Miami Herald:

17 dead, 15 wounded after expelled student shoots up Stoneman Douglas High in Broward

9:10 PM

Florida school shooting suspect was ex-student who was flagged as threat

9:27 PM

Amid massacre, a story of courage: Reports say football coach stepped in front of bullets

8:12 PM

As bullets flew at school, one student kept the world updated on Twitter

6:47 PM

President Trump on shooting: Nobody ‘should ever feel unsafe in an American school’

7:34 PM

Parkland was just listed as one of the safest cities in the country

9:12 PM

Worse than Columbine: This is one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history

8:21 PM

Link to tweet: These are the chilling messages I received from my sister. She is safe. Thank you everyone

Link to tweet: this is a conversation someone should never have with their family....

In Miami, schools chief beefs up security and demands national “courage” on gun control

By Douglas Hanks @ MiamiHerald.com, February 14, 2018 10:14 PM ET

Miami-Dade students and parents should expect an extraordinary police presence when classes resume on a normal schedule Thursday, as an anxious system grapples with anhorrific school shooting outside its boundaries but close to home.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said the system’s own police forces will be on full deployment, while officers and squad cars from municipal and county agencies will be dispatched to schools across Miami-Dade to assist with increased security measures.

The beefed-up and highly visible deployment, previewed in a taped message from Carvalho sent to parents’ phones across the county, serves two purposes. First, a guard against copy-cat attacks. Second, a salve for anxious families and school employees as students return to classrooms [....]

The shooting spree inside a high school will force Miami-Dade and school systems across the country to rethink some security procedures, Carvalho said. Authorities said the gunman, Nikolas Cruz, pulled a fire alarm inside Douglas High, and that the routine evacuation that followed provided more opportunities for him to open fire on victims.

Carvalho said the scenario touched on his “worst fears,” when one safety precaution is revealed to be a vulnerability for another threat. “All the protocols were followed,” he said. “But someone interfered with those protocols.” [....]

“There are limits to the envelope of safety you can impose around the school. This is why we try to be as vigilant as possible on prevention, to try and avert these types of tragedies,” he said. “The research is pretty consistent that mental prevention trumps metal detection every time.”

He also said the Douglas High shooting offers another horrific reminder of the need for national action on gun control.

“At what point — after how many killed? — will we have the courage to address the issue of access to guns and gun ownership?” Carvalho asked. “There are some on this equation who will only want to talk about mental health. Others will only want to talk about gun control. How about being reasonable, and talking about both?”

Mass shootings are getting deadlier. And the latest ones all have something new in common: The AR-15

By Matt Pearce @ LATimes.com, Feb. 14

[....] As of this week, seven of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history have all happened since 2007. The Parkland massacre is now the eighth-deadliest attack.

The nation's mass-shooting problem seems to be getting worse. And the latest, most serious shootings all seem to have one new thing in common: the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle.

The AR-15 typically has large magazines, shoots rounds at higher velocities than handguns, and leaves more complex wounds in victims [....]

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Rifle type used in school massacre ‘designed to kill multiple enemy combatants at once’

BY SARAH BLASKEY @ MiamiHerald.com, February 14, 2018 09:52 PM

Semi-automatic rifles look like military weapons, and in many cases they are. But most types of semi-automatic AR-15 rifles — like the one the Broward Sheriff’s Office said was used to massacre 17 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Wednesday afternoon — are legal for civilian use across the United States. In Florida, anyone can buy a rifle so long as they are not a convicted felon.

Most guns used in mass shootings across the United States were legally obtained — sometimes by the individual, or they were taken from a family member with a permit.

“AR-15s are designed to kill multiple enemy combatants at once,” [....]

It is still unknown whether the AR-15 used at Stoneman Douglas Wednesday belonged to Nikolas Cruz, the suspect now in the custody of law enforcement. Cruz is not listed as holding a weapons license through the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the government agency tasked with monitoring gun owners and concealed carry licenses. However, witnesses at the scene told the Miami Herald that Cruz had previously talked about having guns at home and using them [....]

AR-15 style weapons are designed and manufactured by many different companies. And some models, like the Colt M4 carbine, can shoot semi-automatically as well as in three round bursts. A bump stock, the stock replacement now-infamous for its role in increasing casualties in last year’s Las Vegas shooting, can make an AR-15 into a crude version of an automatic weapon.

Sound recordings from inside the school Wednesday indicated that the weapon in question was on a semi-automatic setting, according to Smyth who heard about 12 shots in a video posted to Twitter. “He was not using a bump stock,” said Smyth. “With a semi-automatic you squeeze the trigger and it automatically reloads.”

