 

At least he’s wonderfully blunt about his goal to create a peaceful cybertron, which makes it easier if you want to avoid him or smth. meanwhile you have fake people IRL that smile their way through and then slit your throat and you won’t even know it was them (hey jazz, no offense, but that’s what spec ops does). Fakers are the scariest enemy, but Prowl is still a threat, just not as big as a someone who fluffs you up on a balloon and then pops it. Prowl would just be like, hey, you’re really useful, come over here in my white van i wanna show you something and then maybe you get destroyed. But hey! You were the one with the highest chance of surviving compared to other people! Isn’t that great? You’re so skilled WOW. (Prowl gets punched. Again!) Prowl represents the necessary evil in society. We WILL ALWAYS HAVE EVIL people in this world. But Prowl is a far better evil than people who do evil for their own selfish reasons. It’s like how we have law enforcers and politicians . It’s basically giving them legal rights to do illegal things (lmao). BUT we need them regardless. We need those people to get their hands dirty, possibly killed, so that people can live in innocence and peace. 

I don’t think Prowl ever realized that he was a necessary evil, and when Spike showed him that, he was bitter. But he accepted it. Which I respect because most people can’t be bothered to understand themselves and just throw themselves in denial, and point fingers for their flaws. Prowl sucks up and understands who he is, and he makes the best of it to achieve his goal.  I mean, honestly? Prowl is probably a miracle worker. Not in a Ratchet sense. But look at the way modern governments run, nothing gets done, everything is stalled because no one has the guts to make sacrifices. Prowl would have gotten a shit ton of things done, man, and take quick efficient action. Even if he sacrifices many things for it.  (Warning. I do not condone any taking of lives, NO ONE has the right to judge whenever a person should live or die.)  Prowl reminds me of 秦始皇 (Qin Shi Huang), the king who unified China and sacrificed millions to make the Great Wall, canals, and road systems that last to this day. If it wasn’t for these accomplishments, China wouldn’t have been what it is today. Was it a good thing? For the future residents of China? Hell yeah. But the costs? Those are sins that can never be erased, and they are horrible and shouldn't be done ever again. Was it necessary? Perhaps. But that’s another discussion. Is Prowl evil? Depends on your definition of evil. Perhaps he’s justified, perhaps in his world, he’ll go down as the Qin Shi Huang of the Cybertronians. Regardless, Prowl like Pharma, is an EXCELLENT example to study on public ethics, and administrative officials should analyze him and learn from his mistakes and sins.  I think Prowl is not evil in a sense that he wishes to harm others, but evil in a sense of his apathy. Prowl is a necessary component to a functional society (someone to plot, to use people, to enforce rules even if some are sacrificed, someone who can get their hands dirty). He lives a terrible and sad fate, and I do not wish ANYONE to live a life like Prowl’s or look up to Prowl. Yes, he’s so clever and brilliant, but that kind of power will make you the loneliest person on Earth.

Thanks Prowl for taking the entire load of sin on your shoulders! Big MVP! You get nothing from the world except hate and contempt.  I would go on about him more but I have IRL stuff to do. I love Prowl as an example to tell people that MODERATION. COMMUNICATION. AND COMPASSION are important factors to have a healthy and good mental state. Prowl is the perfect example of someone who doesn’t want to empathize (haha so many people are like this today), who doesn’t want to try to use more braincells and friends help to make better plans that are more moderate and not extreme, and who doesn’t want to talk to anyone thinking its a waste of time or have difficulty explaining things.  BUT I LOVE G1 PROWL because he has far more patience and manners, and doesn’t take a darker, route for his goals. awhohdohd he’s baby,,, i wish all cops had patience and manners and in general open-minded yet cautious enough not to be taken advantage of,,,, perhaps then we wouldn’t have so much polarization and fighting with authority in this world.... 

uwuwwuwuwuw they did prowl so dirty in idw WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH ;____;   Again, you are welcome to disagree or agree! I wrote this really quickly so I’m sure there will be points that could be clarified or edited. Prowl’s really complicated and I do not like to talk about current IRL problems, but Prowl represents a lot of problems in society. And I think it’s critical if we try to look at both perspectives to get an understanding on WHY people do these things, and is there a solution to AVOID making those same mistakes? There’s a couple of controversial things in this short essay I wrote, esp. about cops IRL. So feel free to have at it! Or ignore it! Whichever is more comfortable for you! Thanks for coming to my ted talk! Again, Prowl is a bad influence and a sorrowful life to live. please do not try to be like prowl. xD I won’t intrude on you if you do, because you have a right to live the life you want as long as you’re not hurting other people’s interests and wellbeing! 

[lyrazehedgieboiii]

Insecurities

Hey guys! SO, I decided to make a one-shot on how Amy’s feeling very stressed, and her feelings on top of that make it harder for her to be happy. How will Sonic feel once he finds out? Let’s GO!!!!

Amy was sitting at Tails’s house, listening to Tails identify his newest invention, and was smiling, as if she were listening, but the only thing she was listening to was her thoughts. 

  ‘Ugh, don’t you have better things to do, Pinky?” her thoughts kept focusing on when she’d get to go. She started going to far in thinking and ended up hurting her own feelings. ‘Yeesh, you’re so weak, no wonder no one likes you.’ Amy widened her eyes, realizing that everyone had their eyes on her.

  “Uhm, why is everybody staring at me?” Amy asked, not liking the sudden attention. 

  “We were asking if we could have dinner at your place?” Sticks said. 

   “OH. Uhh...o-of course! I’ll go home and start. What does everyone want?” 

    “CHILI DOGS.” Sonic yelled, kneeling down, begging Amy to make them.

    “Eh, I’m fine with whatever you make, Amy.” Sticks said. Amy smiled, not sure whether to take that as a compliment. Amy looked at Tails.

     “Cookies for dessert, Tails?” Amy asked, smirking.

     “You know me, Amy! You’re chocolate chip cookies are the best things that ever happened to me!” Amy felt tears coming, this was too much for her to take. She ran towards Tails and hugged him, and then hugged Sticks, and Sonic, lingering a bit during his turn. As she was about to turn to Knuckles, Rouge slammed the door open, and bent down to control her breathing. 

   “Eggman’s...*pant*...attacking...the *pant* village.” Sonic immediately got up, still a bit giddy from Amy’s unexpected sign of affection, and sped off. Rouge, flew by Amy as they all ran. “What’s up with Blue Boy today? He seemed a little excited, did you kiss him?” Rouge asked the petite pink girl.

   “OH NO, no, no, No, no, NO Rouge! I just gave him a hug.” Amy exclaimed while blushing. 

    “But you wish you could more, right?” Rouge said, nudging her elbow at Amy. Amy turned red, trying to hide the fact her heart was hammering. The team made it to the battle scene, finding Eggman in his Eggmobile waiting to introduce his newest robot. 

   “OH Ho, ho, ho, this robot is sure to get rid of that pesky blue rat!” Eggman laughed evilly, while the villagers just rolled their eyes and watched the fight.

   “You keep calling him a ‘pesky blue rat,’ just call him something else! Maybe...,” Lyra stared off into space for a few moments. “DEFORMED PINEAPPLE!” Amy was the only one that giggled. Sonic glared at her. Amy just smirked at him, and sent a blowing kiss. Sonic went giddy and red again.

   “Ok, let’s take this from the top. OHOHOHO, THIS ROBOT IS SURE TO GET RID OF YOU, YOU DEFORMED BLUE PINEAPPLE!” Eggman shifted to the side, to reveal a 20 foot tall robot, with lasers, missiles, and shooters on its arms, legs, and head. Everyone went straight for it, Sonic being in the lead. The missiles fired, but were quickly dodged. Then the lasers started firing, and that started to get tough. Along with the crabbots and beebots in the background, it was gonna put up a lot of effort. Knuckles and Tails got blasted away leaving Shadow, Rouge, Amy, Silver, Sonic, and Lyra left. Suddenly a missile was fired, and pushed Rouge aside before exploding. It didn’t cause too much damage to her, but she fell to the ground, caught by Knuckles. 

     “Come on Hedgie Squad, we can do this!” Lyra said, stabbing the beebots with her scythe.

     “Don’t call us that ever again.” Shadow muttered, running towards the back of the robot. That wasn’t a very smart idea, because there were lasers and missiles at the back too. Shadow got blasted, and that only enraged him. He ran faster, but got shot by a laser. He gave up, needing a break. Lyra gave up too, because she just felt lazy. She was cautious though, she didn’t feel like this would end well. Silver, Sonic, and Amy were left. Silver got annoyed with all the unnecessary scrap metal zooming around them and picked them up with his powers, and pushed them all together, and threw them to the side.

While he was doing that, he didn’t notice that Sonic was warning him to get out of the way, and Sonic pushed him, but they both got shot by the laser. 

   Eggman chuckles. “Looks like Sonic’s whiny little girlfriend is left. Well, that’ll be easy, since she’s so weak and pathetic anyways. I mean come on! The pink brat can easily be thrown off with a laser, or her hurt feelings.” Lyra and Rouge widened their eyes. That wasn’t a good idea...

Amy fell to her knees. She let out a loud sob. She recited every cruel thing that’s ever been told to her. ‘Weak and pathetic.’ ‘Pink brat.’ ‘Those people aren’t your friends, they just feel sorry for you.’ Everyone looked at Amy with surprise. They didn’t know that Amy was getting bullied. Amy stood up, feeling her heart burn with that same weird feeling she had earlier. She couldn’t identify what it was...

Until Sonic muttered. 

   “Rage.”

Amy’s eyes went dark, along with her quills, and her outfit changed, which surprised Sonic. He was the same when he was in his dark form, he never got a change of wardrobe. Amy however, did. Her dress turned into a dark red halter top, with a high-low skirt, with the back ending just a little below her knees. Her quills became longer, and a blackish aura tinted her vibe.

   “I’m sorry Dr. Eggman, what did you say?” Amy asked, floating towards the eggmobile.

    “Uh...I’m sorry?” Amy leaned back, and the aura only seemed to deepen.

    “YOU LIE! Pathetic old man!” Amy shot some of her negative energy at him, and he disappears into the sky. She summoned her hammer, and it evolved to about 10 feet, and she smashed the robot. It fell back, and then Amy pounded its head.

