Word: standoff
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Virginia Tech massacre. The following day, three Pittsburgh, Penn., police officers responding to a domestic disturbance were killed by 23-year-old Richard Poplawski. In both cases, the suspects were wearing body armor. Wong ultimately took his own life; police eventually took Poplawski into custody after a four-hour standoff, charging him with three counts of criminal homicide and nine counts of attempted homicide as well as charges stemming from his use of body armor in a criminal act. (See pictures of the scene in Binghamton...
...versions of armor to protect against gunshots appeared in the 18th century, made of layers of cotton and sufficient enough to protect against rudimentary firearms. In the 1870s, Australian outlaw Ned Kelly famously crafted entire suits from steel for himself and his gang members for the final, ill-fated standoff with police that led to his capture. During the Korean War of the 1950s, U.S. forces used armor made of fiberglass, nylon and heat-treated aluminum. Today an array of protective gear is available including the soft ballistic vests favored by police and S.W.A.T. team members, often made...
...Pakistan A Deadly Show of Strength Baitullah Mehsud, commander of Taliban groups in Pakistan, took credit for a March 30 raid on a police academy in Lahore that sparked an eight-hour standoff and left at least 12 people dead. In telephone interviews with Pakistani news agencies, Mehsud also promised to "amaze everyone in the world" with an attack on Washington as revenge for U.S. missile strikes on militant bases along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The FBI painted the threat as purely aspirational, pointing out that Mehsud had made similar comments before. Still, the attack comes less than a month...
...exactly as appalling as you'd expect, and Cullen doesn't spare us a second of them. To assemble a definitive timeline of the attack, Cullen has had to resolve hundreds of wildly divergent eyewitness accounts. This was, as he puts it, "the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age," so as the nightmare unfolded, students were calling local news stations, which then fed their panicked stories back into classrooms via TVs in real time, creating a feedback loop that distorted their experience of the event even as it was happening. Maybe the most surprising thing to come...
...some lessons from Columbine, though not always the right ones. Colorado tightened restrictions on gun sales at gun shows ... but national legislation died in Congress. An epidemic of profiling swept U.S. high schools, but it was based largely on the erroneous idea that the killers were bullied outcasts. Armed-standoff tactics changed too. SWAT teams are now more likely to rush into a building and take down shooters immediately rather than establishing a perimeter and waiting for more information. That strategy may have saved lives at Virginia Tech, where in 2007, Cho Seung-Hui killed 32. (See pictures...