Generally speaking, an AR-15 shoots a small caliber rifle rounds with gunpowder cartridges the size of a stubby finger. “It’s a relatively small bullet. But it’s a high-power round with a relatively large amount of gunpowder behind it,” Smyth said.

The rounds are lighter than other larger rifle rounds, so they tumble on impact with a target, according to independent weapons expert Michael Limatola. A light bullet will zig-zag through flesh, and usually leaves a gaping exit-wound.

Europeans had school shootings, too. Then they did something about it.

By Rick Noack, @ WashingtonPost.com, Feb. 15 at 9:18 AM

Summary: extensive background checks on gun owners (example given of the Swiss who have a lot of guns) + heavy duty psychological support in the schools for the troubled (German example).

The latter covers the argument "well they could just use bombs or knives." The latter does have to addressed, mho. When kids start trying to join ISIS or White Supremacy groups glorifying violence, there's trouble coming. Little one can do when they reach adulthood, but when they do it in high school, somebody should be paying attention, see what's going on there. Yeah that means tattling on Instagram posts to teachers. So? Doesn't necessarily have to mean Stasi land. Don't we complain all the time that the internet could do with some more self censorship and discernment about behavior? Freedom of speech doesn't have to mean Lord of The Flies.

Hannity on Fox is with the NRA, BUT elsewhere in the Murdoch Empire:

New York Post to Trump: 'Please act' on gun control

 @ TheHill.com- 02/15/18 09:28 PM EST

[....] The New York Post is issuing a rare plea to President Trump to take action on gun violence following the deadly high school shooting in Florida this week.

The hometown paper for Trump, which endorsed his 2016 presidential bid, released its Friday cover story calling on the president to "please act" on guns, featuring grieving students following Wednesday's shooting.

[....]

In NYC, mho, Bloomberg actually made this a position that conservatives didn't need to be afraid of taking.

For this reason, I am sure Trump gets that. It's just that his priority is pandering to his country mouse fans. Urbanites aren't fans.

I'm sure everyone's seen the stories about how assertive many of the high school students in southern Florida have been about speaking out in contrast to other recent school shootings. Here's something I just ran across that adds to hope that times really could be a changing, it implies that millenials are already affecting drops in gun violence and certainly got my hopes up:

Gun Violence Has Dropped Dramatically in 3 States With Very Different Gun Laws

To have an honest, nonpartisan discussion about gun violence, we must look at what happened in New York, California, and Texas.

@ YesMagazine.org, Feb. 16

[....] Let’s begin with one of the most hopeful and obvious: the massive decline in gun homicides in the nation’s three biggest states, concentrated among young people and urban residents all sides claim to be concerned about—so long as the discussion doesn’t challenge pet positions.

Over the last 25 years—though other time periods show similar results—New York, California, and Texas show massive declines in gun homicides, ones that far exceed those of any other state. These three states also show the country’s largest decreases in gun suicide and gun accident death rates.

These major states containing seven in 10 of the country’s largest cities once had gun homicide rates far above the national average; now, their rates are well below those elsewhere in the country.

The declines are most pronounced in urban young people. Among ages 15-24, gun homicide rates are down nearly 80 percent in cities of 500,000 or more in the three largest states, led by declines—approaching 90 percent in New York City’s central boroughs, more than 80 percent in Los Angeles, and 74 percent in Dallas [....]

Prominent Republican Donor Issues Ultimatum on Assault Weapons

By Alexander Burns @ NYTimes.com,  Feb. 17

A prominent Republican political donor demanded on Saturday that the party pass legislation to restrict access to guns, and vowed not to contribute to any candidates or electioneering groups that did not support a ban on the sale of military-style firearms to civilians.

Al Hoffman Jr., a Florida-based real estate developer who was a leading fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s campaigns, said he would seek to marshal support among other Republican political donors for a renewed assault weapons ban.

“For how many years now have we been doing this — having these experiences of terrorism, mass killings — and how many years has it been that nothing’s been done?” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s the end of the road for me.”

Mr. Hoffman announced his ultimatum in an email to half a dozen Republican leaders, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida. He wrote in the email that he would not give money to Mr. Scott, who is considering a campaign for the Senate in 2018, or other Florida Republicans he has backed in the past, including Representative Brian Mast, if they did not support new gun legislation.

“I will not write another check unless they all support a ban on assault weapons,” he wrote. “Enough is enough!” [....]