A large section of Columbus, Ohio was under lockdown last night after police were shot at by a man with a rifle. The police were responding to a call about shots fired near Columbus circle. When they arrived at scene, they came under fire. Police cordoned off a large section of town, including a long stretch of Cleveland Avenue.
Police assigned a SWAT team and a helicopter to aid in the search. Later, a man in an SUV was identified as a suspect, which led to a standoff . During the standoff, the suspect threw what turned out to be a hoax bomb. His SUV was blocked in by police.
Based upon reports for various media sources, the would-be cop-killer appears to have randomly fired shots into local businesses and vehicles to lure police into the area, and then engaged officers as they arrived on the scene. Fortunately for the responding officers, the suspect was unable to make any hits.
He then fled the scene, but was soon spotted and boxed in by three police armored cars and SWAT officers behind a heavy wheeled shield.
The suspect surrendered after a lengthy standoff and was taken into custody.
We’ll update this story as we have more information.
We told you yesterday about the officer-involved shooting during a domestic violence incident at Dallas’s Love Field airport. A man identified as Shawn Nicholas Diamond began destroying his girlfriend’s car, smashing the glass of the vehicle with a traffic cone and large rocks before officers responded.
We now have security camera video of the incident from multiple angles, and what stuns me the most isn’t Diamond’s attack on the vehicle nor the officer’s eventual shooting of Diamond, but the obliviousness of the other people in the area who utterly refused to face the reality that they were in a very dangerous situation where they could easily find themselves injured or killed.
I’d suggest watching the video below twice: one time to see the conflicts between Diamond and his ex-girlfriend transitioning into a confrontation between Diamond and responding officers that led to his being shot, and the second time to notice the numerous citizens standing in close proximity to both the domestic violence attack and then the attack on the officer
Amazingly, other people near the domestic violence attack all but ignored the threat of the enraged Diamond attacking the vehicle. They either simply watched him continue his frenzied attack from yards away where he could just as easily have turned his rage on them, or they seemingly pretended that nothing was going on.
Here are some choice screen captures from the security camera footage.
The man in the white SUV was well aware of Diamond’s attack on his girlfriend’s car, having stopped to watch it briefly. Amazingly, he decides to ignore the potential threat. Even as officers arrive and draw their weapons, he decides to unload bags from the back of his SUV. Incredibly, the woman in the black SUV opens her door and gets out of her vehicle to get a better view of the attack on the vehicle just feet in front of her. She stands there even as the officer draws his gun on Diamond. It isn’t until the officer apparently yells at these people that the man runs from his SUV, and the woman gets back into her vehicle.
Lemmings have better self-defense instincts.
We then go to a different camera view, which is a bit dark because of the shadows. Diamond is on the lower center left of this camera view, the handgun-armed officer is in the middle center of the sidewalk, and what appears to be an officer with a taser drawn stands near the curb. Amazingly, people well aware that officers have their weapons drawn on a non-compliant individual just stand there and watch the dangerous confrontation going down right in front of them. One man is standing in front of a car by the curb. At least three more bystanders are right behind the officer with the drawn handgun. Diamond’s girlfriend is at the bottom of the frame, almost in the line of fire, transfixed.
No one is seeking cover or is attempting to move away from a very dangerous situation.
Four shots ring out as Diamond moves to rush the officer. Diamond collapses to the pavement. Amazingly, even after shots ring out, not a single soul has the instincts for self-preservation to run away from a still-active shooting in process. They cringe, and one or two take a few halting steps, but they’re all basically frozen. Diamond’s ex-girlfriend is the only one who takes more than a step, and she’s only slowly walking away in disbelief as Diamond attempts to rise and rush the officer a second time, resulting in five more shots being fired.
Here’s another video taken by another civilian who didn’t have the good sense to seek cover.
You’ll notice one or two women with the good sense to move away from the scene at the first sounds of gunfire. Amazingly, most people simply stood there, even though they had no idea what was going on, and few people were actually stupid enough to close in and get a better look as shots were still being fired!
What can we learn from this? A number of things.
Humans are slaves to their routines. They will often not deviate from normal behavior even in the face of obvious threats to their lives… and there’s a reason for this.
Think of your brain as a computer, and your daily routines as pre-programmed software routines. You’ve been programmed your entire life to act a certain way in civil society. When people run into situations far outside their areas of experience, many freeze up when they can’t readily access a program on how to handle that new situation.
They typically “lock up” in one of two ways. They either ignore the new situation and run a pre-programmed routine they do understand, such as the man continuing to unload luggage from his SUV, or they freeze until they can gather enough data to figure out what to do next. The woman who got out of her SUV in an attempt to process more data and formulate a response, and the dozen of more witnesses who either just stood there watching or who moved closer to the scene of the threat manifested this response.
Folks, people are often nothing more than stupid computers made of meat.
So what can we learn from this?
It’s simple: think about the kinds of possible (even improbable) scenarios and develop pre-programmed responses to threats. In this instance, seeing a crazed man smashing a car with large rocks should immediately trigger a response of, “get the heck away from there.”
Once officers arrived and drew their weapons, the pre-programmed response should be, “move away as fast as possible and find cover.”
We often talk about situational awareness, but that’s generally a load of crap. More than a dozen people in this incident had an awareness that something was going on. What they didn’t have was a pre-existing plan for how to deal with a dangerous incident.
As we’ve noted numerous times in the past, you will not rise to the occasion. Not one of the dozens of people standing around here did. What you will do is default your level of training.
