Turns out that this was the incident: some yahoo called Littleton PD, claiming to shot a couple of co-workers, holding the rest hostage. SWAT came in (in a very appropriate use of SWAT) to investigate, while nearby schools were locked in.
And it turns out the yahoo who made the call was doing it to harass a fellow Counter-Strike gamer (more details at http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/28/false-report-brings-swat-raid-on-gamer/) through a tactic called "swatting" — calling in just this kind of shooting to the police, which may be oodles of fun for the yahoo in question, but not only inconvenienced (to say the least) a lot of other people, but could have ended in tragedy if the cops had been a bit more trigger-happy or if they'd more clearly heard sounds from the FPS game.
So this would be just a crazy story, except that it actually affected me and my family — which just makes it crazier.
(h/t +Les Jenkins, though he didn't know the connection)
Gamer’s video shows SWAT bursting into office while Littleton Police investigate report of shooting
Aspen Academy has sent an alert to parents warning them about an active shooter a few miles from the school.
I hope they figure out who did this and put them in jail for a long time.
Surprising that the police did manage to shoot somebody anyway
+Rick Gary (I think you mean "didn't"?)
Right you are. Thanks!
I thought that this was just done to celebrities in California. I guess we're exporting another wonderful trend to the rest of the nation.
… Yay?
This was on the BBC. I wondered when I saw yesterday’s posts if it was connected.
Re: SWAT. What do you expect? They don’t know what they will be facing when they get there. Jim Wright wrote a long post despairing at both sides in the argument over Ferguson.
This is the part when he stops kicking the Right, and turns his attention to the opposition.
Let me tell you from this side of the Atlantic. You buggers are SCARY. Now I’m sure there are lots of Yanks who cheer at that, ‘We’re Muricans, you should be scared of us.” But you are the belligerent drunk waving a broken bottle scary. You let small girls fire guns, then when the inevitable happens, say its nothing to do with gun culture- the instructor was wrong.
You’ve gone from the loud boisterous bruiser to the lunatic bully.
I know that while there are more guns than Americans, but actually over half the population doesn’t have one. The ones who do, contain a lot of aggressive people, who seem to see gun ownership as a way to prove they are right.
An armed society isn’t a polite society; it’s a scared one.
Sorry if I come across as negative, but we aren’t talking about a handful of nutters. HALF your population votes Republican. They think Ron Paul has reasonable ideas. And most of the rest is still to the Right of Europe