Thursday, December 06, 2007
Shooting at Omaha, Nebraska Mall
In a tragic incident yesterday, a 19-year-old killed eight people in a Nebraska mall and wounded five others before killing himself.
The night before the shooting, Robert A. Hawkins had shown the woman whose family he was living with a semiautomatic military rifle. He also called her before the shooting to tell her about a suicide note.
Sadly, this pattern has become far too familiar from school shootings and other tragedies throughout the country. The fact is, according to a government study, in four out of five of school shootings, the attackers tell other students about their plans beforehand. And as demonstrated in this most recent tragedy, it's not just true of school shootings
That's why PAX has created the first and only national hotline to report weapon-related threats: 1-866-SPEAK-UP. The hotline has received more than 20,000 calls in only five years. Countless deaths have been prevented as a result. 1-866-SPEAK-UP works.
As the nation turns again to the issue of how a shooting rampage can devastate a community, prevention must be critical part of the dialogue -- especially a means of prevention that has proven as effective at saving lives as 1-866-SPEAK-UP.
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