Good heavens, I hadn't heard about the story at all yet. That's terrible.
I sure find the first of those quotes weirder than the latter two, which seem totally normal to me. The first one, though -- hey, media writing instructor, do you have to make this a teaching moment? (It may have been less stilted in reality than Ms. Van Duyne makes it sound, I'm sure.)
We have a couple of friends who at VT (they're fine), and boy, it's been a hell of a year there -- they had an armed escaped felon on campus last semester and some bomb threats in the last week or two.
How terrifying. This is the first I'd heard of it as well.
A friend of mine works there and has been showing me some of the emails that are being sent out by the administration. Typos in the subject line when announcing a crisis situation are perfectly understandable but do give off a certain "OMG WERE ALL GONG 2 DIE" vibe.
When I got my news headlines this morning, it just said that one person had been shot. When I refreshed a few minutes ago, it had been upped to over 20.
NPR is now reporting 22 dead, over 20 wounded. (!!!)
Holy Jesus, an hour ago reports were one dead. Two thoughts: damn sorry for those kids and their families and please don't let it be Muslim shooters.
Terrible tragic. Also: "(Watch a student's recording of police responding to loud bangs)"? Lord to I hate cnn.com.
Fuck, this is so awful. Columbine really threw me emotionally for a while, and this is bringing back memories of that.
I've only just heard about this, and I'm knee-jerkily going to assume that any shooting that started in a dorm is, at bottom, going to be explained by the shooter having some bullshit hangup about a girl.
Also, am I wrong, or is there a disporportionate tendency of teh homocidal crazies in things like tech and engineering students?
Eh, if that were the case it'd be like the Montreal shootings where he only killed women. My guess is the combination of just generally mentally ill and flunking.
I don't think you'd have to only kill women; all you'd have to do is start with one fucking bitch that broke my heart and then generalize it to the damn school that she preferred over me.
But like I said, it's a knee-jerk thing. Maybe it's just because I'm tired of the flunking out shootings.
We probably aren't really disagreeing, but what makes the hangups "bullshit?" They seem real enough to an adolescent, I can tell you, even when we don't and wouldn't have killed anybody over them.
12: UNC's crazy guy that went down the main street with an assault rifle was a law student. Who I knew pretty well, actually.
15: The hangups are bullshit because they're solipsistic. You're not a nice guy if you can't get your head around the idea that just because you like a girl she isn't duty-bound to like you back.
15: Being sad about romantic woes isn't bullshit. Hurting other people over them, even a little, is bullshit.
Reports are that there were two shooting incidents. One report even said they were "unrelated." What?
17: There you go, judging other people's choices again.
7: The "anti-jihadosphere" starts scrying FOX News reports for signs of "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" in 3... 2... 1...
Yes, this is a great moment for everyone to trot out their favorite hobby horses. I think he snapped and shot people because of too many required English classes. ("I'll show you fuckers the Male Gaze.")
ABC:
Police at Virginia Tech said that the shootings happened at a dormitory and a classroom on opposite sides of the university campus in Blacksburg, Va.
Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said that one person was killed in the first shooting, which occurred just after 7 a.m. at West Ambler Johnston Hall, a large dormitory. Flinchum said that at least 20 more people were killed in a later shooting at Norris Hall, an academic building.
The gunman, whose identity has not been released, is among the dead. Flinchum wouldn't say whether the shooter had killed himself.
ABC News has confirmed that there were two separate bomb threats last week at Virginia Tech that targeted engineering buildings. The first was directed at Torgersen Hall, while the second was directed at multiple engineering buildings. Students and staff were evacuated, and the university had offered a $5,000 reward for information into the threats.
Not all the students involved in the shootings are dead. Two local hospitals have reported treating 21 people.
University president Charles Steger said that police have not officially tied together the two shootings.
19: That seemed bizarre, even if the cops were merely saying they had no evidence the two were related. It also seems strange that the campus wasn't locked down after the first shooting, given that, according to the NYT, three hours elapsed between the two and the shooter was still at large.
And more seriously - Holy Fucking Shit! 22? That's horrible.
Nothing, not knowing your victim is a mass murderer, justifies violence. And, yes, there is much solipsism in every adolescent romantic fixation. Is anybody claiming otherwise?
First there was a shooting at 7:15 AM in a dorm that left one dead, then the massacre at the engineering building at 10 AM. I don't think they have any way of knowing whether it was the same person yet.