    “Amy?” Amy’s pupils came back, and she looked scared. She turned back to her normal form, and ran off crying. Lyra held Sonic from catching up to her.

    “Give her a few minutes, bro. Then go.”

-

Meanwhile, Amy was in her room sobbing, her thoughts keeping her up in a bubble. She didn’t know how it started, but wanted it to stop. She couldn’t help how she felt, but it only hurt her more. She heard a knock on the door, but ignored it. She heard the door open, and she dashed into her closet, and hid under the clothes. 

    “Ames, I know you’re in the closet, open up!” Sonic yelled from the other side.

    “And what if I were changing?” Amy asked, in quite a harsh tone. “I-I’m so sorry, Sonic. I-I don’t k-know what’s happening to me!” Amy let out a sob. 

    “Amy. Just open the door and talk to me. Please.” Amy thought that his tone was a bit strange. It almost sounded as if he were...begging her to open the door. She got up, and slowly opened the door. “Thank Chaos, I thought you’d never come out.” Sonic wrapped his arms around Amy, and sat on her bed with him. “Now, tell Doctor Sonic what’s wrong.” Amy put her head on his lap, and he stroked her quills.

    “Well, it started a few months ago. I was walking through the village, going to a local mall, and I heard some teens talking trash about m-me. You know how I am when that happens, right?” Sonic nodded. He knew what it was like under the wrath of Amy Rose. “I hit th-them with my hammer, and they literally started crying. Those weird feelings kept my brain occupied for some reason.”

    “Don’t worry, Amy. Just be ha-” Sonic was cut off by Amy’s growl.

    “Don’t tell me to be happy, Sonic the Hedgehog, don’t you think I already tried that?!” Amy sobbed. Sonic hated the fact that she was depressed. He would do anything to see her smile. He pulled her up, and hugged her. 

    “I want you to be happy, so what can I do?” Sonic pulled back just a little, to tuck a loose quill out of her face. 

    “Well, you can kiss me, take me out on a date, marry me, have about seven children, I don’t mind more. You can-” This time, Sonic was the one to cut off Amy. However, it wasn’t with a comment. It was with a kiss. Amy immediately kissed back. Sonic used tongue in this kiss, and that excited specific parts of Amy’s body.

    “Sorry Ames. Only one at a time, you’re only 16! Chaos.” Amy pouted. “Okay, two things.You are officially now my girlfriend.” Amy smiled, and squeezed the living daylights out of her new-found boyfriend. 

 Sonic wrapped Amy’s hair around in his finger. “I see your quills are still long from that, incident.” Amy giggled a little. 

    “I don’t think I want to cut it.” 

    “And I don’t mind that at all. But, next time, can’t you tell us what’s eating you.”

    “Why do I have to acknowledge that you’re eating me?” Amy joked. Yes, she intended the joke to sound a bit...dirty.

    “Oh my CHAOS, Amy! Way to get a man’s hormonal drive up to 130%!” Sonic said, putting his hand to his heart, acting all dramatic. 

    “Wow. How was it so easy to confess to me?” Amy asked, while smirking.

    “I never confessed! But here it is! I...I-I l-love...you...” Sonic barely said it all out. Kind of hard to explain feelings when you’re ego is the size of an Olympic Swimming Pool. His ego would probably die there, anyways.

    “IT’S ABOUT TIME, GOD, I THOUGHT AMY WOULD END UP WITH SOMEONE ELSE!” The couple turned around, to find the whole team standing at the door. Lyra was recording with a camcorder, a digital camera, and her phone. She even set up a tripod. Knuckles was the one who yelled, just wanted to let you know. Suddenly, Sonic felt warmth on his ear.

    “I love you too. Good job on recognizing your feelings for once.” Amy winked at him and left the room.

WOW WAS THIS LATE. Sorry for posting this a bit late. I started this on Wednesday, but somehow completed this Sunday night. It’s weird because I usually spend fifteen minutes writing a oneshot, but writing this was a bit difficult, because I’m not one to insult Amy Rose. I LOVE HER TOO MUCH SHE’S MY FAVORITE SONIC CHARACTER!!!!!!!!!! I’m very tired because my bed is so fricking hard. 

[underneaththesurface]

The murder of Jason Blossom

Estelle: Good evening, Riverdale. I’m Estelle Ollier.

Omi: And I’m Omi Klyde.

Estelle: And this is Underneath The Surface, where we dive into the history of our town, Riverdale.

And today, we'll be talking about the murder of Jason Blossom.

Omi: The murder that sent this town in a downward spiral...Well, more than it already was.

Estelle: Well, let's just say that it sure gave a couple of families some unwanted attention.

Omi: Their meddlin' days were numbered!

Estelle: (chuckles) And this is how it happened:

Estelle: On the morning of the 4th of July 2017, the twins Cheryl and Jason Blossom drove out to Sweetwater River for an early morning boat ride.

Later that morning, the local scouts' group found Cheryl by the shore, crying.

She claimed she dropped her glove in the water, and when Jason reached for it, the boat tipped over. That was the last time she saw Jason.

Omi: This sounds like a much more abysmal version of Kim Kardashian losing her diamond earring.

Estelle: Maybe if Kim had lost it before people started dying.

Omi: Maybe the Blossoms and Kardashians could learn something from each other.

Estelle: (gasps)

Estelle: I'd rather not think about that.

Omi: Oh god, not like THAT!

Estelle: This is going to be a looooong night (chuckles)

Omi: Don't get me started on reality tv...I could talk for days.

Estelle: I'll just move on.

Omi: Yes, go on.

Estelle: About a month later, two teenage boys who wish to remain anonymous found Jason's body on the river shore, with a bullet wound in his forehead.

The coroner discovered that Jason had been a victim of animal scavenging. But he also found ligature marks, and signs that he was frozen.

And last but definitely not least, it turned out that Jason died on the 11th of July, instead of the 4th.

Omi: Yikes.

Estelle: Y-yeah, that changed the story.

Estelle: The results led the investigation to Cheryl, who voluntarily went with them as she claimed she expected them to find out she was guilty.

Omi: That girl’s been through Hell.

Estelle: Yeah, I guess being a Blossom is both a blessing and a curse.

Omi: I guess so. What happened next?

Estelle: In the principal's office, Cheryl admitted that Jason wanted to leave town and never come back and that she helped him come up with the plan, so their parents wouldn't go looking for him.

They made it to Greendale, and Jason left, saying he'd reach out in a month. But he never did.

She also mentioned hearing a gunshot the same day, and sheriff Keller let her go.

The next day, Archie Andrews admitted he too heard a gunshot that day. However, he claimed he didn't see who fired the gun.

When sheriff Keller asked why he was there and what he was doing, and if he was with someone who could've seen the shooter.

Archie answered that he was writing songs and that it was just him and his dog.

Omi: Was it really, though?

Estelle: Mmm, I heard things but I'm not sure it qualifies as evidence.

Omi: Same, that's fair.

Estelle: Fast-forward to several days later, on the last movie night at the Twilight Drive-In, someone broke into the Kellers' home, and stole all the evidence in the Jason Blossom murder case, including the documented files, background checks, and the video and audiotapes of police interviews. For sheriff Keller, this meant that Jason Blossom's murderer must be from Riverdale since the burglar must've known he wasn't home at the time.

Estelle: In September, sheriff Keller received a text from an unknown number, stating that Jason planned to run away with Polly Cooper as his parents disapproved of their relationship.

Polly never made it Greendale, however, as her parents sent her to Sisters of Quiet Mercy.

They had a getaway car parked on the side of the highway, along with Jason's belongings.

But by the time they reached the vehicle, it had been set on fire, destroying any potential evidence or clues.

Omi: What a coincidence...

Estelle: Mhmmm.

Omi: Alexa, play Things We Lost In The Fire... Wait, is that copyright? Do I have to sing again?

Estelle: Oh my God... Maybe play a snippet?

Omi: Lit... Like that car was. Ok, I’ll play it.

(things we lost in the fire starts to play)

Estelle: I'll try to chime in at a good moment.

Omi: (turns song off at the chorus)

Ok, I think that’s as far as my dad’s money can take us.

Estelle: (laughs)

Estelle: Ok, time to be serious again.

At the sheriff station, as he was about to start investigating the remains of the vehicle, the Blossoms let him know that Polly escaped the Sisters of Quiet Mercy on the same night that the car burned down, making this their new suspect.

Omi: Oh?

Estelle: Somehow, very short-lived, though.

Estelle: Meanwhile, during the investigation on the burned down vehicle, two fingerprints showed up, belonging to Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones.

Jughead's prints were on file from an incident that took place in 2011, where he attempted to burn down Riverdale Elementary School.

Omi: Queenie told me bout that, but I never thought it was true, damn. How did our lovely detective couple manage to involve themselves in this case?

Estelle: I guess, Betty got involved because of her sister.

Omi: True.

Estelle: Jughead, I don't know.

It didn't help him since they took him to the station.

During interrogation, Keller brought up Jughead's school records, stating that he was bullied a lot by the football team, whose captain was Jason, giving Jughead a motive to murder Jason.

Omi: Oh damn.

Estelle: Didn't look so good for him.

However, Keller later released Jughead after Fred Andrews claimed that Jughead was working for him the day Jason died.

Omi: Mr. Andrews always comin' in clutch.

Estelle: It felt a little too convenient if you ask me.

But that's also how I felt about the lie that Jason drowned since he used to be in our water polo team.

Omi: the Jones and Andrews have always been close. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was a coverup-LEGALLY I’m not saying it was though...

Omi: Wasn’t he one of the better swimmers, too?

Estelle: Yeah, so I don't understand why that was considered plausible before they found him.

Omi: It was an easy answer without taking the background into consideration.

Estelle: That applies to half the murder cases in this town.

Omi: Exactly...

Estelle: So, sheriff Keller returned his attention to Polly, who was pregnant and living at the Pembrooke at the time.

She confirmed that she and Jason intended to run away.

She then informed the sheriff that Jason was involved with the Southside Serpents, as he made a one time deal to deliver drugs for them in exchange for money.

Later that day, sheriff Keller received a phone call that two guys attacked an Andrews Construction employee.

The owner, Fred Andrews, mentioned that Clifford Blossom had his wishes to halt the project.

His son Archie, however, suggested that it may have been two members of the Southside Serpents, the location used to be part of their territory.

Omi: Is that so?

