The DOE has issued an official press release regarding the shooting incident today at Roosevelt High School:

01/28/14

HONOLULU - Roosevelt High ended classes at 10 a.m. today as a result of an incident that placed the school under lockdown earlier in the morning. Classes will resume tomorrow as scheduled.

The lockdown began around 8:30 a.m. when two police officers arrived to escort a 17-year-old reported “runaway” off campus. The male is a non-active student registered at Roosevelt High. According to the Honolulu Police Department (HPD), upon seeing the police officers, the male became combative and brandished a knife, which he used to slash at the officers. One of the officers fired two shots, striking the male once. The male was taken to a hospital in serious condition with non-life threatening injuries.

Parents were immediately notified of the lockdown through the school’s emergency call system. An hour and a half later, the school released students early to allow the HPD to conduct an investigation. Parents and guardians were notified of a student pick-up location.

“Incidents like this are very rare in Hawaii, however, our partnership with the Honolulu Police Department on safety drills played a major role in the success of today’s lockdown,” stated Schools Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi. “I commend Roosevelt High staff and students for their diligence in following safety protocols, as well as police officers for quickly bringing the situation under control. I also want to thank parents for their patience and understanding during the incident.”

Complex Area Superintendent Ruth Silberstein added, “Today’s situation was handled in a manner that caused the least disruption on campus and it is a testament to our teachers, faculty and students.”

Roosevelt High will have supports and counselors available to students when classes resume. There are 1,390 students enrolled at Roosevelt High.

All Hawaii State Department of Education schools conduct regular safety drills in coordination with HPD to ensure students and staff are prepared to respond to emergencies.

A 2012 report from the Attorney General Crime Prevention and Justice Assistance Divsion shows that there’s actually a reverse correlation in Hawaii between firearms registration and gun-related violence.

Paul Perrone, Chief of Research & Statistics, writes:

Given the tremendous increases in statewide firearm registration activity throughout the 2000-2012 period, and in particular the major increases reported for the post-2008 period, it is understandable that some readers might at first glance be alarmed, fearing that these increases have necessarily resulted in commensurate increases in firearm-related violent crime trends. However, as shown in the following figures, such has not been the case.

[...] While firearm registration activity has increased dramatically, the trend for firearm-related violent crimes has remained fairly stable within a narrow range, and decreased substantially during the same period (2008-2012*) during which registration activity increased the most sharply.

Perrone told the Independent that even though we have a comparatively stringent background check, including checks for mental illness, we have a relatively low denial rate.

“It’s the squeakiest clean of our citizens which are applying for firearms permits,” Perrone said.

In 2003, Ebert wrote a review of “Elephant,” a film about the Columbine High School massacre. In it he lays out the problem with the media’s coverage of these events; in short, the problem is the way in which the media makes antiheroes of the villains.

“Events like this,” I said, “if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn’t have messed with me. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of “explaining” them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.