There may be something bad in the water in Tennessee. Months after the Nashville mass shooting at a Christian school (where evidence is still being suppressed), another would-be mass shooter showed up at a different religious educational center in Memphis. This time it happened at the Margolin Hebrew Academy-Feinstone Yeshiva of the South. Or to be more accurate, I should say that it didn’t happen.  But it was close. An unidentified suspect with a gun showed up at the door of the Yeshiva and attempted to get in. But the school’s security system thwarted him so he wound up firing several shots into the air. Police quickly tracked him down and a shootout took place when the man emerged from his vehicle still holding his weapon. He survived the encounter and was listed in critical condition at the hospital. The good news is that there were no deaths or injuries at the school. (NY Post)

Memphis police on Monday said officers shot a suspect after he attempted to enter a Jewish school with a gun and fired shots after he couldn’t get into the building.

Assistant Police Chief Don Crowe said the suspect, whose identity has not been released, approached Margolin Hebrew Academy-Feinstone Yeshiva of the South around 12:20 p.m. He fired several shots and then left in a maroon truck.

“Thankfully, that school had a great safety procedure and process in place and avoided anyone being harmed or injured at that scene,” Crowe said.

The police responded swiftly and did a great job. Also, the Police Chief is taking the correct approach by praising the school’s resilient security precautions and informing the public so others can learn from their example. But this incident is a chilling reminder of how horribly this could have gone if they hadn’t had those precautions in place. Still, for every failed attempted shooting, we have one less set of funerals to attend and one more maniac that is taken off the streets.

The main question here, however, is precisely how long this particular maniac will be off the streets. It certainly seems obvious what he was attempting to do, but his failed effort may not produce what we might like in terms of charges and eventual sentencing. In the end, he didn’t wind up shooting anyone. In fact, he didn’t even get the chance to shoot at anyone except for the police, who thankfully were unharmed. At the school, he only fired into the air.

I suppose he can be hit with charges for having a firearm on school property and improper discharge of a gun too close to a building. He won’t be hit with any charges in terms of registration because Tennessee has been a permitless-carry state since 2021. The one exception might be if he turns out to have a record of previous felony convictions for violent crimes or drug crimes. If so he might do some additional time for that.

They’ll almost certainly be able to bring some charges against him for the shootout with the cops. But, again, since he didn’t manage to hit anyone the charges will likely be limited to “attempted xxx.” I’m certain the police are already scouring his online record to see if he has any sort of history of making threats against Jews or other groups, opening up the possibility of some sort of thought crime being tacked on. But if his attorney is any good at all, they’ll likely try to claim that he’s suffering from mental disorders.

But enough about the would-be killer. Hopefully, we will get some general details of the security procedures that the school had in place. The more we learn, the more we can promote this information to schools around the country. We’ve already learned some lessons the hard way and we need to be implementing changes at a national level. These should include:

• No glass doors that can be easily and quickly shot out
• Security bars on all first-floor windows that would take time to break through
• Armed school resource officers and police beats that always have at least one patrol car near the school
• Security cameras everywhere

If we learned anything from the trans shooter in Nashville and the supermarket shooter in Buffalo, it’s that these attacks are rarely done on the spur of the moment. The shooters plan in advance and consider which locations would be the easiest to hit. Making the schools look like challenging targets will hopefully make aspiring shooters look elsewhere.