Estelle: It was one of the places the Serpents used to hang out, I heard.

Omi: Ahh, okay.

Estelle: I heard sheriff Keller let it slide, though. Which is weird to me.

Omi: Keller isn’t always the most...vigilant sheriff though.

Estelle: True, but his son also worked there. Makes me wonder if he'd let it slide then...

Anyway, let's move to the first real suspect of this case.

Estelle: On October 5, Keller received an anonymous tip, and he and his deputies obtained a warrant to search FP Jones' trailer.

In the trailer, they found the murder weapon in a lockbox, and they arrested FP Jones.

In the interrogation room, sheriff Keller informed Jones that the gun matched the bullet they found in Jason's body.

Omi: How did Jones react?

Estelle: According to FP, Jason approached him at the White Wyrm and explained his situation and that he needed money and a getaway vehicle.

FP made a deal that if he made a delivery for the Serpents, he'd give him money and a getaway car.

However, FP kidnapped him in Greendale, and he held him hostage in the basement of the White Wyrm.

Earlier, he learned that Jason was a Blossom, and he hoped to get a large amount of cash for his return.

But before he was able to make the call, Jason attempted to escape, and FP shot him, hid his body in the freezer, and later dumped his body in Sweetwater River.

Omi: Do we really believe that FP shot him?

Estelle: It is a little strange that he immediately chose to shoot him.

FP was a football player in high school, he'd know how to tackle him.

Omi: That seems like it would do more harm than good. One would think that, yeah.

Estelle: But sheriff Keller got a confession, and I guess that's all that mattered.

Omi: I wish this town would do better background checks.

Estelle: Sheriff Keller asked if FP also broke into his home, to which he admitted he was.

After the interrogation, FP's son and his friends approached sheriff Keller, claiming that someone planted the gun inside the Jones' trailer.

Omi: Oh?

Estelle: But like I said, sheriff Keller got a confession. And that was enough.

Omi: (sarcastically) Of course it was.

Estelle: The next day, the station received a 911 call that someone found a Serpent named Mustang dead in his hotel room.

In his hotel room, they found a duffel bag with a large sum of money, with the initials "H.L." on it.

At first, sheriff Keller assumed it was Hermione Lodge who gave him the bag until the daughter brought up that her father - who has the same initials - was in business with the Serpents.

Estelle: Well. Now we know why they gave up the Drive-In.

Omi: I was about to say... He’ll buy up this whole town when no one’s looking I swear.

Estelle: The world is just a Monopoly board for him. Even in prison. And, surprisingly, sheriff Keller let this slide.

But then, later that night, Alice Cooper handed Keller a USB flash drive.

The flash drive contained a surveillance video of Jason's murderer.

Despite his confession, it was Clifford Blossom and not FP Jones.

Omi: He’s got too many of those Get Out Of Jail Free cards, doesn’t he? Killing his own child? Disgraceful...

Estelle: Mhmm. And let me tell you why he did it.

Estelle: Jason wanted no part of the business, and Clifford feared that Jason running away could lead to his arrest, as his maple syrup business was a cover-up for transporting heroin. So, he had Mustang took Jason to the White Wyrm and later shot him.

Clifford then murdered Mustang and staged it as a suicide.

Arriving at Thornhill to arrest Clifford, they found Clifford in the barns where he hung himself.

Omi: Well, that was a rollercoaster.

Estelle: (laughs) I spent so much time trying to make sense of it for tonight. It's impossible.

Omi: I’m still not processing it. Like...what??? How the??? What??? That’s insane!

Estelle: It's like an episode of Dynasty.

Omi: I haven’t gotten to that show yet... Is it really?

Estelle: (sighs)

Estelle: Yes.

Omi: I'll put in on my list then.

Estelle: Back to the drama in our town:

Now that the real murderer was revealed, some people started to wonder what this meant for FP Jones.

Omi: Well, they obviously let him out, right? Or did he have a different but equally as essential role to play in this?

Estelle: Well, he was still guilty of tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice, mishandling a body, perjury, etc.

So, he still remained in custody.

However, Sheriff Keller offered FP a deal that the DA and Mayor McCoy were willing to offer him leniency if he handed them the names of the drug dealers.

Estelle: Basically, throwing his own people under the bus.

Omi: isn’t that like, against serpent law?

Estelle: It's one of their most important ones, so I've heard.

Omi: same. Damn...and he’s still the leader?

Estelle: Which is why he declined the offer, and had to await trial, possibly facing twenty years.

Omi: well that’s good at least...the not breaking rules part.

Estelle: Yeah you might go to prison and won't be out until you're well into your sixties but-

hey, at least you didn't snitch on your buddies.

Omi: that just seems like a lose-lose situation

Estelle: I know he made the better choice given his environment, but-

yeah.

Estelle: Well, I guess we reached the end of this episode of Underneath The Surface. I'm Estelle.

Omi: And I'm Omi.

Estelle: Don’t forget to tune in next week, and join us for our next topic: the horror on Wabash Avenue.

Omi: See y'all then!

[nancygduarteus]

America’s Unending Tragedy

LITTLETON, Colo.—Evan Todd, then a sophomore at Columbine High School, was in the library on the day 19 years ago when Eric Harris appeared in the doorway, wielding a shotgun. Harris fired in his direction. Debris, shrapnel, and buckshot hit Todd’s lower back; he fell to the ground and ducked behind a copy machine. Harris fired several more shots toward Todd’s head, splintering a desk and driving wood chips into Todd’s left eye.

Todd listened for several more minutes as Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates, taunting them as they screamed. Todd prayed silently: “God, let me live.”

Then Klebold pulled back a chair and found Todd hiding underneath a table.

He put a gun to Todd’s head. "Why shouldn't I kill you?" he asked.

“I've been good to you,” Todd said.

Klebold looked at Harris. “You can kill him if you want,” Klebold told his teenage co-conspirator.

No one knows why—indeed, no one knows the “why” behind such violence—but that’s when Harris and Klebold left the library. Todd got to live.

Thirteen people did not, though. Today, that’s why Todd supports allowing teachers to have guns in schools. Teachers shouldn’t be required to be armed, he says, but if they already have a concealed-weapons permit, and they’re already comfortable using a gun, why not let them have it with them in school, the place they are most of the day, and the place where these attacks happen over and over again?

Today, Todd is a stocky, bearded manager of construction projects, and describes himself as a history buff. He grew up around guns, but after Columbine, he thought hard about whether easy access to them might have been what caused the shooting. No, he decided. “We've always had guns since the beginning of the founding of our country, but what we haven't always had are children murdering children,” he told me over coffee this week. “Something has changed.” Todd believes school shootings are motivated by a fundamental lack of respect for human life.

The way Todd sees it, “liberals like to control others and conservatives like to control themselves.” He glanced around the Starbucks where we were sitting. Statistically, he said, four people there were likely have guns on them. Being near four guns might scare many liberals. Many conservatives, though, would want to be one of the four with a gun.

The gun debate is an odd one because, at some level, everyone agrees on what they want: No more Columbines. No more Parklands. Most people affected by the Columbine massacre can even agree on what definitely didn’t cause it. After the shooting, Columbine developed a reputation as a toxic school where jocks tormented “geeks” like Harris and Klebold. But it’s a stretch to say the shooters were pitiable outcasts, bullied until they snapped. In reality, they were budding little fascists who wore swastikas on their clothes and spewed racial slurs as they gunned down black classmates. Kumbaya circles wouldn’t have fixed that.

The Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colo. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

But, nearly 20 years later, not even people in Littleton can agree whether the best way to prevent another Columbine is more guns or fewer. Todd’s experience—a 15-year-old whose brush with death-by-gun led him to respect guns more—helps to explain why there have been so few new federal gun restrictions since Columbine.

There have been at least 10 mass school shootings in the years since, which have claimed at least 122 lives. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of young people will march on Washington to show just how much this disgusts them. They believe they will be the ones to end the most calcified cultural stalemate of our time: that Americans fundamentally do not agree on whether guns are dangerous—or essential.

Todd worries that if more guns are removed from the hands of law-abiding citizens, a tyrannical government could take over—we could see an American Stalin or Mao. “More people would be murdered without the Second Amendment,” he said.

In the nearby town of Centennial, 64-year-old Carol Schuster said that’s one thing that keeps many conservatives from supporting gun control. “They’re afraid of the government,” she told me. She knows because she used to be one.

Schuster and her husband, Bill, own a company that sells big mobile filing cabinets, the kind that doctors use to store their patient records. Like many small-business owners, they long voted Republican.

The Schusters were terrified when Columbine happened, but they didn’t think it would keep happening. Those shooters were freaks, juvenile delinquents. “Another school shooting” hadn’t yet become a thing Americans say almost every month.

Carol Schuster at her home in Centennial, Colo. on March 20 (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

Then came the Sandy Hook shooting, in which six- and seven-year-olds were mowed down as they cowered in their elementary-school bathroom. Schuster began to feel like her party wasn’t doing enough. (Just this week, Republican state legislators in Colorado rejected a ban on bump stocks, the devices used by the Las Vegas gunman that allowed his rifles to fire faster.) She attended a meeting of Colorado Ceasefire, a local gun-control group, and she was the only Republican there. “Oh,” she thought. “These Democrats really are nice people.” In 2016, Schuster voted for Hillary Clinton as a single-issue voter on guns.

Today, one portion of her office wall is devoted to photos of her family, another to pictures of dogs, and another to the front pages of newspapers covering all the mass shootings that have taken place since Columbine. “Important things,” she explained.

When she saw the Parkland shooting on TV, she decided she would go to Washington on Saturday to take part in the March for Our Lives. Her sign will read, “Former Republican for sensible gun laws.”

Schuster asked me where I was going next, and I told her I’d be interviewing Patrick Neville, a former Columbine student who survived the massacre and is now a Republican State Representative who supports concealed carry among teachers. Schuster said she had a lot of questions for him.

When I arrived at his office in the Capitol building in Denver, Neville looked red and tired. His press secretary seemed weary, too, from listening to dozens of voicemail messages, many of which wished to inform her that her boss was a “fucking asshole.” A bill Neville introduced, scheduled for a hearing just days after the Parkland shooting, called for allowing concealed-carry permit holders to bring their guns inside schools. “Get your head out of your ass!” one woman’s voice screamed on the answering machine. “Protect these children!” (Todd gets angry messages, too—including from people who tell him they wish he died at Columbine. The Schusters, meanwhile, say they get run off the road for their gun-control bumper stickers.)

