School shootings are generally considered some of the absolute worst situations that can happen in a society. As they should be. It’s absolutely horrible that someone would target our most vulnerable and our collective future by targeting our children.
Make no mistake, no matter what anyone’s position is on private gun ownership, everyone with even an ounce of morality wants to prevent school shootings. We only disagree on what will actually work to do that.
So, in the learning process of figuring out what works, it may make sense to reenact a school shooting to learn what can be done to prevent future shootings (or you could spend just under two hours to get real, fact-based information on school shootings and how to minimize the injury and death numbers here).
But a recent reenactment wasn’t done to learn how to improve future responses to school shooting situations. So, why was it done? Geraldyn Berry writes,
Ballistics experts fired at least 140 bullets at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Friday in a significant reenactment of the tragic 2018 Parkland massacre as part of an ongoing lawsuit that accuses former Broward Sheriff’s Deputy Scot Peterson of failing in his duty to protect the victims.
Democrat Congressman Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) and Republican Congressman Mario Diaz Balart (R-Fla.) led a congressional delegation party on a tour of the facility prior to the reenactment. The reenactment aimed to capture the auditory experience Peterson had during the six-minute attack that left 17 dead, and 17 wounded.
Berry continues:
During the reenactment, technicians stationed outside a three-story classroom building meticulously recording the sound of gunfire to replicate the conditions Peterson encountered that fateful day. Peterson claimed to not have heard all the shots. Therefore, he stated that he could not have discerned their source due to echoes. Peterson has maintained that he would have charged into the building had he known the shooter’s location.
To be clear, the current lawsuit is separate from the court case in which Peterson was recently acquitted of criminal charges for his actions during the horrible Parkland shooting.
Will this reenactment prove that Peterson didn’t know how bad the situation was in the building? We don’t know at the time of this writing.
What we do know, though, is that the shooting could have been stopped if multiple people responsible for protecting the children in that school had done their jobs and if teachers had been able to shoot back at the murderer.
Those are things that we can’t let happen again.