An "altercation" erupted into gunfire after two men in the Lone Star College campus in Houston, Texas got into a fight and one pulled out a handgun, shooting the other. As students, upon hearing the gunshots, frantically ran for cover, a maintenance worker was shot in the leg during the crossfire. A "shelter-in-place order" was subsequently issued, advising students to take cover in their current locations, and the school was put on lockdown. Although only one handgun has been confirmed to have been used in the shooting, both men were wounded and sent to the hospital, along with the wounded maintenance worker. A fourth individual was also brought to the hospital due to an undisclosed medical condition, which a federal law enforcement official who received reports from the scene
claimed was a heart attack.
The two individuals believed to have been involved in the argument that led to the shooting are now detained by police and hospitalized for their injuries. Police officers escorted terrified students and teachers out of their classrooms shortly after the shooting, and one of the students had survived the shooting at Virginia Tech.
One of the men in the shooting is Carlton Berry, who has been charged with aggravated assault and has had several run-ins with the law since 2009. The other man involved, who was shot by Berry, is Jody Neal, who was in the process of enrolling into Lone Star College as a student.
Fears of a replay of the deadly shooting at Newtown, Connecticut were certainly in the minds of the students and staff of the college as the incident took place. According to Lone Star College, weapons are not allowed on its campus, but this clearly did not prevent the shooting from occurring. Is there anything schools, or perhaps the government, can do to prevent such instances from happening again?
2 comments:
I'm sure that schools could potentially do daily pat-down/metal detecting procedures to try and make sure that students have no guns or other weapons on campus, but I'm not sure that even that will affect the situation a whole lot. As long as the person shooting has a motive to shoot, guns will continue to go off in this country.
Moreover, since public schools are technically institutions of the separate states, making a national policy may prove to be extremely difficult as well. The closest thing to a widely accepted policy that would be proposed by the national government is probably some legislature having to do with gun control or the restrictions on what types of weapons can be bought/sold (much like what VP Biden is trying to do right now). However, because gun control is such a controversial issue, coming to even the slightest consensus in Congress would surely take a long time. A law proposal may not be ratified quickly enough to prevent more casualties.
I'd like to say that we can stop future shootings from happening, but I sadly think that such a thought is too naive.
While this piece of news is by no means encouraging, I can't help but wonder if the relatively low number of injuries and fatalities that took place could be attributed to the school's lockdown procedures. If so, they offer a solution to the school shooting problem that doesn't depend upon more and more guns.
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