The official University statement refers to "two shootings," about two hours apart. Seems to be the same shooter, though.
14, wtf? Not so much kneejerk as, I don't know, just making shit up about this story?
27: Not all solipsism rests on the sexist assumption that women are objects with no actual tastes or desires of their own.
30: Speculating, my dear. Speculating.
31 WTF? All solipsism rests on the assumption that all other people are objects with no actual tastes or desires. It's pretty explicit about that.
Totally agree with 23/30. Which makes it even worse that B is probably right.
How does a school go about locking down a campus? I'm asking honestly—air-raid sirens? Administrators were communicating with students via e-mail; I wonder if there's some possibility that the lockdown message went unheeded in classrooms due to class.
How does a school go about locking down a campus?
I think it was the old-fashioned cops driving around with loudspeakers method.
Oh, I'm showing my age—of course students have e-mail in class.
A friend says that the massacre happened after a first lockdown was lifted. That's fucked up, if true. I can't imagine administrators being hasty about something like this.
Probably something like an emergency phone chain contacts someone in every buidling (or on every floor of every building) and tells them to a) call the person next in the chain and b) go from room to room making sure that every room has been informed.
MSNBC:
Aimee Kanode, a freshman from Martinsville, said the shooting happened on the 4th floor of West Ambler Johnston dormitory, one floor above her room. Kanode's resident assistant knocked on her door about 8 a.m. to notify students to stay put.
"They had us under lockdown," Kanode said. "They temporarily lifted the lockdown, the gunman shot again."
16: You know, the night before when he was calling the cops anonymously and saying he was going to pick off people waiting in line outside the Dean Dome, he ended up going over to a friend's apartment and drinking a couple of beers and watching the game instead. The next night, after the shootings, a second friend of mine went over to first friend's place and finished off the beer.
A VT student posted on his livejournal at 9:58 AM that he received this email:
"A shooting incident occurred at West Amber Johnston [one of the dorms] earlier this morning. Police are on the scene and are investigating.
The university community is urged to be cautious and are asked to contact Virginia Tech Police if you observe anything suspicious or with information on the case."
Then he received another message that said it wasn't safe to leave the dorm.
Hard to believe that they would start classes normally at the same time as telling students not to leave their dorms.
Ugh. We are one fucked-up country.
(FWIW, haters, I only thought dv situation when someone told me the first shooting was at a *dorm*.)
43: Seems easily believable to me--a simple matter of miscommunication and/or focusing on the most important thing first (keeping students in their dorms) while the academic side of stuff hadn't quite yet realized what was going on.
Y' all jumping to conclusions. Hang in there; wait for details to emerge.
University president Charles Steger said that police have not officially tied together the two shootings.
In the case to which apostropher refers, the lockdown was enforced at the time by administrators & assistants and TAs manning all the stairwells and hallways and warning anyone in the hallways after having locked all the doors to prevent anyone getting in. Ten years, no email in class, big-ass glass doors he could have just shot open anyway, etc., etc., yes, but that's how they did it in the building I was in. I was told at the time that I could go outside if I wanted but that I needed to know the risks involved and I brushed them aside and walked right out and across campus about a block from the shootings (which had been over for a good half hour or so anyway). I did later find out I had a friend (and sister to apo and me) who was pulled behind a tree and shoved down to get some cover, as she was kind of in the middle of everything at the end.
One thing I wish people wouldn't do, and of course they will, is try to draw larger conclusions. It's pretty easy to kill a bunch of people if you want to, it's a big country full of people and a bunch of them are liable to be nuts, so this kind of thing is remarkably rare, all things considered.
from my cousin, a student there:
cousin: the ridiculous thing is, the first shooting was at 7am in a female Freshman dorm.
cousin:: Classes don't start until 8am
cousin: and the 40 people shot was at 9-9:30am
cousin: all of the blacksburg public schools were closed at 7:30
cousin: and Tech still held classes
Basically reiterating 47, I'm pretty disturbed by speculation about motives and "what it all means" in the light of an ongoing incidennt about which almost no reliable facts are known.
CNN reports it was a coed dorm.
50: A friend of mine just said the same thing, and I'm sorry to say I agree.
