Shots Fired in Terminal 2

My family was in the shooting in Florida at the airport. I saw my twelve year old hiding under a plastic bin and my wife and kids flat on the sidewalk. I just finished a book on mass shootings in America, Shots Fired in Terminal 2. Here is the bad news. When you send your kids to school they are not safe. One in 300 is the statistic that each of us will be in a firearm related incident now. It gets worse. The front lines of this undeclared war on the American populace is the very place we send our children. The schools. This is the free fire zone of our times.

Being in a shooting is like being in a war. You do think you will die. Your heart does race. You breathe like you ran a marathon. And you cannot shake the feeling that something terrible will happen to you any second. And that feeling can come back any time. You may think it happens to other people it does not. The statistics are closing in on everyone. AR15s Assault Rifles make those statistics narrow because they kill with such efficiency and intensity. They are the Tommy Gun of our times which by the way the Thompson Machine Gun was called, The Annihilator by it's inventor.

This may sound grim. It is. It is a time bomb because every day more people buy assault weapons. Of the ten shootings I studied every one one of the shooters was considered mentally ill. So there you go. Here is the math. 350 million people. Even if 5 percent of the population is mentally ill that is 17 million people. There are 310 million guns. That one in 300 will soon be one in 200 then one in 100... then it will come into your life.

Channel 32

Shots Fired in Terminal 2

The Motivation of the Las Vegas Shooter

Unfortunately Stephen Paddock is not that different from other American shooters. I just finished a first draft of a book, Shots Fired in Terminal 2 about the Ft Lauderdale airport shooting that I had the bad luck to be in. I studied twenty mass shootings in America and I looked for common factors in the shooters. This is what I found. They were male. Ninety nine percent white. Young adult to middle age. Middle class. And they had access to high powered weapons. And they were all insane to some degree. And their stated reasons for murdering people was not really important.

It is the pissed off white male syndrome. That is what I called it though I never put it in the book. From Sandy Hook to Columbine the psychopath was there waiting. The paranoid schizophrenic, the PTSD vet hearing voices telling him to kill, the manic depressive, the truly insane killer of children and the killer of people watching movies all are cousins of the severely mentally ill. By the time I was finished I realized there were two things that could be done to limit these shootings. One was to get rid of access to semiautomatic weapons and the other is to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

If we did these two things and nothing else we would see a result. People who shoot people enmasse are insane. They just are. There is no rational. There is no motive. I saw it in every shooting that I studied. The men who committed these acts were simply nuts and it is not about the second amendment or handgun laws. What happens is the insane individual decides to kill people and they know that the best gun to do this is a semiautomatic. That is where it stops.

 Stephen Paddock just joined the white men's club of mass killers who have no motivation. Insane people don't need one.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

Being in a Mass Shooting

When I was going through the Ft Lauderdale airport with my wife and children we heard the gunshots that began Esteban Santiago's rampage that left five people dead and eight wounded. You never forget that moment when your adrenalin kicks in and you go to some primal fight or flight response that gets you running. You just cant believe it is happening but once you have gone through it you never view public venues the same. I never go into a crowd without thinking that a shooter could appear from anywhere.

And watching the video from Las Vegas you see the same disbelief then terror all over again. I watched the country singer Aldine run off stage and people are already criticizing him but the thing is once that cold fear hits you there is not much you can do. Your primal response is to try and survive and the only way you can do that really is to flee. Could he have said something like there is a shooter of course. But here is the thing you don't really think you just react and the overwhelming reaction is to run and get away from those bullets.

And there will be  the same responses by the gun lobby and everyone else. But listen to that video of automatic weapon fire. It goes on and on. I just finished Ken Burns Vietnam and that kind of sustained fire was common. But that was a war.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair