J. Neil Schulman
@ Agorist.com
@ Agorist.com
Interviewed October 1st by Sean Hannity about the shootings at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College, Air Force Veteran John Parker revealed that at the time of the shootings Parker was in a campus veterans’ center armed with a licensed, concealed handgun and was only 200 yards from active shooter, Chris Harper Mercer. When Parker attempted to leave the veterans’ center with the intent to stop the shooting rampage, college authorities stopped Parker.
The college authorities may not have known that Parker was carrying concealed when they stopped him. But the college authorities were unarmed and if John Parker had stuck to his guns they could not have restrained him. Parker would have arrived to confront Mercer long before the police arrived far too late to stop 10 dead and seven wounded before police killed Mercer.
So why did Parker not go ahead and stop the shooting?
As Brad Linaweaver and I discussed today, John Parker as an Air Force veteran was trained to follow orders from superior officers assumed to have a better strategic and tactical picture. It was natural for him to assume that college officials stopping him had superior knowledge, perhaps that armed authorities were already on the scene.
This was not the case and anyone with knowledge of prior incidents would know that police almost never are present on the scene early enough to prevent mass casualties.
The assumption that “authorities” have if not omniscience then superior knowledge is the basis for the current trend of “sheltering in place” imposed on civilians in emergencies ranging from brushfires to the Boston Marathon bombings. The very word “authority” means just that.
It’s a lie. In the beginning of any disaster it’s unlikely that anyone in the government knows more than the initial reports and a civilian on site might well have superior tactical knowledge.
This needs to be made part of training in arms for both ordinary citizens and authorities who pat themselves on the back in news conferences tagging themselves as “first responders” when the truth is their arrogance in disarming and stopping potential real first responders such as John Parker gives them the victims they need to con the public into thinking heroism is drawing chalk lines around the dead they fail to protect.
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