Neville wasn’t inside Columbine when the shooting happened. He was just outside the building, skipping class to go smoke with friends. When he realized what was happening, he ran to a nearby house and called his mom. “I’m not going to be able to get to my next class,” he told her.

If Republicans are afraid of government overreach, then on the other side, “there’s an irrational fear of guns,” Neville said. Todd and Neville see guns as “tools” that can be safely used for fun or protection. Like Todd, Neville believes shooters target gun-free zones like schools because they know they won’t meet resistance. Not knowing which teacher might be armed is a “huge tactical advantage,” Neville argued. To protect his three young daughters, he plans to send them to a private high school, where teachers can carry guns.

This was the fourth time Neville sponsored the concealed-carry bill, and it failed like it always does, but he plans to introduce it again. Why? “Never a wrong time to do the right thing,” he said. The morning we spoke, another school shooting had taken place in Maryland.

Littleton, a Denver suburb, in many ways offers a typical middle-American landscape—dotted with drab office parks and Outback Steakhouses. Less typical are the striking, snow-streaked mountains, which loom in the background.

The light-beige Columbine High School building gets threats all the time. It’s the unholiest of holy sites: Several times a day, a security guard told me, random people stop by to take pictures or just to take a morbid look. The guard can’t allow them to do that; he can’t make the kids relive it that often.

Another security guard in the student parking lot kept a wary eye on me. But at 2:45, the glass doors swung open and perfectly normal students burst out of a perfectly normal school, laughing and asking each other about homework assignments. Among them was Kaylee Tyner, a junior who organized Columbine’s student walkout for gun control, which happened earlier this month.

Kaylee Tyner at her home in Littleton, Colo. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

The day I met up with Tyner, she had called a handful of her classmates to her house to make signs for Saturday’s march. Her friends plan to go to the local march in Denver, but Tyner will travel all the way to Washington with her mom. On top of her political advocacy, Tyner is in four AP classes, several clubs, and works as a waitress at a retirement home.

Tyner peeled a sticky note off the window of her Nissan—she’s in a club whose members leave encouraging messages for one another—and drove the four minutes from her school to her house. She put out some snacks and brought up tempera paints from the basement. The other girls trickled in a few minutes later. They huddled around Tyner’s dining-room table and laid out orange, black, and white poster boards. They’re Columbine’s core group of activists, and it’s something they’re surprisingly secure about. Once, a boy said something like “oh, there go the feminists” as they walked by, and one of them, 16-year-old Mikaela Lawrence, said simply, “Chh—yeah!”

The girls might get their news from social-media sites like Twitter, but, they tell me, they’re careful to check it against other sites to be sure it’s not “fake news.” Rachel Hill, a cheery 16-year-old, easily rattled off the gun measures she’d like to see: universal background checks, a ban on bump stocks, higher age limits and longer waiting periods. She painted a sign that read, “I have thought. I have prayed. Nothing changed.”

Kaylee and a few friends work on signs for March for Our Lives on March 21, 2018, in Littleton, Colo.

The day after the Parkland shooting, the halls of Columbine were unusually quiet. Despite all the security, kids at Columbine periodically worry about another shooting happening there. Some of their teachers have panic attacks when the fire alarms go off, the girls said.

“We’re not gonna stop fighting until laws are passed,” said 14-year-old Annie Barrows, laying down her paint brush and hammering her fist into her hand. “There’s blood spilling on the floors of American classrooms.”

Kids who go to Columbine rarely joke about the shooting, but students from other schools sometimes make crass remarks, the girls said. “Going to Columbine, we don’t get to pick the label for our school,” Tyner said. “We’re one of the most infamous schools in America. We’re trying to show people that this affects your community for decades.”

One day in early April 1999, Daniel Mauser, a blond-haired, bespectacled Columbine sophomore, came home and asked his father, Tom Mauser, “Did you know there are loopholes in the Brady bill?”—the national law that requires background checks for gun purchasers. Tom didn’t think much of it. Daniel was on the debate team; he and his conservative classmate, Patrick Neville, would sometimes argue about politics.

Two weeks later, the day of the Columbine shooting, Tom didn’t know whether Daniel was alive or dead for nearly 24 hours. Late that night, authorities called to ask what Daniel had been wearing, or if the Mausers had any dental records. They said the Mausers would hear more in the morning. The following day at noon, the sheriff came along with some grief counselors to tell Tom that Daniel had been shot to death.

The Mausers stayed in the area, but they couldn’t bring themselves to send their surviving daughter to Columbine. Instead, she went to the nearby Arapahoe High School. It, too, had a shooting, after she graduated.

Tom, who worked for the state’s transportation department, took on a second role as a spokesperson for Colorado Ceasefire. He and his son shared a shoe size; he began wearing Daniel’s black-and-gray Vans to testify at hearings. In 2000, he successfully helped push through a measure to close the state’s gun-show loophole. He’s one of the few Columbine parents who speaks out about guns; some others support him but find it too painful to talk about, he says.

Over lunch at Panera Bread, he told me he doesn’t support arming teachers—there’s too much of a risk of crossfire, accidents, or police not knowing who the true “bad guy” is in a hectic shooting situation, he said. And what, are we going to hold first-grade teachers accountable for acting as soldiers would in combat? Many Republicans, he argued, seemingly “cannot acknowledge the danger caused by guns.” (Many Republicans, of course, argue Democrats can’t acknowledge the danger caused by restricting guns.)

One of the most helpful gun measures, he thinks, would be a state- or nation-wide red-flag law, allowing family members or law-enforcement officers to ask a judge to temporarily take away the guns of someone who seems dangerous.

At this point, a woman approached our table to thank Tom for his efforts. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The following day, Tom planned to go for a bike ride in the 70-degree weather, enjoy his retirement a little. But for the moment, he went back to talking about his dead son with yet another reporter. Because Columbine High has a stain, but so does the whole country, and it will endure until there aren’t any more stories like this left to tell. So he tells it.

Like Evan Todd, Daniel Mauser was in the library. Eric Harris insulted him, then fired his rifle and hit Daniel in the hand. Then the mild-mannered Daniel fought back—he pushed a chair at Harris. Harris responded by shooting him in the face.

I sat there speechless as Tom Mauser calmly ate a spoonful of soup. “This is America,” he said.

(Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/littleton-columbine/556358/?utm_source=feed

[nemossubmarine]

DA RP Write-Up #14.1

Oh man, it’s the 14th adventure already? Time sure flies. This time we don’t quite yet make it to Orzammar for reasons that will become apparent soon. 

Our adventuring group has made it back to Redcliffe, where our bronto, dwarf friends and cart are waiting for us. We spend the night and are to leave in the morning.

Morning finds Boshara, cranky and drunk off her ass, at the bar. She has apparently been drinking the whole night. When Humbert tries to get her up and off to her room, she starts shouting.

She reveals that Randy, drunk as well, told her that Humbert is her father and how he had molested her mother and...

Humbert wakes up in cold sweat from this nightmare.

The morning in Redcliffe brings up no drunken trouble, and there’s even some time to do shopping before we go.

Boshara, with Alf’s knowledge of the criminal underground, finds a magic shop, where she purchases a new wand and also a magical necklace for Elspet. Alf steals a golden ring.

Cahair and Elspet go to a woodcarver’s so Cahair can buy a new staff (bc his old one got destroyed in Tevinter). Cahair also buys a small carved box for Richard, tho now he has to figure out what to put in there.

Our heroes head off, and for the most part the traveling is uneventful, although there seems to be a lot of templars on the road, which is rather spooky.

But it all goes well, our heroes are nearing the gates of Orzammar, when we ran into a turned-over cart on the road.

Cahair goes to investigate and finds a small dwarven child hiding under there. The dwarven child is rather scared (Boshara, who isn’t good with children, doesn’t help), but Cahair manages to persuade him to come out. His name is Trin, he was playing outside when he ran into some wolves and had to hide.

We agree to take him to his grandpa’s place near, but not before Humbert throws him up and down a bit, bc that’s what the kids these days are into.

We make it to Trin’s grandpa’s Ortag Punchfist’s house. Ortag is very delighted to have his grandson back.

We introduce ourselves. Well, Humbert does most of the introducing at first, but when he tries to introduce Cahair as “just Cahair”, Cahair quickly corrects him with the clan name attached.

Ortag offers us some food, which we happily take.

While we’re eating we talk to Ortag about Orzammar. Apparently he left, so that Trin would have a better life, because Trin’s mother was of lower caste.

When he hears about Randy, he is quick to start telling stories how he knew Mandulfr when they were kids, and apparently bullied him.

After food, Ortag says he’ll go get something relating to Mandulfr from the room downstairs to show us.

While waiting, our heroes suddenly start feeling rather ill, as if the food they’ve eaten had been bad in some way, and just as sudden four dwarven figures spring out of the cupboards and attack!

They immediately rush Randy, pushing him to the ground and stabbing him multiple times.

There’s also someone shooting arrows into the house and one hits Elspet.

Cahair backstabs one of the roguish ones close to him, and Humbert finishes him as well as wounding two others with a cleave.

Elspet knocks the attackers down with her magic, and Boshara tries to incapacitate them with hers.

Alf goes out to shoot at the shooters. One of them shoots a fire arrow into the room and it catches on fire.

One of the rogues manages to bring Elspet down with an attack, so as revenge Cahair brutally murders the offender (as in jamming his sword through the dwarf twice, hitting the spine and disemboweling them), before helping Elspet to her feet.

The two still remaining attackers grab onto Randy and throw him down the stairs. Elspet uses a healing spell to stabilize Randy, while Humbert contains the attackers into a magic circle, before going to see Randy. Boshara attacks the two, knocking them down once more, before following Randy and Humbert down the stairs.

The house is filling with smoke, and Elspet passes out again. Cahair revives her again and then helps her out through a window. Seeing that Cahair has one hand still wrapped up after the ice dragon incident, it’s a rather clumsy show, but they make it.

Boshara and Humbert are trapped by the smoke in the room downstairs. With them is unconscious Randy as well as one of the warriors, also fainted. Ortag is nowhere in sight.

