Fort Sam Houston Shooting Puts Military Base On Lock Down
A soldier who wounded a fellow service member in a shooting at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio surrendered and is in military custody. The shooting took place at the Army Medical Department Center and School at about 2:50 p.m., the Army said in a statement. Base spokesman, Brent Boller, said the gunman surrendered to San Antonio police and the female victim is in stable condition. It was revealed that the victim and shooter were involved in a relationship and that no other people were targeted in the attack. Authorities locked down the base for about two hours while military police cleared the building where the shooting took place. Fort Sam Houston is one of the oldest U.S. military bases still in operation and is located in central San Antonio.
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Insurance Companies Aren't Excited About Armed Teachers in the Nation's Schools
School Shooting Preparedness Requires Complex Training
Colleges and universities are fine-tuning emergency plans; re-examining preventative measures, coordinating with local law enforcement and improving response strategies to active shooter scenarios. If preventive measures are not successful, a well-coordinated response is the only viable alternative. Educational institutions must acknowl- edge that without strong support from local law enforce- ment, fire and rescue, and emergency medical services, institutions will not have enough resources to handle an active shooter scenario effectively. Adequate planning, training and exercises can provide public safety and emergency management professionals with a strong foundation to react appropriately to or avoid critical incidents when lives are in danger. To be successful, higher education institutions should: expand participation in the exercise planning team to mitigate potential conflicts; reduce dispatch time by streamlining reporting to improve response time; establish and practice a command structure that will be used to manage incidents; ensure interoperable communications and establish protocols to coordinate a multiagency response; assign and deploy responding personnel to specific duties; and develop, train, exercise and evolve a plan that is accepted by all first responders.
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After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, NRA chief Wayne LaPierre offered his organization's solution to the problem: Get the feds to put armed guards in every school. Turns out, that's expensive. So some school districts decided to take the idea into their own hands. But, thanks to understandably cautious insurance companies, that's expensive, too. Estimates for the additional costs insurers might charge vary. The Oregon School Boards Association puts it at $2,500 annually for each armed staff member and an additional $5,000 a year for arming and training one staff member. Some insurers say the risk is so great that they won't provide any insurance at all. One of the initial criticisms of the NRA's plan for trained, armed guards paid for by the federal government was that it was prohibitively costly. The costs to districts, if the estimates from the Oregon schools are correct, are also substantial nationally. If each school has one staff member trained and equipped with a weapon, that would total $7,500 per school per year, under its valuations. That's $740 million for public schools and $250 million for private — nearly a billion dollars of additional cost. Debate aside, the insurance industry—an industry predicated on reducing the likelihood that something costly will happen — doesn't think the idea of putting armed people in schools a good one.
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The Evolution of School Security
Every time a school is attacked by some maniac intent on killing innocent children, the nation becomes outraged and people demand more security, stricter gun control on automatic weapons, and more government funds to add security devices and procedures to stop the horrific rampage and mass killings. It should be noted that most guns used in mass killings were obtained legally, and it's doubtful the laws would or could be changed sufficiently to really prevent them from being obtained and used by determined mass murderers. Each incident brings a wave of remedial solutions. Some are ridiculous; most are simply ineffective. Schools placed security low in their list of priorities until the late 1970s, and the security industry had traditionally neglected school security. When security in schools started to become a concern, many public schools developed their own protection systems, which focused on protecting the building with little attention given to protecting students and teachers. School security has always been reactive rather proactive as seen by the reaction for stricter gun control only after a mass killing. In the mid-1980s school security was still a low priority but there were a few school districts that were concerned about the safety of teachers in the classroom. Today, schools are using management entrance systems, metal detectors and picture ID verification, but no system is 100% effective.
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