School Board shooting on tape.
Again I saw only a bit of this while in the Gym today, (one of the advantages of being behind so many times zones)
It seems that a guy came into the School board armed with a handgun and randomly shooting it. The video is unreal to watch.
The video shows 56-year-old Clay Duke, an ex-convict, walking into the meeting and scrawling the symbol from the film V for Vendetta on the school board wall before pulling out a 9-mm Smith & Wesson handgun. He then ordered all the women and non-board members out of the room.
Board member Ginger Littleton returned and tried to disarm Duke by hitting him in the arm with her purse. Instead, Duke put her on the ground.
But don’t worry the board members know who to thank for saving them.
“It could have been a monumental tragedy,” Husfelt later said. “God was standing in front of me and I will go to my grave believing that.”
Really? I thought it was the guys that placed the well placed shots that did it?
“I don’t think anything was going through my mind, except for the fact that these guys were sitting ducks,” she said. “They were lined up like pigeons on a wire and I couldn’t leave them.”
Duke’s wife said her husband was an excellent marksman and he probably missed the board members on purpose.
Also the shooter had a past to boot.
Duke had a troubled history. In 2000, he was convicted for waiting in the woods for his ex-wife with a rifle, wearing a mask and a bulletproof vest. She confronted him, then tried to leave in a vehicle, and Duke shot the tires.
I wonder if this will change people’s thoughts about carrying concealed weapons?
Category: Breaking News, General Whackos
I bet if anything it’ll go in the other direction. Politicians will demand more gun control. but imagine if one of the board members had pulled out a pistol from behind him and shot him? he’d probably go to jail.
Did you see earlier in the video a woman whacked him with her purse? It gives me warm, fuzzy feelings to see people actively resisting despite lack of means.
The following is a list of places where you are restricted from carrying a weapon or firearm even if you have a license. Please note that this is a simplified list. The places marked by an asterisk (*) may have exceptions or additional restrictions. See Section 790.06 (12), Florida Statutes for a complete listing.
o any place of nuisance as defined in s. 823.05
o any police, sheriff, or highway patrol station
o any detention facility, prison, or jail; any courthouse
o any courtroom*
o any polling place
o any meeting of the governing body of a county, public school district, municipality, or special district
o any meeting of the Legislature or a committee thereof
o any school, college, or professional athletic event not related to firearms
o any school administration building
o any portion of an establishment licensed to dispense alcoholic beverages for consumption*
o any elementary or secondary school facility
o any area technical center
o any college or university facility*
o inside the passenger terminal and sterile area of any airport*
o any place where the carrying of firearms is prohibited by federal law
Therefore having a gun on school ground would have been a felony…
I agree with Doc on this. They will twist it around the other way. They will conveniently forget that he was a convict in possession of a handgun (illegal), so he was already breaking the law. That doesn’t mean much to the roundheads in the anti-gun movement, though, because they are stuck in a utopian dream where if they ban handguns, the criminals will immediately throw theirs away, because they are now illegal, and the rest of the un-armed population will be at the mercy of all the criminals that decided to keep theirs.
Cars kill more people a year than guns do, so we need to ban cars. Drunk drivers kill more people a year than guns, so we need to ban booze (how did that work out the last time?). Doctors making mistakes kill more people a year than lawful guns (that’s why they call it “practicing” medicine) so do we need to ban doctors, too?
See the logic if we follow the thinking of the anti-gunners?
Right on, Doc and Old Trooper. And you are correct in saying the anti-gun crowd is wandering around in a utopian dream, you only needed to add “socialist utopian dream” 😉
I have seen the video several times, but my original assessment of his actions has not changed. This was simply suicide by cop. I don’t believe he ever intended to shoot anybody. His first shot is wide right from point blank range and he then pumps several into the desk, once again actually avoiding aiming at the people. After he is shot he then pumps several rounds into the ceiling instead of returning fire at who shot him. I have two different accounts of what happens after the portions of the video that are shown. One is he then turned the gun on himself and the other is he succembed to his wounds. Whichever the case is he is dead and I think that was his goal all along. I am glad no one but the perpetrator was hurt.
Not to mention the fact he’s a convicted felon (don’t know if his rights were restored in FL) and shouldn’t have had a weapon in the first place.
Yeah, more laws, that’ll show ’em!
If Florida law did not prohibit armed carry on school grounds, we might have seen a much quicker resolution, but that’s a big *might* because we can’t know if anyone there would have been armed even if they could have. Fact remains, though, that you essentially had a roomful of unarmed victims.
I am not a fan of the term ‘suicide by cop’ because it typically brings to the public mind the image of some bawling harmless loser waving an empty gun in the air and begging the police to shoot him. It’s a sympathetic term that implies the guy wasn’t going to hurt anyone, and if the cops had done A, B, or C, the poor fella would still be alive.
Duke very well might have desired a death at the hands of law enforcement, but as a first responder, you can’t bank on the guy being a harmless confused soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was an armed, unstable aggressor who was holding five or six people hostage.
This could have been a bloodbath. Personally, it looked to me like he was building up to the killing. IMHO, he missed with that first round because he was a shitty shot, not out of the goodness of his heart. This could have easily gone another way.
Regardless, he is dead and nobody else got hurt. I call that a win.
Our lives become more stable and more routine in our everyday world; when that routine derails into this kind of insanity, we grope for some way to explain what happened, and we try to determine what can be done to prevent it.
It’s hard to understand this, but nothing can be done differently. We have the laws and structures in place to do what can be done. It is exactly as was said above: the criminal in the room didn’t bother to obey the law. There is no law you can put in place that will make a criminal obey.