This is the kind of thing that makes me glad that I don't watch tv or even listen much to the radio. It's awfully nice not to have that panicked feeling of urgency and omgImustfindoutwhat'shappeningRIGHTNOW that usually eats up an entire day when there's some breaking news story. I think I'm actually going to take a nap.
If you're looking for something to distract from the horror, there's some very useful information on the Aces of Spades thread linked in 22. The winner so far is "Maetenloch," who reminds us all -- a propos of nothing in particular -- that the Lepine Massacre was really about Teh Jihad:
For those who've forgotten, in 1989 Marc Lepine (born Gamil Rodrigue Gharbi) executed 14 women at the University of Montreal. He had been taught to despise women by his Algerian father.
50: On MSNBC a firearms expert is spinning this story as no reason why anyone should support any form of gun legislation, though no one has actually brought up the issue.
taught to despise women by his Algerian father.
Comity!
so this kind of thing is remarkably rare, all things considered
This is also a conclusion being drawn.
From BBC: "several friends of mine were near to the second incident and took pictures using a mobile phone."
Put down your phones, people! Run!
According to NBC, the killer used two 9mm handguns and killed himself.
55: Apparently somebody already brought up gun control at the White House press briefing. Why, I'm not sure.
The problem with the news is that there isn't enough of it to fill the time, so you have lots of talking heads offering mostly ungrounded opinions. But the on-the-ground, news between the news is always fascinating to me: Like the local correspondent who was just answering while on air questions that a despondent student was asking her, saying, "I don't know, I have no information."
Re: Ogged's quote of "Kanode's resident assistant knocked on her door about 8 a.m. to notify students to stay put."
RAs are much like flight attendents -- someone stuck enforcing somewhat silly and petty rules who get no respect but are asked to put themselves on the line in the .001% of times things get really fucked up. Much respect to the RAs who were running around knocking on doors and warning people to stay in their rooms.
(Yes, I was an RA in college. I was also one of those .001% [although, in my case, thankfully nobody got hurt] -- we had a large fire in my dorm on my floor that gutted three rooms. I really hope those kids get good support from the administration for what they've been through.)
A CNN piece included the line "The university is updating its 26,000 students through e-mails," and it genuinely took me about 45 seconds to grasp that they weren't talking about, say, installing upgrades to the students' operating systems. "The vulnerabilities addressed by this critical security patch include mass murder and mayhem."
Pieced together from all the rumors, blog posts and so forth:
6' Asian Radford student who's VT girlfriend left him.
Went to her dorm room this AM - she wasn't there.
Shot her roommate and the RA in the dorm.
Went cross campus to where she had her first class scheduled this morining but didn't know in what room.
Started going into classrooms at random and shooting them up.
Once he was cornered - shot himself.
All I have to say, not knowing anybody involved, is that presuming that somebody must be an aggrieved Muslim because he shot a bunch of people and presuming that someone must be a jealous ex-boyfriend because he shot a bunch of people are equally obnoxious presumptions.
And B's speculation sounds to be accurate.
Except he wasn't an engineering student, apparently; his ex-girlfriend was.
fox news is saying 32 killed?? fox, but still...
also cousin reports that because of high winds, medivac helicopters can't get in; all the local hospitals are full, and the next closest one is 40 minutes by car. jesus.
So far Kos has scooped Drudge and Google news on this story, granted that #64 is mostly accurate.
As much as I don't like Fox News's ideology, they tend to have the fastest updates and accurate stuff when you're talking breaking domestic news like this. I'd trust it.
And being bitter and jealous over an ex-girlfriend is much less inherently solipsistic than being bitter over someone who may or may not give a shit about you without giving a second thought to their opinions.
69: If the wind in Blacksburg is anything like it was down here this morning, I don't doubt that they can't get helicopters in there.
I bet ex-girlfriend is feeling really super right now. Bleargh.
Carter said he suspected that whoever the shooter was suffered from some deep psychological problem and was likely connected to the university campus in some way.
Carter is uncannily perceptive. There are telltale signs by which experts like him can distinguish psychologically healthy serial killers from the sickos.
75: Maybe Carter was subtly, subtly trying to say that it does not appear to be political terrorism of the nationwide-paralysis-inducing variety.
Christ. My brother's a student at tech, his old roommate was one of the ones shot (not killed, fortunately, wounded in the leg). He and a bunch of their friends are at the hospital now. He's saying that the hospital is in fact full, they're going to have to send people to Roanoke, which is almost an hour away. The wind is crazy down there too, so no medivac helicopters, they have to drive.