Boshara finds a trap door leading to a tunnel under the carpet, and they use it to get out. It leads them to a forest area some way off the burning building. The warrior hadn’t made it, but Randy is alive.

Boshara looks over the warrior’s corpse and finds a strange ring with initials and an inscription in dwarvish. She also picks up some gold and powdered lyrium, but doesn’t mention these to Humbert.

They take Randy and start heading back to the cloud of smoke in the horizon.

Meanwhile, Cahair and Elspet are checking on Elspet’s wounds. There is some kind of poison in the arrow that hit Elspet, and it’s quite a gnarly sight. Elspet doesn’t recognize the poison, but feels a bit better after Cahair cleans it up.

Alf joins them. He had chased the woodland attackers away, and also smartly avoided all smoke damage.

Soon Humbert and Boshara arrive too.

Our heroes check the other corpses and find more weird rings, and also Cahair picks up an interesting looking dagger. 

Alf recognizes the rings as carta rings.

Humbert brings Cahair back to the trap door’s other side to see if he can follow the tracks but it looks like Ortag has been too clever in hiding them.

So, what’s up? 

Humbert is sure this is an unfortunate coincidence, because no one should have known that we were arriving to Orzammar on this route. 

Boshara is convinced that this is an assassination plan and that Randy’s wife must be behind it, as she would inherit (we presume).

Cahair’s just confused to learn that Randy has a wife. No one had told him, cos when the others found that out he was tracking the Tevinter woods.

We can’t be staying there, so we continue on our way, trying to keep our eyes out for Trin or anything else suspicious but see neither.

We make it to Orzammar gates which is flooding with people, dwarves and templars. We park our cart at the entrance and Humbert, Boshara and Pitkä-Breck go talk to the guard.

The guard is rather unsympathetic until she learns that we have injured Randy on board, after which she immediately starts arranging for him to be brought in. Our little group is not involved in these plans.

Boshara flashes her certificate stating she belongs in house Mandulfr and the guard finally agrees to let her in, but only her. The rest will have to wait outside.

Humbert asks the guard to deliver a letter to Marjaleena, Randy’s wife about our situation.

No one is allowed in without a permission from a dwarven general by the name of Worav Saelac. King Aeducan has apparently given him the command of Orzammar while the carta is being dealt with.

And so Boshara has been let into the isolated dwarven city. Here’s hoping the rest of us make it in there at some point as well.

[investmart007]

SANTA FE, Texas  | Survivors of Texas massacre confront 'spiritual war zone'

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/dXigkm

SANTA FE, Texas  | Survivors of Texas massacre confront 'spiritual war zone'

SANTA FE, Texas  — Inside a packed church sanctuary, the seniors of Santa Fe High School and the prosecutor speaking to them confronted the challenges borne of the shooting that took the lives of 10 people at the school near Houston.

The young graduates have to grieve their slain classmates and cope with their emotions as they try to heal after the mass shooting.

“You are entering into a war zone in this world, and it’s a spiritual war zone,” said Jack Roady, the Galveston County district attorney, in his speech to them. Roady has to prosecute the capital murder case against the teenager suspected of killing eight students and two substitute teachers. He said later that the case presented the most deaths in one crime that he had ever faced.

This deeply religious community came together Sunday for prayer services at local churches and a traditional end-of-school baccalaureate service that acknowledged the pain wracking Santa Fe, a town of 13,000. Mourners also gathered at a Houston-area mosque to remember the life of a slain exchange student from Pakistan.

The baccalaureate is typically a religious celebration to honor school graduates. After Friday’s shooting, it was moved from the high school auditorium to nearby Arcadia First Baptist Church. Every pew in the church was filled, and folding chairs against the wall provided seating the pews couldn’t.

When “Pomp and Circumstance” played, the seniors filed in wearing green caps and gowns. Most had serious looks on their faces, though a few smiled at people they recognized in the crowd.

Speaker and Santa Fe graduate Aaron Chenoweth gave a short testimony about trials and tribulations this graduating class faced. He called on the community’s faith in God.

“If you give God the glory, you will always find comfort and love,” he said, receiving a standing ovation.

Roady told the students that they were “suffering in ways that no one else can understand.” He called on them to draw closer to their faith and each other.

Todd Penick, a graduating senior who is planning to attend Texas State University, said last year’s baccalaureate was attended by around 25 people. This year’s, which drew around 200 people, was a chance to reunite with his friends and classmates.

“Nobody is going to be OK in a couple of days,” he said. “Nobody can look you in the eyes and tell you it’s OK. But we’re going to be OK because everyone is so unified.”

He added: “Family and friends and God, that’s what’s going to get us through this.”

Meanwhile, hundreds attended a service Houston’s Muslim community held for Sabika Sheikh, a 17-year-old exchange student from Pakistan who talked about one day becoming a diplomat.

Her host mother, Joleen Cogburn, recalled asking Sheikh why she came to study in the U.S. She said she wanted to learn American culture and to share Pakistani culture with Americans.

“And I want us to come together and unite,” she told Cogburn. “I don’t know if they know us the way they should.”

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Sheikh continues to be a diplomat “because even in her death, she is pulling the relationships between Pakistan and the United States, specifically the Houston area, even closer.” Her body was to be returned to Karachi.

The shooting suspect, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, has been jailed on capital murder charges.

In their first statement since the massacre, Pagourtzis’ family said Saturday that the bloodshed “seems incompatible with the boy we love.”

“We are as shocked and confused as anyone else by these events,” said the statement, which offered prayers and condolences to the victims.

Relatives said they remained “mostly in the dark about the specifics” of the attack and shared “the public’s hunger for answers.”

Roady declined to answer questions about the shootout and investigation Sunday, including whether police may have hit any students in a gunfight with the shooter.

He also said autopsy reports won’t be released while the case is pending.

Although officials have praised a swift response, it remains unclear just how quickly police got to the art lab on the 1,400-student campus, where authorities say Pagourtzis opened fire with a shotgun and .38-caliber handgun. Galveston County Judge Mark Henry, the county’s top administrator, has said police exchanged rounds with Pagourtzis “for quite a while” before he surrendered a half-hour after the first reports of a shooter on campus.

“They said there was a lot of firepower and a lot of rounds exchanged,” Henry said.

One Santa Fe school police officer who responded to the attack was shot and remained in critical condition Sunday, according to the University of Texas Medical Branch.

The suspect’s attorney, Nicholas Poehl, said he was investigating whether his client endured any “teacher-on-student” bullying after reading reports of Pagourtzis being mistreated by football coaches.

In an online statement, the school district said it investigated the accusations and “confirmed that these reports were untrue.”

Poehl said that there was no history of mental health issues with his client, though there may be “some indications of family history.” He said it was too early to elaborate.

__

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

[healthandfitnessrecipes-blog]

America’s Unending Tragedy

https://healthandfitnessrecipes.com/?p=1017

LITTLETON, Colo.—Evan Todd, then a sophomore at Columbine High School, was in the library on the day 19 years ago when Eric Harris appeared in the doorway, wielding a shotgun. Harris fired in his direction. Debris, shrapnel, and buckshot hit Todd’s lower back; he fell to the ground and ducked behind a copy machine. Harris fired several more shots toward Todd’s head, splintering a desk and driving wood chips into Todd’s left eye.

Todd listened for several more minutes as Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates, taunting them as they screamed. Todd prayed silently: “God, let me live.”

Then Klebold pulled back a chair and found Todd hiding underneath a table.

He put a gun to Todd’s head. "Why shouldn't I kill you?" he asked.

“I've been good to you,” Todd said.

Klebold looked at Harris. “You can kill him if you want,” Klebold told his teenage co-conspirator.

No one knows why—indeed, no one knows the “why” behind such violence—but that’s when Harris and Klebold left the library. Todd got to live.

Thirteen people did not, though. Today, that’s why Todd supports allowing teachers to have guns in schools. Teachers shouldn’t be required to be armed, he says, but if they already have a concealed-weapons permit, and they’re already comfortable using a gun, why not let them have it with them in school, the place they are most of the day, and the place where these attacks happen over and over again?

Today, Todd is a stocky, bearded manager of construction projects, and describes himself as a history buff. He grew up around guns, but after Columbine, he thought hard about whether easy access to them might have been what caused the shooting. No, he decided. “We've always had guns since the beginning of the founding of our country, but what we haven't always had are children murdering children,” he told me over coffee this week. “Something has changed.” Todd believes school shootings are motivated by a fundamental lack of respect for human life.

The way Todd sees it, “liberals like to control others and conservatives like to control themselves.” He glanced around the Starbucks where we were sitting. Statistically, he said, four people there were likely to have guns on them. Being near four guns might scare many liberals. Many conservatives, though, would want to be one of the four with a gun.

The gun debate is an odd one because, at some level, everyone agrees on what they want: No more Columbines. No more Parklands. Most people affected by the Columbine massacre can even agree on what definitely didn’t cause it. After the shooting, Columbine developed a reputation as a toxic school where jocks tormented “geeks” like Harris and Klebold. But it’s a stretch to say the shooters were pitiable outcasts, bullied until they snapped. In reality, they were budding little fascists who wore swastikas on their clothes and spewed racial slurs as they gunned down black classmates. Kumbaya circles wouldn’t have fixed that.

The Columbine Memorial in Littleton. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

But, nearly 20 years later, not even people in Littleton can agree whether the best way to prevent another Columbine is more guns or fewer. Todd’s experience—a 15-year-old whose brush with death-by-gun led him to respect guns more—helps to explain why there have been so few new federal gun restrictions since Columbine.

There have been at least 10 mass school shootings in the years since, which have claimed at least 122 lives. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of young people will march on Washington to show just how much this disgusts them. They believe they will be the ones to end the most calcified cultural stalemate of our time: that Americans fundamentally do not agree on whether guns are dangerous—or essential.

Todd worries that if more guns are removed from the hands of law-abiding citizens, a tyrannical government could take over—we could see an American Stalin or Mao. “More people would be murdered without the Second Amendment,” he said.

In the nearby town of Centennial, 64-year-old Carol Schuster said that’s one thing that keeps many conservatives from supporting gun control. “They’re afraid of the government,” she told me. She knows because she used to be one.

Schuster and her husband, Bill, own a company that sells big mobile filing cabinets, the kind that doctors use to store their patient records. Like many small-business owners, they long voted Republican.

