WASHINGTON(Washington Insider Magazine) – A new bill presented this week would create a federal alert program for active shooter scenarios, which have spiked by more than 1200 percent since 2000.
An active shooter, according to the FBI, is someone who is actively killing or trying to kill others in a populous location. According to an FBI analysis issued last year, 333 active shooter episodes in the U. S. resulted in 2,851 casualties from 2000 and 2019, despite accounting for a tiny fraction of gun deaths.
There were active shooting incidents on Tuesday alone at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where 2 officials were shot, and at South Education Center in Minnesota, where a student was murdered and another was critically injured.
On the same day, a bill was introduced in the House which would allow raising the alarm in the event of an active shooting incident, so that those in the area would receive up-to-date details on their phones.
The measure was introduced by Reps. Fred Upton (R-MI) and David Cicilline (D-RI), with the goal of improving law enforcement agents’ ability to promptly transmit data during active shooter scenarios. The AMBER Alert system, on which this bill is based, is a public alert that is activated when a child is in danger or has been kidnapped.
The mechanisms of the warning system are not specified in the law, but a Department of Justice administrator would be in charge of defining best practices.
Other alarm systems have been developed in Michigan, Rhode Island, and Texas, but the new law would give a more uniform, nationwide approach.
While past efforts at federal gun regulation have stalled in the Senate in recent years owing to Republican resistance, this bill — which has no direct effect on gun ownership — was introduced on the Senate floor by a bipartisan duo hopeful of receiving equal consensus in the Senate.
According to ABC NEWS, the Active Shooter Alert Act involves minimizing injury during a shooting incident rather than preventing the active shooter from obtaining a gun in the first place.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as occurrences in which 4 or more individuals are shot and records them using public data, press accounts, as well as other sources, mass shootings accounted for under 1% of the 191,897 gun casualties that transpired from 2015 to 2019. Over the same 5 year period, they accounted for just 2.8 percent of the 74,565 gun homicides.
According to the bill’s sponsors, the bill will be presented for a House vote during Police Week, which spans from May 15 to May 21.