One point worth speculating about, there will be renewed calls for gun control (and rightfully so), advocated from the left and resisted by the right. To what extent will this become an election issue next year?
To what extent will this become an election issue next year?
My guess is none at all.
Fox:
FBI spokesman Richard Kolko in Washington said there was no immediate evidence to suggest it was a terrorist attack, "but all avenues will be explored."...."The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed," spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
I'm in Blacksburg. With the wind today, no helicopters anywhere. This fucking sucks--I can only hope my friends' kid was in another hall at this point.
From the NYT's "The Lede:"
Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit observes: that "these things do seem to take place in locations where it's not legal for people with carry permits to carry guns."
Which is more obscene, that GR comes out with this kind of thing while the bodies are still warm, or that the paper of record turns to him for an opinion as they're updating the story? Christ.
Matt F: Holy fuck. Glad your brother's okay.
I still don't understand from the coverage -- is it over, or are people still getting shot?
78: Best wishes or good thoughts or...gawd, everything seems inadequate...something for your brother and his friends, Matt. And, of course, everyone else who has been tragically affected. Just awful.
83: I'd dare him to say that to parents of one of the dead students. Fucking Reynolds. The kid went insane. Think he would have been stopped had he known that one of his classmates could be possibly packing a handgun?
83: Yes obscene, but entirely predictable behavior by all parties.
Matt F: My thoughts are with you and everyone else touched by this tragedy.
JM, perhaps even more obscene is GR's implication of turning this tragedy into another NRA advertisement.
Michelle Malkin has appeared, and she has a scapegoat! But it's not racial in nature: Reader Kevin e-mails: "Imagine if sensible CCW laws allowed people to defend themselves, this tragedy could have been avoided."
Well, now you know why they're dead. Liberals.
The way to reduce gun deaths is to make sure more people have guns. Just ask Baghdad.
Also: "Just imagine if students were armed. We no longer need to imag[in]e what will happen when they are not armed."
To recap, the shooting of 30+ people is what happens when students are not armed. Presumably, when students are sufficiently armed, nobody will ever be shot.
91 is completely inarticulate. I'm sorry. Thinking of A. and everyone and wishing them (as Tim says)...something.
Maybe it's because I didn't grow up around guns at all, but I seriously have trouble imagining a mindset that says, "I'd feel more secure if it were more likely that more students in the classroom were armed."
"All laws must be followed".
What a weird comment by The Prez. "Sure, the guy may have wanted to go on a murder spree, but that's against the law".
Obviously he knew that he had to make a Second Amendment statement, but then realized that it would look callous standing alone, so he thought up something else to tack on. He doesn't think well on his feet.
Of course, by commenting on the way Reynolds and our President have politicized a horrible tragedy, we're politicizing a horrible tragedy. That's the way blood-sucking liberals work.
I'm just so sorry for everyone affected. I don't know -- how big is Virginia Tech? Is it big enough that some of the students are going to be largely unaffected, or is this going to be a situation where everyone on campus knows the people who were shot?
Oh, man. I didn't realize: This is the deadliest shooting incident in U.S. history.
It's interesting how Kos updates changing reports of "Asian" to "American." But of course, what was most likely meant by "Asian" was Asian-featured American...
Not sure how much credence to give the Radford-ex-boyfriend thing. Seems too much information too early.
98 Agreed. Remember, young brains aren't fully developed, at least in the opinion of the SCOTUS.
Sounds right. Sort of snaps all of those "30 killed by car bomb in Baghdad" headlines into focus, doesn't it.
Looks like B for the win in 11.
As for the topic... aw shit. My heart goes out to everyone in VTech right now. And Glenn Reynolds can go fuck himself.
how big is Virginia Tech?
~15,000 students.
Maybe neil has a better source on student numbers there.
Oops. 15,000 male students. Another 10,000 or so female students.
What are the Virginia gun-control laws? My understanding is that they're pretty lax. Reynolds may have embarassed himself.
22k with grad students. Apo's number is right for just undergrad, I'm pretty sure.
Again from the Times:
Under Virginia law, many college campuses are gun-free zones, including Virginia Tech. Last year, a piece of legislation sought exceptions for licensed gun owners, but it didn't make it out of the statehouse.
