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To Prevent a Suicide: Hope Is Not a Plan
On September 24, in Collierville, Tennessee, some asshole shot up a Kroger supermarket. A few hours after the shooting stopped, and one victim died and fourteen others were being worked on in area hospitals, a small-town Chief of Police stood before a slew of reporters and microphones, as small-town Chiefs invariably do these days when some asshole shoots up a supermarket, or a house of worship, or a school, or an office building in their town, and he said of mass shootings,
“We hope they don’t happen. But hope is not a plan.”
And Collierville first responders, citizens, and even Kroger store employees did more than just hope when the shooting started. Shoppers shut themselves inside store freezers, hid behind displays and pallets, one employee found his way to the store’s roof. Those small-town police officers stormed the market in minutes, a mass shooter scenario training exercise in June assisting their muscle memory. Firefighters in bulletproof gear, purchased for them thee years prior, followed close behind.
We know by now that, “That can’t happen here” is a fantasy. We know. We have seen too much. Mourned too much. Lost too much. We know that, today, even Thornton Wilder’s fictional Grover’s Corners could easily be the site of a mass casualty incident if the much-maligned Simon Stimson went out and got himself an…