Responding to Red Lake

More answers - and more questions.

More information is coming out about the shootings; for example, we now know that the killer, Jeff Weise, used his policeman grandfather's gun. We still don't know why. But Weise's description is quite similar to other school shooters.

USAToday has an interesting look at Red Lake when compared with the Columbine killings. There have been some big improvements in how police respond:
Police immediately entered the high school and went after the killer, who turned the gun on himself when confronted. At Columbine, police waited several hours before entering the school, a decision that was criticized later.
"We learned from Columbine that time is not on our side," Lavarello says. "We can't sit back and wait for a SWAT team to respond while children are being killed."
Although, in fairness to the police at Columbine, no one had ever really considered such an event. For all they knew, they had a hostage situation. At Red Lake, the police do what they always do - risk their lives to save others. And it worked.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, schools are still safe:
Killings are exceedingly rare at schools in the USA. So far this school year, there have been 19 violent deaths among the 54 million students enrolled in 119,000 elementary and secondary schools.
Youths were 100 times more likely to be murdered away from school than at school from 1992 through 2000, according to an Education Department report in November 2004. During that time, 234 students were killed at school and 24,406 were murdered away from school.

Which makes these types of mass murders harder to comprehend. We expect schools to be safe - and by and large they are. But safety and risk can only be described in probabilities, not certainties, and that has always been the case.

The media handling of this still has been strange; I remember when Columbine happened that it was nonstop coverage for days, and dominated the news for months. It was talked about by everyone everywhere. Red Lake is being treated differently; not much discussion on radio talk shows or in the blogosphere. And I don't see a reason why.

Have we become desensitized to scholastic massacres, as Jamo earlier commented?

And what are we becoming if we no longer can be shocked?