The Schusters were terrified when Columbine happened, but they didn’t think it would keep happening. Those shooters were freaks, juvenile delinquents. “Another school shooting” hadn’t yet become a thing Americans say almost every month.

Carol Schuster outside her home in Centennial. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

Then came the Sandy Hook shooting, in which six- and seven-year-olds were mowed down as they cowered in their elementary-school bathroom. Schuster began to feel like her party wasn’t doing enough. (Just this week, Republican state legislators in Colorado rejected a ban on bump stocks, the devices used by the Las Vegas gunman that allowed his rifles to fire faster.) She attended a meeting of Colorado Ceasefire, a local gun-control group, and she was the only Republican there. “Oh,” she thought. “These Democrats really are nice people.” In 2016, Schuster voted for Hillary Clinton as a single-issue voter on guns.

Today, one portion of her office wall is devoted to photos of her family, another to pictures of dogs, and another to the front pages of newspapers covering all the mass shootings that have taken place since Columbine. “Important things,” she explained.

When she saw the Parkland shooting on TV, she decided she would go to Washington on Saturday to take part in the March for Our Lives. Her sign will read, “Former Republican for sensible gun laws.”

Schuster asked me where I was going next, and I told her I’d be interviewing Patrick Neville, a former Columbine student who survived the massacre and is now a Republican State Representative who supports concealed carry among teachers. Schuster said she had a lot of questions for him.

When I arrived at his office in the Capitol building in Denver, Neville looked red and tired. His press secretary seemed weary, too, from listening to dozens of voicemail messages, many of which wished to inform her that her boss was a “fucking asshole.” A bill Neville introduced, scheduled for a hearing just days after the Parkland shooting, called for allowing concealed-carry permit holders to bring their guns inside schools. “Get your head out of your ass!” one woman’s voice screamed on the answering machine. “Protect these children!” (Todd gets angry messages, too—including from people who tell him they wish he died at Columbine. The Schusters, meanwhile, say they get run off the road for their gun-control bumper stickers.)

Neville wasn’t inside Columbine when the shooting happened. He was just outside the building, skipping class to go smoke with friends. When he realized what was happening, he ran to a nearby house and called his mom. “I’m not going to be able to get to my next class,” he told her.

If Republicans are afraid of government overreach, then on the other side, “there’s an irrational fear of guns,” Neville said. Todd and Neville see guns as “tools” that can be safely used for fun or protection. Like Todd, Neville believes shooters target gun-free zones like schools because they know they won’t meet resistance. Not knowing which teacher might be armed is a “huge tactical advantage,” Neville argued. To protect his three young daughters, he plans to send them to a private high school, where teachers can carry guns.

This was the fourth time Neville sponsored the concealed-carry bill, and it failed like it always does, but he plans to introduce it again. Why? “Never a wrong time to do the right thing,” he said. The morning we spoke, another school shooting had taken place in Maryland.

Littleton, a Denver suburb, in many ways offers a typical middle-American landscape—dotted with drab office parks and Outback Steakhouses. Less typical are the striking, snow-streaked mountains, which loom in the background.

The light-beige Columbine High School building gets threats all the time. It’s the unholiest of holy sites: Several times a day, a security guard told me, random people stop by to take pictures or just to take a morbid look. The guard can’t allow them to do that; he can’t make the kids relive it that often.

Another security guard in the student parking lot kept a wary eye on me. But at 2:45, the glass doors swung open and perfectly normal students burst out of a perfectly normal school, laughing and asking each other about homework assignments. Among them was Kaylee Tyner, a junior who organized Columbine’s student walkout for gun control, which happened earlier this month.

Kaylee Tyner at her home in Littleton. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

The day I met up with Tyner, she had called a handful of her classmates to her house to make signs for Saturday’s march. Her friends plan to go to the local march in Denver, but Tyner will travel all the way to Washington with her mom. On top of her political advocacy, Tyner is in four AP classes, several clubs, and works as a waitress at a retirement home.

Tyner peeled a sticky note off the window of her Nissan—she’s in a club whose members leave encouraging messages for one another—and drove the four minutes from her school to her house. She put out some snacks and brought up tempera paints from the basement. The other girls trickled in a few minutes later. They huddled around Tyner’s dining-room table and laid out orange, black, and white poster boards. They’re Columbine’s core group of activists, and it’s something they’re surprisingly secure about. Once, a boy said something like “oh, there go the feminists” as they walked by, and one of them, 16-year-old Mikaela Lawrence, said simply, “Chh—yeah!”

The girls might get their news from social-media sites like Twitter, but, they tell me, they’re careful to check it against other sites to be sure it’s not “fake news.” Rachel Hill, a cheery 16-year-old, easily rattled off the gun measures she’d like to see: universal background checks, a ban on bump stocks, higher age limits and longer waiting periods. She painted a sign that read, “I have thought. I have prayed. Nothing changed.”

Kaylee and some friends work on signs for March for Our Lives at her home in Littleton, Colo.

The day after the Parkland shooting, the halls of Columbine were unusually quiet. Despite all the security, kids at Columbine periodically worry about another shooting happening there. Some of their teachers have panic attacks when the fire alarms go off, the girls said.

“We’re not gonna stop fighting until laws are passed,” said 14-year-old Annie Barrows, laying down her paint brush and hammering her fist into her hand. “There’s blood spilling on the floors of American classrooms.”

Kids who go to Columbine rarely joke about the shooting, but students from other schools sometimes make crass remarks, the girls said. “Going to Columbine, we don’t get to pick the label for our school,” Tyner said. “We’re one of the most infamous schools in America. We’re trying to show people that this affects your community for decades.”

One day in early April 1999, Daniel Mauser, a blond-haired, bespectacled Columbine sophomore, came home and asked his father, Tom Mauser, “Did you know there are loopholes in the Brady bill?”—the national law that requires background checks for gun purchasers. Tom didn’t think much of it. Daniel was on the debate team; he and his conservative classmate, Patrick Neville, would sometimes argue about politics.

Two weeks later, the day of the Columbine shooting, Tom didn’t know whether Daniel was alive or dead for nearly 24 hours. Late that night, authorities called to ask what Daniel had been wearing, or if the Mausers had any dental records. They said the Mausers would hear more in the morning. The following day at noon, the sheriff came along with some grief counselors to tell Tom that Daniel had been shot to death.

The Mausers stayed in the area, but they couldn’t bring themselves to send their surviving daughter to Columbine. Instead, she went to the nearby Arapahoe High School. It, too, had a shooting, after she graduated.

Tom, who worked for the state’s transportation department, took on a second role as a spokesperson for Colorado Ceasefire. He and his son shared a shoe size; he began wearing Daniel’s black-and-gray Vans to testify at hearings. In 2000, he successfully helped push through a measure to close the state’s gun-show loophole. He’s one of the few Columbine parents who speaks out about guns; some others support him but find it too painful to talk about, he says.

Over lunch at Panera Bread, he told me he doesn’t support arming teachers—there’s too much of a risk of crossfire, accidents, or police not knowing who the true “bad guy” is in a hectic shooting situation, he said. And what, are we going to hold first-grade teachers accountable for acting as soldiers would in combat? Many Republicans, he argued, seemingly “cannot acknowledge the danger caused by guns.” (Many Republicans, of course, argue Democrats can’t acknowledge the danger caused by restricting guns.)

One of the most helpful gun measures, he thinks, would be a state- or nation-wide red-flag law, allowing family members or law-enforcement officers to ask a judge to temporarily take away the guns of someone who seems dangerous.

At this point, a woman approached our table to thank Tom for his efforts. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The following day, Tom planned to go for a bike ride in the 70-degree weather, enjoy his retirement a little. But for the moment, he went back to talking about his dead son with yet another reporter. Because Columbine High has a stain, but so does the whole country, and it will endure until there aren’t any more stories like this left to tell. So he tells it.

Like Evan Todd, Daniel Mauser was in the library. Eric Harris insulted him, then fired his rifle and hit Daniel in the hand. Then the mild-mannered Daniel fought back—he pushed a chair at Harris. Harris responded by shooting him in the face.

I sat there speechless as Tom Mauser calmly ate a spoonful of soup. “This is America,” he said.

(Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2018/03/033_KLB_toned/lead_960.jpg Credits: Original Content Source

[ionecoffman]

America’s Unending Tragedy

LITTLETON, Colo.—Evan Todd, then a sophomore at Columbine High School, was in the library on the day 19 years ago when Eric Harris appeared in the doorway, wielding a shotgun. Harris fired in his direction. Debris, shrapnel, and buckshot hit Todd’s lower back; he fell to the ground and ducked behind a copy machine. Harris fired several more shots toward Todd’s head, splintering a desk and driving wood chips into Todd’s left eye.

Todd listened for several more minutes as Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates, taunting them as they screamed. Todd prayed silently: “God, let me live.”

Then Klebold pulled back a chair and found Todd hiding underneath a table.

He put a gun to Todd’s head. "Why shouldn't I kill you?" he asked.

“I've been good to you,” Todd said.

Klebold looked at Harris. “You can kill him if you want,” Klebold told his teenage co-conspirator.

No one knows why—indeed, no one knows the “why” behind such violence—but that’s when Harris and Klebold left the library. Todd got to live.

Thirteen people did not, though. Today, that’s why Todd supports allowing teachers to have guns in schools. Teachers shouldn’t be required to be armed, he says, but if they already have a concealed-weapons permit, and they’re already comfortable using a gun, why not let them have it with them in school, the place they are most of the day, and the place where these attacks happen over and over again?

Today, Todd is a stocky, bearded manager of construction projects, and describes himself as a history buff. He grew up around guns, but after Columbine, he thought hard about whether easy access to them might have been what caused the shooting. No, he decided. “We've always had guns since the beginning of the founding of our country, but what we haven't always had are children murdering children,” he told me over coffee this week. “Something has changed.” Todd believes school shootings are motivated by a fundamental lack of respect for human life.

The way Todd sees it, “liberals like to control others and conservatives like to control themselves.” He glanced around the Starbucks where we were sitting. Statistically, he said, four people there were likely have guns on them. Being near four guns might scare many liberals. Many conservatives, though, would want to be one of the four with a gun.

