Scenario One:

Two young killers bent on murdering as many people as possible, carry firearms and bombs into their High School in the USA and proceed to kill at random. The time is around 11:15 AM when the police are first notified.

A few local officers arrive within 20 minutes and wait for the County Swat team to show up. Meanwhile the killers go on their rampage unchallenged. Calls are coming in from students and teachers within the school pleading for help. The slaughter continues and numerous kids are being killed and others are seriously wounded.

Later an officer, who has a child attending the school, fed up with the Swat team perimeter procedure, calls for a few volunteers to join him in entering the building. This is at 12:30 PM! An hour and 15 minutes since the first 911 call!!! Lord knows how many officers are on the scene 'securing the perimeter'. Many are running with students away from the school, supposedly protecting them from fire from inside. Meanwhile, no one is inside protecting the students hiding under desks, in closets and small rooms. The killing carries on.

Officers that do enter, find students seeking a safe exit, so they run with the students out the known safe doorways 'saving them'. Meanwhile the killing continues, unchallenged.

The crazed killer kids finally decide to end the carnage by their own hands. It sure didn't look like they were going out in a spectacular fire fight with the police! This was around 3:30 PM, over four hours since they started!

Scenario Two:

Two young killers are bent on robbing an expensive mall jewelry store in Hong Kong six years ago. One of two clerks is shot in the face when he's noticed touching an silent alarm button. The other clerk is wounded by the other gunman while running to the back room equip with an auto-lock door which she manages to close before she's killed. Security, monitoring surveillance cameras, immediately sends a description of the killers to the Swat team already on their way.

Four big black vans loaded with Swat team members quietly pulled up, one at each entrance to the mall (obviously they had maps and pre-planned their actions enroute). Two very well dressed individuals, one man in a business suit and one woman wearing a classy casual dress, stepped out of one van and walked briskly to the now sealed entrance. The man carried a rain coat over his arm concealing his arm and hand. The woman, a purse which she put her hand into and held it there as they went slowly walking down the mall aisle as if they were shopping.

Before the killers could find a hostage or wreak more havoc, within two minutes after the plainsclothes officers enter, the killers were dead, both shot once through the heart and once between the eyes.

The entire incident from the time the first clerk was shot till the time the killers went out in body bags was only 10 minutes! Traffic on the street, both pedestrian and vehicular, weren't even aware of the drama inside. I was there inside the mall.

I was 'there' in a sense also during the High School killings. I watched it 'live' on TV. I kept asking myself, "When are you going in, you cowards?!!"

How many officers, sworn to 'serve and protect', were on the scene while the killing was going on in that High School? How many children were being killed while the police were setting up their 'secure perimeter' and refusing to enter the building? Or refused to obey orders and entered immediately upon their arrival?

There are funerals for the one teacher and 12 students and the two psycho killers. How many officers were wounded or killed protecting the innocent children during that incident?

What has this got to do with Y2K?

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND FAMILY!

Don't expect any heroes to show up to save the day or put their lives on the line for you. If you think the debate about what happened there should be about the availability of guns or violent video games and television, think again. Perhaps it should be about how officials can put their own personal safety above the lives of innocent children.

Gary Allan Halonen

-- Gary Allan Halonen (njarc@ica.net), April 26, 1999

Answers

Gary,

Great piece. I was wondering exactly the same thing. Saw those guys (the SWAT team) on the tube in their police uniforms being interviewed as a group. They were teary-eyed over it, and all of them said they were "frustrated" that all they could do was drive up and grab that kid who threw himself out the second story window. I kept listening for the answer to your question (through all the news), and all I ever heard was, "Sending officers in would've endangered more lives."

Really... Hmmmmmm. Sure was a lot different than the TV, the movies. And I'm sure those guys have been driving and walking around for years in some kind of cowboy fantasy about how they're on the SWAT team, "ever ready to blow the hell out any insane person who threatens our community." I can just see them at cocktail parties too, being introduced:

"This is Bob. Bob's on the police force; a member of the SWAT team."

"Ouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. The SWAT team? Really? I bet that's a scary job."

Driving around for years (with nothing to do), and then all of a sudden when the SWAT chips are down for the first time what happens? They wind up standing around behind tanks and armor plated laundry trucks talking to each other on cool headsets while a couple of punks are inside slaughering kids for hours without any interference whatsoever...

Oh well... No doubt it has nearly imploded all their brains. Pretty tough to rationalize that kind of stuff, I'm sure...

Later,

Bill

-- Bill (billdale@lakesnet.net), April 28, 1999.

Seems to me the only one who gave their life willingly was a teenage girl--who chose to answer the killers question,

"Do you believe in Jesus?"

"Yes."

Are there any things worth dying for? All depends what your ultimate reality is.....

-- Greg Benesch (gbenesch@earthlink.net), May 16, 1999.