There are no active shooters

Because of scheduling changes with my job, I haven't had the opportunity to listen to The Susan Monday Show for many months.  That changed yesterday.

One gets a warm, fuzzy feeling returning to a radio program that was once a daily listening ritual, but hasn't been listened to in months.  It's like coming home after months of absence.  Familiar sounds.  Familiar routines.  Everything is right in the world again.

Susan Monday still puts on good, and I'm sure award winning, shows.  She certainly isn't a cookie cutout, one-party cheerleader like so many other talking heads up and down the radio dial.  The drumbeat she marches to is a symphony of her own orchestration.  It's her independent uniqueness that makes her shows entertaining, informative, and...well...must hear radio.

Now that I buttered up the Honorary Drunk Redneck and former English teacher, I have to call her out for the last segment of her show yesterday.  SuMo, as her fans call her, talked about a company offering bullet proof inserts for kids' backpacks.  If an "active shooter" enters the school, all the kids need to do is use his/her bulletproof backpack as a shield.

Bulletproof backpacks make an ideal
Christmas gift for the child who has
everything

There it was, the phrase that slaps me in the face like a Nerf microphone - "active shooter."  Using it once wasn't enough for SuMo.  She threw the phrase in a couple of times.

Either one is a shooter or not.  Adding the adjective, active, is redunant.  Sort of like saying you are the spokesperson speaking for the Department of Redundancy Department.

Did you catch the double redundancy in that last sentence?

Now I could be wrong.  Susan Monday is a former English teacher so I'm sure she'll be quick to metaphorically rap me on the knuckles with her sharp wit to set me straight, but for the life of me I can't figure out what an active shooter is.  If one exists, then what is an inactive shooter?  All the students in the school who don't have a gun?

Perhaps an inactive shooter?
I think the phrase originally arose out of a writer's need to sound more intelligent and important than he/she really is.  Probably one of those writers on one of those CSI shows wrote "active shooter" in the script.  The actor robotically repeated the line without question.  The director yelled, "Cut!  Good job."  The editing room left it in because they weren't paying attention to how the dialog sounded grammatically.  The episode aired nationwide and a handful of reporters picked up on the phrase because it sounded so official and professional.  They repeated it over and over because Lord knows we've had ample scenarios to use the phrase and "active shooter" is now part of our accepted lexicon.

That's my guess how the phrase came to be because that's a lot shorter than explaining the failure of our school system and how that led to us adding a lot of unnecessary words in our speech, much like most of the words I add in my articles.

I say we call everyone out for using "active shooter" in their speech.  This is America, dang it, and we speak English here, not bureaucratic redundancy.  We just ain't got no need for that phrase, active shooter!

TL;DR folks:
Susan Monday said "active shooter."  Want to know why?  Catch her show weekdays on Delaware 105.9 and simulcast on WDEL 101.7 - FM radio or streaming live.



For your listening pleasure:


Posted by Five Drunk Rednecks

Comments

  1. Thank you Ms. Monday. Now I know my my faithful readers, all three of them, probably read the articles for the pictures!

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