The gun debate is an odd one because, at some level, everyone agrees on what they want: No more Columbines. No more Parklands. Most people affected by the Columbine massacre can even agree on what definitely didn’t cause it. After the shooting, Columbine developed a reputation as a toxic school where jocks tormented “geeks” like Harris and Klebold. But it’s a stretch to say the shooters were pitiable outcasts, bullied until they snapped. In reality, they were budding little fascists who wore swastikas on their clothes and spewed racial slurs as they gunned down black classmates. Kumbaya circles wouldn’t have fixed that.

The Columbine Memorial in Littleton, Colo. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

But, nearly 20 years later, not even people in Littleton can agree whether the best way to prevent another Columbine is more guns or fewer. Todd’s experience—a 15-year-old whose brush with death-by-gun led him to respect guns more—helps to explain why there have been so few new federal gun restrictions since Columbine.

There have been at least 10 mass school shootings in the years since, which have claimed at least 122 lives. On Saturday, hundreds of thousands of young people will march on Washington to show just how much this disgusts them. They believe they will be the ones to end the most calcified cultural stalemate of our time: that Americans fundamentally do not agree on whether guns are dangerous—or essential.

Todd worries that if more guns are removed from the hands of law-abiding citizens, a tyrannical government could take over—we could see an American Stalin or Mao. “More people would be murdered without the Second Amendment,” he said.

In the nearby town of Centennial, 64-year-old Carol Schuster said that’s one thing that keeps many conservatives from supporting gun control. “They’re afraid of the government,” she told me. She knows because she used to be one.

Schuster and her husband, Bill, own a company that sells big mobile filing cabinets, the kind that doctors use to store their patient records. Like many small-business owners, they long voted Republican.

The Schusters were terrified when Columbine happened, but they didn’t think it would keep happening. Those shooters were freaks, juvenile delinquents. “Another school shooting” hadn’t yet become a thing Americans say almost every month.

Carol Schuster at her home in Centennial, Colo. on March 20 (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

Then came the Sandy Hook shooting, in which six- and seven-year-olds were mowed down as they cowered in their elementary-school bathroom. Schuster began to feel like her party wasn’t doing enough. (Just this week, Republican state legislators in Colorado rejected a ban on bump stocks, the devices used by the Las Vegas gunman that allowed his rifles to fire faster.) She attended a meeting of Colorado Ceasefire, a local gun-control group, and she was the only Republican there. “Oh,” she thought. “These Democrats really are nice people.” In 2016, Schuster voted for Hillary Clinton as a single-issue voter on guns.

Today, one portion of her office wall is devoted to photos of her family, another to pictures of dogs, and another to the front pages of newspapers covering all the mass shootings that have taken place since Columbine. “Important things,” she explained.

When she saw the Parkland shooting on TV, she decided she would go to Washington on Saturday to take part in the March for Our Lives. Her sign will read, “Former Republican for sensible gun laws.”

Schuster asked me where I was going next, and I told her I’d be interviewing Patrick Neville, a former Columbine student who survived the massacre and is now a Republican State Representative who supports concealed carry among teachers. Schuster said she had a lot of questions for him.

When I arrived at his office in the Capitol building in Denver, Neville looked red and tired. His press secretary seemed weary, too, from listening to dozens of voicemail messages, many of which wished to inform her that her boss was a “fucking asshole.” A bill Neville introduced, scheduled for a hearing just days after the Parkland shooting, called for allowing concealed-carry permit holders to bring their guns inside schools. “Get your head out of your ass!” one woman’s voice screamed on the answering machine. “Protect these children!” (Todd gets angry messages, too—including from people who tell him they wish he died at Columbine. The Schusters, meanwhile, say they get run off the road for their gun-control bumper stickers.)

Neville wasn’t inside Columbine when the shooting happened. He was just outside the building, skipping class to go smoke with friends. When he realized what was happening, he ran to a nearby house and called his mom. “I’m not going to be able to get to my next class,” he told her.

If Republicans are afraid of government overreach, then on the other side, “there’s an irrational fear of guns,” Neville said. Todd and Neville see guns as “tools” that can be safely used for fun or protection. Like Todd, Neville believes shooters target gun-free zones like schools because they know they won’t meet resistance. Not knowing which teacher might be armed is a “huge tactical advantage,” Neville argued. To protect his three young daughters, he plans to send them to a private high school, where teachers can carry guns.

This was the fourth time Neville sponsored the concealed-carry bill, and it failed like it always does, but he plans to introduce it again. Why? “Never a wrong time to do the right thing,” he said. The morning we spoke, another school shooting had taken place in Maryland.

Littleton, a Denver suburb, in many ways offers a typical middle-American landscape—dotted with drab office parks and Outback Steakhouses. Less typical are the striking, snow-streaked mountains, which loom in the background.

The light-beige Columbine High School building gets threats all the time. It’s the unholiest of holy sites: Several times a day, a security guard told me, random people stop by to take pictures or just to take a morbid look. The guard can’t allow them to do that; he can’t make the kids relive it that often.

Another security guard in the student parking lot kept a wary eye on me. But at 2:45, the glass doors swung open and perfectly normal students burst out of a perfectly normal school, laughing and asking each other about homework assignments. Among them was Kaylee Tyner, a junior who organized Columbine’s student walkout for gun control, which happened earlier this month.

Kaylee Tyner at her home in Littleton, Colo. (Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

The day I met up with Tyner, she had called a handful of her classmates to her house to make signs for Saturday’s march. Her friends plan to go to the local march in Denver, but Tyner will travel all the way to Washington with her mom. On top of her political advocacy, Tyner is in four AP classes, several clubs, and works as a waitress at a retirement home.

Tyner peeled a sticky note off the window of her Nissan—she’s in a club whose members leave encouraging messages for one another—and drove the four minutes from her school to her house. She put out some snacks and brought up tempera paints from the basement. The other girls trickled in a few minutes later. They huddled around Tyner’s dining-room table and laid out orange, black, and white poster boards. They’re Columbine’s core group of activists, and it’s something they’re surprisingly secure about. Once, a boy said something like “oh, there go the feminists” as they walked by, and one of them, 16-year-old Mikaela Lawrence, said simply, “Chh—yeah!”

The girls might get their news from social-media sites like Twitter, but, they tell me, they’re careful to check it against other sites to be sure it’s not “fake news.” Rachel Hill, a cheery 16-year-old, easily rattled off the gun measures she’d like to see: universal background checks, a ban on bump stocks, higher age limits and longer waiting periods. She painted a sign that read, “I have thought. I have prayed. Nothing changed.”

Kaylee and a few friends work on signs for March for Our Lives on March 21, 2018, in Littleton, Colo.

The day after the Parkland shooting, the halls of Columbine were unusually quiet. Despite all the security, kids at Columbine periodically worry about another shooting happening there. Some of their teachers have panic attacks when the fire alarms go off, the girls said.

“We’re not gonna stop fighting until laws are passed,” said 14-year-old Annie Barrows, laying down her paint brush and hammering her fist into her hand. “There’s blood spilling on the floors of American classrooms.”

Kids who go to Columbine rarely joke about the shooting, but students from other schools sometimes make crass remarks, the girls said. “Going to Columbine, we don’t get to pick the label for our school,” Tyner said. “We’re one of the most infamous schools in America. We’re trying to show people that this affects your community for decades.”

One day in early April 1999, Daniel Mauser, a blond-haired, bespectacled Columbine sophomore, came home and asked his father, Tom Mauser, “Did you know there are loopholes in the Brady bill?”—the national law that requires background checks for gun purchasers. Tom didn’t think much of it. Daniel was on the debate team; he and his conservative classmate, Patrick Neville, would sometimes argue about politics.

Two weeks later, the day of the Columbine shooting, Tom didn’t know whether Daniel was alive or dead for nearly 24 hours. Late that night, authorities called to ask what Daniel had been wearing, or if the Mausers had any dental records. They said the Mausers would hear more in the morning. The following day at noon, the sheriff came along with some grief counselors to tell Tom that Daniel had been shot to death.

The Mausers stayed in the area, but they couldn’t bring themselves to send their surviving daughter to Columbine. Instead, she went to the nearby Arapahoe High School. It, too, had a shooting, after she graduated.

Tom, who worked for the state’s transportation department, took on a second role as a spokesperson for Colorado Ceasefire. He and his son shared a shoe size; he began wearing Daniel’s black-and-gray Vans to testify at hearings. In 2000, he successfully helped push through a measure to close the state’s gun-show loophole. He’s one of the few Columbine parents who speaks out about guns; some others support him but find it too painful to talk about, he says.

Over lunch at Panera Bread, he told me he doesn’t support arming teachers—there’s too much of a risk of crossfire, accidents, or police not knowing who the true “bad guy” is in a hectic shooting situation, he said. And what, are we going to hold first-grade teachers accountable for acting as soldiers would in combat? Many Republicans, he argued, seemingly “cannot acknowledge the danger caused by guns.” (Many Republicans, of course, argue Democrats can’t acknowledge the danger caused by restricting guns.)

One of the most helpful gun measures, he thinks, would be a state- or nation-wide red-flag law, allowing family members or law-enforcement officers to ask a judge to temporarily take away the guns of someone who seems dangerous.

At this point, a woman approached our table to thank Tom for his efforts. “You’re welcome,” he said.

The following day, Tom planned to go for a bike ride in the 70-degree weather, enjoy his retirement a little. But for the moment, he went back to talking about his dead son with yet another reporter. Because Columbine High has a stain, but so does the whole country, and it will endure until there aren’t any more stories like this left to tell. So he tells it.

Like Evan Todd, Daniel Mauser was in the library. Eric Harris insulted him, then fired his rifle and hit Daniel in the hand. Then the mild-mannered Daniel fought back—he pushed a chair at Harris. Harris responded by shooting him in the face.

I sat there speechless as Tom Mauser calmly ate a spoonful of soup. “This is America,” he said.

(Kirsten Leah Bitzer)

Article source here:The Atlantic

[investmart007]

SANTA FE, Texas | Texas school gunman: 'I'm going to kill you.' Then he fired

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/qbkmCS

SANTA FE, Texas | Texas school gunman: 'I'm going to kill you.' Then he fired

SANTA FE, Texas — The suspect in the Texas school shooting began his attack by firing a shotgun through an art classroom door, shattering a glass pane and sending panicked students to the entryway to block him from getting inside, witnesses said.

Dmitrios Pagourtzis fired again through the wooden part of the door and fatally hit a student in the chest. He then lingered for about 30 minutes in a warren of four rooms, killing seven more students and two teachers before exchanging gunfire with police and surrendering, officials said.