One of my college roommates got a Virginia concelaed carry permit more or less on a whim a few months ago without ever owning a gun before, so they can't be that hard to obtain.
99: Yes, it's mighty white of Bush to admit that shooting people is all against the law and stuff, isn't it? I wonder if Cheney plans to weigh in.
Here's a site on Virginia gun laws.
Official death toll at 31 now. Tech has between 22,000 and 26,000 students depending on whether you count graduate students.
Can I just say again how much it sickens me that the first thought of Reynolds and Malkin and their despicable ilk is to blame the victims for being shot?
The political spin, so heavy and so blatant, and so soon, really is quite sickening.
I've been to their local emergency room (one of my friends who was a student there had a surprisingly severe hide and seek injury), and yeah it doesn't seem the sort of place that could handle dozens of gun injuries.
122 not really to 121 in particular.
The Asian guy people are talking about may be a reporter who was arrested for crossing police lines, not the shooter. Grain of salt.
I agree that what they're saying is unfeeling and utterly inapporpriate, but if they're someone other than the shooter, isn't it the legislature?
I am, of course, missing the word "blaming" in 126.
I think both halves of that are fair.
I teach the legal portion of a concealed carry class (handguns) here in Virginia.
The push to allow guns on campuses was being made long before this case. This horrible, tragic event will only make that debate hotter.
Emerson's link to packing.org is a good one. An even more aggressive organization is www.vcdl.org.
122: Both sides have learned from the other. Nothing is more important than immediacy.
So basically Reynolds is on top of the situation regarding the law. And it would be wrong to say that he's just been waiting for something like this to happen.
Emerson:
I do not think that your second sentences results from your first.
I cannot stand Reynolds. But, this is not a new concern. For some time, the gun rights people have been arguing that campuses that ban firearms are open season for crazed killers.
And, ew:
"The identification of the gunman was proving difficult because the suspected shooter did not have identification among his effects and was further complicated because of the severity of an apparently self-inflicted wound to the head."
From the Times.
CNN notes it's the same week as Columbine, Oklahoma City, Waco. What makes the crazies come out in April?
Am I the only one who finds the discussion of gun laws at this point disgusting?
Boys, beer, fraternity parties, and guns ... do you feel comforted by the thought that legal gun possession would have prevented this tragedy? Maybe not 30+ victims in one day, but how about hundreds or more victims in ones and twos. I foresee an ugly debate. Le canard est toujour vivant!
132: Getting on top of the law, for an internet-savvy lawyer, should take five minutes at most, right? After that, the responses are so stereotyped from all sides of the issues that they might as well be burned into the autonomic nervous system. I haven't heard anything new since the JFK shooting.
137: No, plenty of people are disgusted. It's shame, though -- being revolted at the politicization of a tragedy tends to take a political tone, at which point one loses one's ability to take the moral high ground.
Thanks to gun-control legistlation.
141 An indiomatic expression in French, the duck is *still* alive meaning the problem just doesn't go away.
The timing disgust me if he were right on the merits. I get very angry at people who talk about "politicizing" a tragedy that policy caused, or seriously contributed to, or could have prevented. But the idea that a concealed carry law would have stopped this and would make our college campuses safer places is pretty much ludicrous.
139: Because JFK was an asassination, with political meaning at least to Oswald, I've always thought of it in a different category from lonely white guy mass shootings. The Texas Tower was the first of those I remember, and set the pattern in my mind. There may have been earlier examples, but I don't know about them.
It isnt the concealed carry law that is the issue.
The issue is whether concealed carry laws are ok everywhere except college campuses.
I am not sure that I have heard a convincing argument that an adult can have a concealed weapon (with permit) everywhere except the campus.
But what sets the Texas Tower incident apart from others, I believe, is that the shooter had a brain tumor - perhaps accounting for the aberrant behavior.
What really seems to be at stake is whether anyone anywhere can ban guns. Here in Minnesota the bank, the church, and the medical clinic have had to post signs banning guns from the property. I imagine that that would really steam Reynolds if he knew about it, and as soon as some armed wacko kills someone in a church we'll hear the same lame bullshit from him.
The Second Amendment dream of a 100% armed citizenry is loony, creepy, and delusional. There are much better ways of achieving safety.