My grandfather said it best: locks are made for honest people.
there are all sorts of “What Ifs”, but until you can have a non-lethal device that has the stopping power, accuracy and range of say a .45, the end result is that Lethal Force can and will be used to quickly end the situation. Until he opened fire the “Safety Officer” was content to let him spin his wheels. When he fired, and appeared to hit at least one hostage, it became a simple solution.
the Law is not going to stop a man like this, nor Columbine, or the 90 other school shootings. It doesn’t matter if a gun store is a mile, or 10 miles from a school or a prison or whatever else, if a person wants a gun they WILL find it. There are more than enough illicit ways to get one, that they really don’t need to even walk into a gun store.
In the end I think the Super’s actions are the best example of how to handle this. Remain calm. Talk. Attempt to diffuse the situation. When that fails, the “Safety Officer” and his actions are the solution. If more people could deal with this and not freak out when they see a gun, then, you’d see less of this crap.
I’d also like to point out that society as a whole is starting to level so much fear towards firearms, that idiots suddenly think that this is instant power. Guns are tools. Granted they are usually lethal tools, but they are tools nonetheless. A good analogy is fire. Great stuff, we all love it. Some a little too much. But everyone knows that fire is dangerous. Screw around with it, and it WILL burn you, but people are not as terrified of fires as they are of guns, yet if you think about it going by fire is a far more horrible way to go. This is a perception that really should be combated. A gun will not “go off” unless acted on, and a person using a gun is not suddenly Hades incarnate come to take you to the underworld.
Out of everything I’ve read so far and not just here? Doc gets it. To really break it down, a gun is one thing, a pistol is another. The man was found to to have with a spare clip in his back pocket and carried a fifty rd box of spare ammo.
That tells me this dude was determined, one way or another he wanted to end his life. Watching a second video and more complete video here.
There is no doubt in my mind, this man was determined to end HIS life. I’ve tried to figure out why if he was at such close range, he didn’t hit any of the men he shot at. I’m betting he knew the school officer might be armed but wasn’t sure. Either way he wanted his ticket in life punched out.
If we progress further into the ABC News video I’ve linked to, this man was living apart from his wife. The video of his wife standing in front of tri-level house and then a shot of the mobile home he inhabited tells me this man was on his last legs.
I’m not nor will I ever claim to be a pro at figuring out people; Even money says this man conned her, he got found out and with everything else tossed in, he was done.
None of what I say dismisses or diminishes the action of the people at that meeting. Each was brave in their own way and did what they could or felt was the best course of action.
And by the way, if you watch the video, he’s returning fire in the direction he’s being fired up…before he puts the pistol to his head. This man was determined, his life was over.
Sporkmaster: I have to ask who thought it was a good idea for the shooter’s wife to be put on TV.
The last sentence should read “returning fire in the direction it’s coming from” The school safety officer was being shot at, not the ceiling…before he applies said weapon to his temple.
I was looking to see if I could find video of the press conference where Mike Jones, the security guy, spoke. Haven’t found that yet, but I did find this. He’s not a “security guard”. He’s a retired cop who is the district’s chief of safety, security and police. He wasn’t even supposed to be working this week. He wasn’t in the room where the meeting was taking place when the gunman opened fire.
Found it. You can see that press conference here. It’s not the default video – it’s the “Mike Jones, Security Guard” on the right. He was only in the building because he wanted to be available to answer questions from the board on an item they had on their agenda. He said he wasn’t in the building 5 minutes when he was involved in that gun battle…
“It’s a sympathetic term that implies the guy wasn’t going to hurt anyone, and if the cops had done A, B, or C, the poor fella would still be alive”. Yeah, Jack, you’re absolutely correct, if only Jones had shot him in the arm, if only he’d shot him in the hand, if only he’d shot the gun out of his hand.
And, I agree, he was building up the courage to take that next, fatal step, when, ruh, roh, I didn’t count on this!!!
I love how his wife tearfully says that he was REALLY a nice guy, and he was just trying to help her. BULL. There’s a reason ABC interviewed her and not the guy that shot him. I don’t think any effort should be wasted on sympathy on this guy. He wanted to die. That was pretty clear when he put the gun to his temple. What we should be asking is “Is there a better way we could have responded. As Ladybug says he had JUST shown up. Imagine had he not been there? So, should people be armed? Is the average citizen a better responder?
In response to a few comments I’m seeing here and elsewhere about Superintendent and Mike Jones, the School Safety Officer…well, first off, I am very, very loath to Monday morning QB anyone in a lethal force encounter. I don’t like seeing it done, it is usually unfair and portrays those involved in an undeservedly negative light. There are so many armchair experts on police tactics, shooting, lethal force encounters, etcetera, and the fact is that most of them usually have no freaking clue about what they are talking about. That being said, I saw a lot of stuff on the video that concerned me. A lot. I saw things being done that I would never, ever do, things that I would caution others to never, ever do, yet somehow in this particular situation worked out. Let me preface my next comments with the undeniable fact that nobody knows what might have happened. At any moment, Duke could have opened up on everyone there, and seemed about to shoot several times before he did. I want to emphasize that he was an armed hostage taker who gave every indication that he was prepared to start killing people at any second. The Superintendent stayed calm. Good, very good. He engaged the hostage taker in conversation, talked about his family, tried to get other hostages released, he did many things right. He also waved off Mike Jones, an armed first responder, when he first came into the room. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Mike Jones was there for a reason, and it wasn’t to stand on the sidelines while a brave amateur negotiates with an armed hostage taker. The lady bobbed Duke with the purse. Excellent! That very narrow window of opportunity could have been exploited by every man there. All of those guys planted in their seats could have seized that moment to save themselves by rushing Duke, tackling his ass, and beating him until he was no longer a threat. Risky? You bet, but better then sitting there and hoping the crazed gunman holding you hostage is a nice guy, deep down. Mike… Read more »