Freshman Abel San Miguel saw his friend Chris Stone killed at the door. San Miguel was grazed on his left shoulder by another volley of shots. He and others survived by playing dead.

“We were on the ground, all piled up in random positions,” he said.

Galveston County Judge Mark Henry, the county’s chief administrator, said he did not think Friday’s attack was 30 minutes of constant shooting, and that assessment was consistent with other officials who said law enforcement contained the shooter quickly. But authorities did not release a detailed timeline to explain precisely how events unfolded.

Junior Breanna Quintanilla was in art class when she heard the shots and someone say, “If you all move, I’m going to shoot you all.”

The 17-year-old Pagourtzis walked in, pointed at one person and declared, “I’m going to kill you.” Then he fired.

“He then said that if the rest of us moved, he was going to shoot us,” Quintanilla said.

When Quintanilla tried to run out a back door, she realized Pagourtzis was aiming at her. He fired in her direction.

“He missed me,” she said. “But it went ahead and ricocheted and hit me in my right leg.” She was treated at a hospital and spoke with a brown bandage wrapped around her wound.

“It was a very scary thing,” Quintanilla said. “I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to make it back to my family.”

In their first statement since the massacre, Pagourtzis’ family said Saturday that the bloodshed “seems incompatible with the boy we love.”

“We are as shocked and confused as anyone else by these events,” said the statement, which offered prayers and condolences to the victims.

Relatives said they remained “mostly in the dark about the specifics” of the attack and shared “the public’s hunger for answers.”

Pagourtzis’ attorney, Nicholas Poehl, said he was investigating whether the suspect endured any “teacher-on-student” bullying after reading reports of his client being mistreated by football coaches.

In an online statement, the school district said it investigated the accusations and “confirmed that these reports were untrue.”

Poehl said that there was no history of mental health issues with his client, though there may be “some indications of family history.” He said it was too early to elaborate.

Zach Wofford, a senior, said he was in his agricultural shop class when he heard gunfire from the art classroom across the hall. He said substitute teacher Chris West went into the hall to investigate and pulled a fire alarm.

“He saved many people today,” Wofford said of West.

The mother of one slain student said her daughter may have been targeted because she rejected advances from Pagourtzi, who was an ex-boyfriend of her daughter’s best friend.

Sadie Rodriguez said her 16-year-old daughter, Shana Fisher, repeatedly told him no, and he “continued to get more aggressive.” The week before the shooting, Fisher “stood up to him” by embarrassing him in class, Rodriguez said.

The Houston branch of the FBI tweeted Saturday that 13 people were wounded in the attack, up from 10 previously. Hospitals reported treating 14 people with shooting-related injuries, and the reason for the discrepancy still was not clear.

In addition to a shotgun and a handgun, Pagourtzis also had several kinds of homemade explosive devices, but they were not capable of detonating, Henry said.

Investigators found a cluster of carbon dioxide canisters taped together, and a pressure cooker with an alarm clock and nails inside. But the canisters had no detonation device, and the pressure cooker had no explosive material, Henry said.

“They were intended to look like IEDs, but they were totally non-functional,” Henry said, referring to the improvised explosive devices common in the early years of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Authorities have offered no motive, but they said in a probable-cause affidavit that the suspect had admitted to carrying out the shooting.

The gunman told police that when he opened fire, he avoided shooting students he liked “so he could have his story told,” the affidavit said.

From first word of the shooting, at 7:32 a.m. Friday, until confirmation that the suspect was in custody, the attack lasted about half an hour.

Dispatch records indicate that law enforcement first entered the building about seven minutes after learning of the assault. The suspect was said to be in custody by shortly after 8 a.m.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the assailant got a handgun and shotgun from his father, who owned them legally. But it was not clear whether the father knew his son had taken them or if the father could face prosecution. State law makes it illegal to give a gun to anyone under 18, except under the supervision of an adult for hunting or sport shooting.

Pagourtzis, who appeared to have no prior arrests or confrontations with law enforcement, made an initial court appearance Friday on capital murder charges. A judge denied bond and took his application for a court-appointed attorney.

The shooting in Santa Fe, a city of 13,000 people about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of Houston, was the nation’s deadliest such attack since the Parkland, Florida, massacre that killed 17 and energized the teen-led gun-control movement. It was also the deadliest assault in Texas since a man with a semi-automatic rifle attacked a rural church late last year, killing more than two dozen people.

Meanwhile, students on Saturday were being let back inside Santa Fe High School to gather belongings they abandoned when the gunfire began.

The school’s grief was on display at an evening baseball game where Santa Fe players had crosses painted on their faces and the initials of shooting victims written on tape around their wrists. The team also fashioned a tape cross over the dugout with 10 sets of initials and “missed but never forgotten.”

___

Associated Press Writer Will Weissert in Austin contributed to this report.

By PAUL J. WEBER and JUAN A. LOZANO, By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)

___

[investmart007]

SANTA FE, Texas | Gunman blasted through door, lingered for almost 30 minutes

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/YInEpc

SANTA FE, Texas | Gunman blasted through door, lingered for almost 30 minutes

SANTA FE, Texas (AP) — The suspect in the Texas school shooting began his attack by firing a shotgun through an art classroom door, shattering a glass pane and sending panicked students to the entryway to block him from getting inside, witnesses said.

Dmitrios Pagourtzis fired again through the wooden part of the door and fatally hit a student in the chest. He then lingered for nearly 30 minutes in a warren of four rooms, killing seven more students and two teachers before exchanging gunfire with police and surrendering, officials said.

Freshman Abel San Miguel saw his friend Chris Stone killed at the door. San Miguel got grazed in the stomach by another volley of shots. He and others survived by playing dead.

“We were on the ground, all piled up in random positions,” he said.

Galveston County Judge Mark Henry, the county’s chief administrator, said he did not think Friday’s attack was 30 minutes of constant shooting, and that assessment was consistent with other officials who said law enforcement contained the shooter quickly.

But authorities did not release a detailed timeline to explain precisely how events unfolded.

Junior Breanna Quintanilla was in art class when she heard the shots and someone say, “If you all move, I’m going to shoot you all.”

The 17-year-old Pagourtzis walked in, pointed at one person and declared, “I’m going to kill you.” Then he fired.

“He then said that if the rest of us moved, he was going to shoot us,” Quintanilla said.

When Quintanilla tried to run out a back door, she realized Pagourtzis was aiming at her. He fired in her direction.

“He missed me,” she said. “But it went ahead and ricocheted and hit me in my right leg.” She was treated at a hospital and spoke with a brown bandage wrapped around her wound.

“It was a very scary thing,” Quintanilla said. “I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to make it back to my family.”

In their first statement since the massacre, Pagourtzis’ family said Saturday that the bloodshed “seems incompatible with the boy we love.”

“We are as shocked and confused as anyone else by these events,” said the statement, which offered prayers and condolences to the victims.

Relatives said they remained “mostly in the dark about the specifics” of the attack and shared “the public���s hunger for answers.”

Pagourtzis’ attorney, Nicholas Poehl, said he was investigating whether the suspect endured any “teacher-on-student” bullying after reading reports of his client being mistreated by football coaches.

In an online statement, the school district said it investigated the accusations and “confirmed that these reports were untrue.”

Poehl said that there was no history of mental health issues with his client, though there may be “some indications of family history.” He said it was too early to elaborate.

Zach Wofford, a senior, said he was in his agricultural shop class when he heard gunfire from the art classroom across the hall. He said substitute teacher Chris West went into the hall to investigate and pulled a fire alarm.

“He saved many people today,” Wofford said of West.

The mother of one slain student said her daughter may have been targeted because she rejected advances from Pagourtzi, who was an ex-boyfriend of her daughter’s best friend.

Sadie Rodriguez said her 16-year-old daughter, Shana Fisher, repeatedly told him no, and he “continued to get more aggressive.”

The week before the shooting, Fisher “stood up to him” by embarrassing him in class, Rodriguez said.

The Houston branch of the FBI tweeted Saturday that 13 people were wounded in the attack, up from 10 previously. Hospitals reported treating 14 people with shooting-related injuries, and the reason for the discrepancy still was not clear.

In addition to a shotgun and a handgun, Pagourtzis also had several kinds of homemade explosive devices, but they were not capable of detonating, Henry said.

Investigators found a cluster of carbon dioxide canisters taped together, and a pressure cooker with an alarm clock and nails inside.

But the canisters had no detonation device, and the pressure cooker had no explosive material, Henry said.

“They were intended to look like IEDs, but they were totally non-functional,” Henry said, referring to the improvised explosive devices common in the early years of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Authorities have offered no motive, but they said in a probable-cause affidavit that the suspect had admitted to carrying out the shooting.

The gunman told police that when he opened fire, he avoided shooting students he liked “so he could have his story told,” the affidavit said.

From first word of the shooting, at 7:32 a.m. Friday, until confirmation that the suspect was in custody, the attack lasted about half an hour.

Dispatch records indicate that law enforcement first entered the building about seven minutes after learning of the assault. The suspect was said to be in custody at 8:03 a.m.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the assailant got a handgun and shotgun from his father, who owned them legally. But it was not clear whether the father knew his son had taken them or if the father could face prosecution. State law makes it illegal to give a gun to anyone under 18, except under the supervision of an adult for hunting or sport shooting.

Pagourtzis, who appeared to have no prior arrests or confrontations with law enforcement, made an initial court appearance Friday on capital murder charges. A judge denied bond and took his application for a court-appointed attorney.

The shooting in Santa Fe, a city of 13,000 people about 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of Houston, was the nation’s deadliest such attack since the Parkland, Florida, massacre that killed 17 and energized the teen-led gun-control movement. It was also the deadliest assault in Texas since a man with a semi-automatic rifle attacked a rural church late last year, killing more than two dozen people.

Meanwhile, students on Saturday were being let back inside Santa Fe High School to gather belongings they abandoned when the gunfire began.

The school’s grief was on display at an evening baseball game where Santa Fe players had crosses painted on their faces and the initials of shooting victims written on tape around their wrists. The team also fashioned a tape cross over the dugout with 10 sets of initials and “missed but never forgotten.”

By PAUL J. WEBER and JUAN A. LOZANO by Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC(U.S)