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  • 2015-12-18 (xsd:date)
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  • Was the Arapahoe School Shooting Stopped by an Armed School Official? (en)
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  • In December 2015 the Facebook page Oklahoma Locked and Loaded published the above-reproduced image meme, reporting that a school shooting had recently been foiled in Arapahoe County, Colorado, through the intervention of an armed school resource officer: The image was accurate in its claim you didn't read about that in the mainstream media, because no school shooting incident took place in Arapahoe on 11 December 2015. (While likely inadvertent, the image provided itself inherent plausible deniability with that error: readers would search for the story and possibly conclude the image was accurate because they found no reporting in the mainstream media of the non-existent event.) The incident to which the page referred was likely the 13 December 2013 Arapahoe school shooting, but that event in no way bore resemblance to the one described in the meme. Multiple contemporaneous news reports provided an accurate picture of the events of that day, and Wikipedia carries a brief summary of the incident on their page for Arapahoe High School: The image incorrectly stated the date of the incident by a margin of two years and misrepresented the result of the attack. While the meme suggested that the shooter was neutralized before he was able to harm anyone, he did in fact shoot one student, 17-year-old Claire Davis, who later died of her injuries (He also shot at other persons at the school but missed hitting them.) The shooter was not actually confronted and stopped by an armed school resource officer, but rather he died at his own hand after failing to ignite an improvised weapon as a deputy was closing in on him. A school custodian, Fabian Llerenas, was first to see the attacker and alert security. School security personnel (Rod Mauler, Christina Kolk, and Cameron Rust) then ran toward the sounds of gunfire to confront the shooter and were joined by deputy James Englert. According to CNN, the armed deputy minimized casualties primarily by directing civilians at the scene and racing to confront the shooter. Whether the deputy's gun factored into the shooter's decision to take his own life was unclear according to the police report: By some reports, though, the deputy's presence did hasten the conclusion of the active shooter incident: The Denver Post published a lengthy post-incident report several months later, which included a timeline of the shooting in diagram form: An Associated Press report described the timeline of the shooting as well: The role of the school resource officer in the Arapahoe shooting was widely covered in the press, although it's uncertain how much his being armed was integral to preventing a greater loss of life. Reports of the incident hinged on the speculative notion that the shooter didn't break off his attack because he was confronted by armed resistance, but that he hastened his own end because he knew a sheriff's deputy assigned to the school was closing in. (en)
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