144: the idea that a concealed carry law would have stopped this and would make our college campuses safer places
Allowing weapons on campus (not the same as CC, as 147 notes) might have stopped this while creating more problems over time-- the two conjuncts raise very different issues. The first strikes me as much more plausible but it's an empirical claim about which I don't want to speculate much.
One of the really creepy things is the way that the CNN anchorpeople are introducing (over and over again) the camera-phone video that was taken from campus, where you can hear the gunfire. "Oh, you can really hear the shooting..."
And also, "this video really takes us to the center of the action..."
Ugh.
presuming that someone must be a jealous ex-boyfriend because he shot a bunch of people
Again, I thought that only because the first shooting was in a *dorm*. Which suggests to me that there's something personal. And the most common personal event that's highly upsetting is a breakup. I only assumed the shooter was a guy because they usually are.
I'm sorry I was right, not that the guy's motives matter one way or the other. I hope his ex gets some good therapy. And I'm sorry Matt F's brother was affected by it, but glad as hell he wasn't actually injured.
I think it was Johnson's Presidential Commission on Asassinations, appointed after Martin/Bobby, that was the occasion for my first memory of the lonely white guy pattern. That is different from the random killings, killing out of personal anguish pattern, although with Bremer-Chapman-Hinckley the patterns seemed to have merged for a while. Maybe it was in the literature before that, I was just a (solipsistic) kid then. When the random killings pattern began to emerge I don't know.
Of course it's a lie that 'there are no guns on the VT campus.' For two hours before the massacre, there were scores of armed cops searching for the shooter all over campus. They couldn't stop him, and it's also remarkably unlikely that some gun-toting student or staff would have put an end to the rampage. The only thing that really disgusts me (because I do feel that this incident raises legitimate political discussion topics) are the people, like Michelle Malkin, who bluntly state that this massacre would not have happened if the laws had been better. The reason this disgusts me is that they're trying to lay blame, and blame on someone other than the killer himself. They are glad that this happened, so they'd have something to blame on their enemies.
148: You mean a physical cause that we can see. Mental illness of any kind is real.
151,152: Yeah, here I am reading Life: the Movie and it all seems to apply pretty well. Every time I refresh the MSNBC.com story I am a little more horrified to see "Click Below to Listen" above link-text like "Student X describes being in a classroom where many students were shot" and "Sophomore Y describes being shot."
They couldn't stop him, and it's also remarkably unlikely that some gun-toting student or staff would have put an end to the rampage.
I, too, find it a little tough to believe that the people in that room would have been made more safe by having two people on opposite sides of the room firing through them at each other.
157: Yes, and see Apo's link earlier in the thread.
"Allowing weapons on campus (not the same as CC, as 147 notes) might have stopped this while creating more problems over time-- the two conjuncts raise very different issues. The first strikes me as much more plausible but it's an empirical claim about which I don't want to speculate much. "
I agree with these statements.
One thing I clearly remember from the Life photo spread on the Texas Tower is the arsenal of bolt-action rifles necessary for the shooter, available under then-prevailing conditions. Today's perfectly legal requisites would have been much more compact and efficient.
I am guessing that the killer had some mental illness and then suffered a breakdown.
At this point, I worry most about the backlash against the mentally ill.
159 -- this is because people like Malkin have watched a few too many John Woo movies. Maybe she's imagining that one of the students in the class had a birdcage with a false-bottom, and when the gunman walked through the door...
FL, bringer of comity. For me the gun control issue is almost purely a question of policies' consequences, but I do have some irritation with the assumption (rightly ridiculed in 159) that the people carrying guns under a more permissive policy would be maximally rational and steady-handed. I'm not sure to what extent Reynolds buys into that fantasy, which is definitely of the "and a pony" sort.
Also, now Wolf Blitzer is on the scene -- he's replaying the camera-phone video, with a running count of how many shots have been 'heard so far'. Insane.
Don't watch TV news, man, it'll make you go on a shooting rampage.
163: The mass shooting backlash against the crazy or slightly odd has been going on ever since Columbine.
As I mentioned, I teach the legal portion of a concealed carry class.
I talk for about 30 minutes about the places where you are legally allowed to carry.
Then, I spend about an hour talking about when you cannot shoot someone.
"[insert example of stranger approaching] Can I shoot them now?!?!" they ask with a disturbing eagerness.
"No, you may not," I respond.
"[insert example of bf treating them poorly/exspouse pushing them/argument over the last febreeze at Target] Can I shoot them now?"
