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The Los Angeles Times reports
After their teacher fires a gun at school, Georgia students use opportunity to challenge Trump's proposal
Jesse Randall Davidson wasn't a stranger, some mysterious threat from the outside. He was a bearded, bespectacled, 53-year-old social studies teacher and the play-by-play announcer for the football games at Dalton High School in northwest Georgia.
But when the teacher brought a gun to school, barricaded himself in his classroom [February 28], and fired a single shot, students quickly recognized that this wasn't just a sad local incident.
Amid national outrage over school shootings--and suggestions by President Trump that schools would be safer if some teachers packed guns--it was a political event.
"my favorite teacher at Dalton high school just blockaded his door and proceeded to shoot", a 16-year-old student named Chondi Chastain tweeted at the National Rifle Assn., earning more than 17,000 retweets. "We had to run out The back of the school in the rain. Students were being trampled and screaming. I dare you to tell me arming teachers will make us safe."
[...] When students came to his door at room 413 during third period--a time his classroom is normally empty--it was locked, and Davidson wouldn't let them in, police said later.
"My brother, who was one door down from the teacher, said he was yelling at his students to 'get the [expletive] out of here'", junior Henry Hansen, 17, wrote in a private message on Twitter.
The principal, Steve Bartoo, tried to unlock the door with a key, but Davidson "slammed the door before I could open it and said, 'Don't come in here, I have a gun'", Bartoo said at a televised news conference.
Bartoo put the school into lockdown mode, and soon after, Davidson "apparently fired a shot from a handgun through an exterior window of the classroom", Dalton police spokesman Bruce Frazier said at a separate news conference. "It did not appear that it was aimed at anybody."
[...] Dalton police, the Whitfield County Sheriff's Office, the Georgia State Patrol, and federal law enforcement agencies all responded to the emergency. "More or less everybody with a badge in the area came running", Frazier said.
After about half an hour, Davidson surrendered and was taken into custody
[...] The Dalton students immediately turned to social media to take issue with Trump's calls to arm teachers.
Heavy.com adds
Records show Davidson has been charged with aggravated assault with a gun, terroristic threats and acts, carrying a weapon in a school safety zone without a license, reckless conduct, disrupting public school, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. He is being held without bail at the Whitfield County Jail.
[...] Davidson has a history of bizarre medical episodes both at school and outside of school, The Chattanoogan reports.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday March 03 2018, @12:23PM (5 children)
But I will say it's certainly not *pro-gun folks* doing this.
The shooters themselves, in every case, appear to be motivated more by narcissism and drama-llama than any real political goal.
But what encourages them? The media coverage, the notoriety, the idea that *relevance* can be seized by force.
These are not things they're learning on the farm.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by speederaser on Saturday March 03 2018, @02:15PM (1 child)
Mass shootings, school or otherwise, are perpetrated by people under enormous emotional distress, coupled with a lack of empathy with their fellow human beings.
People with these emotional problems don't fall in one politic direction or another. Every group you can think of is represented. Politics has nothing to do with it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by west on Saturday March 03 2018, @08:12PM
correlations amoung school shooters:
SSRI prescriptions
socially isolated
democrats
not saying causation. democrats probably because democratic cities have much higher gun crime rate.
(Score: 1, Troll) by FatPhil on Saturday March 03 2018, @10:41PM (2 children)
... gun nuts.
If you don't understand that, then you won't understand the posts to which you are responding, which have way more than a kernel of truth to them.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @03:39PM (1 child)
ad hominem has such a wonderful track record of changing minds
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by FatPhil on Monday March 05 2018, @06:46AM
Neither's that.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves