18 May 2018 — 1900 mdt

I ignored my own good advice and made a mistake
reporting on today’s school shooting in Texas

First reports always are incomplete and often are wrong. Qualify one’s early comments on an event accordingly. That’s good advice that I offer frequently and try to follow.

But I didn’t do a good job of following it this morning when I Tweeted a link to the Houston Chronicle’s page on the shooting at the high school in Santa Fe, Texas, a small railroad town southwest of Houston. I introduced the link with “10 dead, 12 wounded, an AR-15 genre weapon, the shooter taken alive.” Most of that was correct, but identifying the weapon as an AR-15 genre rifle was not. I removed the Tweet after learning it was flawed.

According to later reports, the shooter, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, used a shotgun and revolver owned legally by his father. There also are reports Pagourtzis might have used, or tried to use, pipe and pressure cooker bombs. A complete, and completely accurate, description of his arsenal probably won’t be compiled and released for a few days yet.

Meanwhile, I’m going to do a better, a much better, job of following my own advice.