"hmmmm, maybe"
I quit arguing with gun control advocates some time ago. I ended up conceding that gun control is a pretty peripheral issue. But Second Amendment enthusiasts almost all strike me as deluded, nasty, unhappy people obsessed with fantasies of heroic violence. They're a fact of American life and we're going to have to live with them.
If the allegiance of hunters to the second-amendment -loony camp could be broken, the issue would disappear.
Ogged, TV news and this fine website are all I have, at this point.
At this point, I worry most about the backlash against the mentally ill.
Which would differ from the status quo how?
And, as much as I hate all the self-righteous crap that gets spewed on the rare occasions when a mentally ill person who does something horrible gets sent to a mental hospital rather than prison, we fail the marginal and the mentally ill in so many ways that which dehumanizing warehouse a mentally ill killer gets sent to is really a pretty trivial piece of the puzzle.
169: Greeeaat.
170: No, I think it's an intestinal virus today, thanks.
Is febreeze really that hard to come by?
Blitzer: just another reminder that TV people make their livings by seeming thoughtful, well-informed, and authoritative, when actually they're silly little actors and actresses repeating conventional stupidities.
We don't even know that this guy was mentally ill. There are Asian communities that are gun-happy and where male "honor" is a big deal; it wouldn't be entirely surprising if one of them went a bit over the edge, but had been otherwise normal.
Certainly, you are not suggesting that we couldnt treat the mentally ill worse?
How about cutting the horrible funding even worse?
Dude, Ogged. By definition shooting 40 people means you're crazy.
175:
You would be surprised at the frequency of febreeze rage.
Ogged: The killer was Asian?
Bitch:
He shot around 60.
32 dead. another 28 or so wounded.
32 dead now? Holy crap.
Still crazy.
As Ogged said, I don't really want to try and draw any kind of larger conclusions from this.
There's a thousand ways these things can play out, and as Will said, there's an issue here wrt "everywhere but campus" concealed carry. But really, I think that once the nutcase has locked himself in the classroom and is popping off rounds, the safety factor is already pretty much at 0.
178: No, but I am suggesting that backlash induced by mentally ill people acting violently has done about all the damage it's capable of.
179: Is there more to what you're saying that argument by solipsism again? Obviously his mental state was about as far from a normally acceptable one as you can get, but are you really ready to say that anyone who's shot forty people has a pre-existing mental illness by definition?
11: If we're speculating, I bet he was awesome at Counterstrike and active on MySpace or Facebook.
Now Blitzer has Dr. Sanjay Gupta on, to talk about the treatment of "penetrating" injuries.
'It depends on the amount of bleeding.'
DaveL
I guess I hold the hope that it might get better, so I am saddened with the anticipation of further poor treatment.
'It depends on the amount of bleeding.'
God, I'm so glad I don't have the tv on.
The killer was Asian?
Nothing for sure yet, but reports that specify an ethnicity say Asian.
I am worried about the lack of PR from the potheads.
You don't see this kind of violence from potheads.
Now he's interviewing a SWAT-trainer, to ask him about responding to a situation like this.
"Well, watching this B-roll, it really reinforces what my company's been trying to do for the last few years."
I can't believe he actually called the live video "B-roll".
187: Your mistake is to have hope.
Actually, that's a little too strong. But IMHO the chance that the majority of people will ever be anything but hostile and suspicious toward the mentally ill is vanishly small. Mental illness is just too scary. Nobody wants to believe it could happen to them or someone close to them, so it must be that those people are just devious/faking/evil/stupid/whatever.
WH really nails it the statement: "'Certainly, bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting ... is against the law and something someone should be held accountable for,' Perino said."
185: Crazy, not necessarily a recognized mental illness. But I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that yeah, anyone who goes on one of those shooting rampages is probably seriously depressed or bipolar or psychotic or schizophrenic or has PTSD or some such, yeah.
I don't know from concealed carry, but didn't an off duty cop who was taking classes at Appalachia State stop a rampage like this by shooting the perpa couple of years ago? That having been said, there is a world of difference between off duty cops carrying weapons, and every Tom, Dick or Harry thinking they will save the day in a hail of gunfire.
186: After this break, Dr. Gupta shows us an illustrative hymen I mean clip from Friday the 13th I mean X-ray and reimagines this morning's tragic events as they would appear had they been committed by Viking savages.
