As I was preparing to write this article on an event twenty years ago today, I noticed the headline that a shooting has just occurred in a Connecticut elementary school with 28 dead, 20 of them children.

I was laid up in bed with my still swollen ankle propped up on a pillow, a zip-lock bag of now melted snow pressed against it. A much-abused copy of Billy Joel's Kohept played on the stereo across the room. The room was sweltering, the window next to me open wide and the snow long-since melted from the overhang, but I wasn't going to limp down the stairs to adjust the thermostat back down again. A knobbed stick lay propped against my milk-crate nightstand surmounted by an ugly lamp, which was now off, the room lit dimly by the lamp-posts of the small cluster of upper class modular apartments, Mods, nestled in the snowy woods. A stack of untouched textbooks lay between me and the window, a Weis and Hickman novel closed and marked on the sill itself.

Incidentally, today, the 11th of November, is the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours (see also Wikipedia), the Catholic Saint represented by the forked tail of our banner. St. Martin was a Roman knight born in 316 AD, who is most known for cutting his rich cloak in two to clothe a naked beggar on the road outside of Amiens.

Johns Hopkins University recently published a White Paper entitled "Case for Gun Policy Reform In America"[bib]201[/bib]. This article will respond to that paper and comment on the larger issues from the context of an organization like the Sheriff's Auxiliary.

[Updated 1 Time]
I have just received a PDF from the Homeland Security Digital Library, entitled "The Response To the 2011 Joplin, Missouri, Tornado; Lessons Learned Study". This is a evaluation of the local, regional, state, and federal response to the EF-5 tornado and its aftermath. The document is unclassified and is redistributable.

The LCSA is exploring local deployment of the prototype LifeNet software stack as "a WiFi-based data communication solution designed for post-disaster scenarios". LifeNet is a fault-tolerant multipath routing framework which uses COTS (Commodity Off-The-Shelf) 802.11.x WiFi equipment to route emergency traffic from device to device until it can reach functioning infrastructure.