Get good training and have a plan, folks. The next time something like this happens, the bad guy might be sending rounds downrange, too.
Last month, dental technology startup ONVI introduced a toothbrush with a camera built in, so users could get a close up look at their teeth as they slowly rot away in their heads. This, thankfully, is not that.
In a lot of ways, Philips’ new smart toothbrush is similar Oral-B’s offering. The verbosely named Sonicare FlexCare Platinum Connected is a Bluetooth-enabled electric toothbrush designed to track and help improve people’s brushing habits.
When I sat down with the company ahead of launch, a spokesperson stressed the need for “truly meaningful innovations,” since, “anybody can create a connected toothbrush,” adding that, at the end of the day, most people who go the lengths of buying a fancy $200 electric toothbrush probably don’t need, say, a twice daily reminder to brush their teeth.
So if you’re going to make a smart toothbrush, you should make it, you know, smartly. In other words, don’t just add connectivity to your toothbrush for the sake of adding connectivity to your toothbrush.
Philips’ big push here its 3D Mouth Map, designed for dentists to designate trouble areas due to over- or under-brushing for specific users. The app utilizes that information to determine where users should be spending their time while brushing. There’s also a touchup feature that tacks on extra time after the requisite two minute to address spots that were missed.
Activity is tracked courtesy of on-board sensors, which display brushing in real-time. That information is recorded and aggregated over time, so dentists can determine the areas that need work before the next checkup. It’s kind of like brushing homework.
The brush itself features three intensity settings, pressure sensors (with a built-in haptic buzz when you press too hard) and a timer. The brush head is rubberized and designed to conform to the teeth and gums. And according to the company, the battery should last upwards of two weeks, making the brush a good potential travel companion.
The Sonicare FlexCare Platinum Connected will run $200 when it starts shipping in July. The company will also be offering the toothbrush bundled with a UV sanitizer to zap bacteria on the brushead.
TCAPS – that’s Tactical Communication and Protective System – are a sort of combo connected earplug/hearing aid currently being deployed by the US Army to both reduce hearing loss from explosive sounds and enhance perception of quiet tones.
The system, currently priced at a (perhaps unsurprisingly) lofty $2,000, is designed to address the problem of hearing loss in the military, one of the most widely reported disabilities among veterans. The issue has been attributed, in part, to soldiers’ unwillingness to wear traditional foam earplugs for fear of missing commands and enemy sounds.
The smartphone-connected TCAPS both block out loud sounds like explosions and gunfire, and are capable of enhancing whispers. The systems come in a variety of sizes and shapes for different ear canals and can by charged via solar, standard outlets and even vehicle batteries.
At present, the Army has issued 20,000 of the devices.
A group of prep school students is upset that their school has fired their beloved teacher, Mr. Bunting (Fred Armisen), so they’re going to stand up for what they believe in. We won’t give away the punchline, but the payoff is well worth the lengthy setup. Well played, SNL.
In case you needed more evidence that the internet, left unfettered, is awful: Boaty McBoatface has now won the poll to name an upcoming polar research vessel.
Last month, the Natural Environment Research Council opened a poll, asking internet strangers what they should name their new boat. Rather than going with a shortlist of options, they made it wide open—so predictably, the internet rallied behind Boaty McBoatface.
The option collected 124,109 votes, four more times than second-placed RRS Poppy-Mai. Honorable mention goes to RRS It’s bloody cold here, which rolled in fourth, with 10,679 votes. Before you get too excited, remember that the final naming decision does rest with the NERC.
It’s been a good year for the internet: first a bunch of hockey fans sent an enforcer to the NHL All-Star game (and won him a car); now a major scientific research project is getting a dumb (if endlessly hilarious) name suggestion.
What about the former BBC presenter who started the whole thing? Well, he’s doing an admirable job of not gloating.
We all laugh about how ridiculous the gun control talking points are and that, if challenged, they buckle under the pressure of having to provide actual facts to back their arguments, but this video really […]
To a lot of gun people, “action star” brings to mind flashy but impractical firearms, one-liners, and unfortunately often a painfully phony relationship between the actor and his weapons. However, as the shooting sports have exploded in popularity since 2004, we’ve seen an increase in celebrity personalities joining the fold, or revealing that they were a […]
In this video multiple scenarios are tested for the time it takes to fire 30 rounds from two 15 round magazines, three 10 round magazines and five 6 round magazines. Watch below.
Remember how Hillary Clinton used a private homebrew email server to conduct official State Department business? Today—only hours before the agency is expected to release the next batch of Clinton’s emails, and just days before the Iowa caucuses—the sitting administration disclosed that 22 of those emails are now considered top secret, and thus exempt from release:
The Obama administration confirmed for the first time Friday that Hillary Clinton’s unsecured home server contained closely guarded government secrets, censoring 22 emails with material requiring one of the highest levels of classification.
As the Associated Press notes, this could very well contradict the argument (floated by Clinton and her surrogates) that the former Secretary of State “never sent or received information on her personal email account that was classified at the time.” Given the nature of the classification, the Obama administration is not required to explain what exactly the top secret emails were about.
The candidate, for her part, appears to be protesting the classification, which allows the government to withhold the entirety of the emails (as opposed to simply redacting certain portions of them). A spokesperson for Clinton’s campaign told NBC News that “we firmly oppose the complete blocking of the release of these emails. Since first providing her emails to the State Department more than one year ago, Hillary Clinton has urged that they be made available to the public. We feel no differently today.”