Ogged, is 177 meant as sarcastic? Because I'm sure you'd be pissed to read: "We don't even know that this guy was mentally ill. There are Middle Eastern communities that are gun-happy and where male "honor" is a big deal; it wouldn't be entirely surprising if one of them went a bit over the edge, but had been otherwise normal."
I don't know from concealed carry, but didn't an off duty cop who was taking classes at Appalachia State stop a rampage like this by shooting the perpa couple of years ago?
Thank you, John Lott.
193: I dunno, I actually think that attitudes towards mental illness have changed a lot over a generation, and that people are surprisingly ready to accept diagnoses. Which doesn't mean they don't still also think that the sick people should just stop being sick, but it's getting there.
"save the day in a hail of gunfire"
A truer oxymoron was never spoken.
195: Probably pretty uncontroversial, now that I think about it.
It wasn't Appalachian State, it was Appalachian School of Law in Virginia.
It is a little scary to think of the PSTD consequences of this War.
The SWAT trainer, Aaron, was just showed the (oft-repeated) video, and asked what he thought.
"Clearly what we've got here is shooting on a campus, and it's the real-deal, and we've got police officers standing around. And the first thing that comes to my mind is, 'Why are these guys standing around? They should go inside and get the job done.'"
Un-fucking-believable. The guy's sitting in LA, claiming that they should have been running into the buildings.
This running commentary on TV news as it plays is useful to me. I'd think it was good for both the watcher/commentator's and the reader's perspective, putting some distance on the nonsense.
I'm sorry, that was reflexive and uncalled for. Yes, TLL, that's sort of correct. There was a shooting at Appalachian Law that John Lott used as a centerpiece for his argument that the Evil Media hates concealed-carry laws, but Lott (unsurprisingly) seems to have misrepresented many of the facts. (Among other things, the two off-duty deputies went to retrieve their guns, but seem not to have used them in stopping the guy; they tackled him and called for backup.)
191 -- I'm confident that universalizing marihuana possession on campus would do more for safety than universalizing firearm possession.
anyone who goes on one of those shooting rampages
Be fair, though: some crowds are just asking for it.
199. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/1/25/153427.shtml
This article also mentions Lott. Doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Ogged, is 177 meant as sarcastic?
No, not sarcastic. I hung out with some Asians guys who were really into their guns and had medieval notions of honor and all that. If one of them had gone on a shooting rampage, I would have been more disappointed than surprised. I'm not sure I'd be upset to read something similar about middle-easterners if the stereotype was something I recognized.
200: Actually, I kind of agree with that, too. Maybe what I'm talking about isn't mental illness generally but some of the more severe forms. There's more acceptance of stuff like being on antidepressants, but not, that I can see, for the Andrea Yateses of the world.
I certainly don't think that there's any contradiction between acknowledging that the right person at the right time could have stopped the rampage with a gun, and believing that the laws against having guns on campus are appropriate.
203: It's a lot scary, and a lot fucking tragic. There are a horrifyingly high number of young men who are going to have to deal with this crap for a long time, if not the rest of their lives. And the military and the VA are imho criminally negligent in how they're dealing with the problem.
Wolf Blitzer is already looking forward to the scheduled 'convocation'/service at Va Tech -- "It will be oh so sad."
I think that the Asian gun culture Ogged talks about is specifically Asian-American, like Bruce Lee.
Just remember, only experts can distinguish the mentally ill mass murderers from the sensible, rational ones. Don't speak when you're not qualified to judge.
210: Some of Ogged's best friends are homicidal maniacs. And they can't drive for shit.
They should go inside and get the job done
I confess I had the same thought.
Yes! CNN is prowling the Va Tech Facebook group!
I'm glad B mentioned PTSD. I sort of don't want to speculate about this, but all of the accounts floating around, coupled with sheer number of fatalities, seem to have the shooter in "kill-mode", as one who is trained, not some guy who had a breakdown.
218: Well, yeah, but you're Iranian.
210: I've run into that too, although I would have a hard time imagining the people involved going much further than never speaking to someone again.
Of course, they might have just watched too many John Woo movies.
Ogged's homicidal friends are good with math, but they have no style sense and can't dance.
210: Come on, ogged. That's youthful angst looking for something to identify with, not Asian culture.
There are also reports that he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
225 -- GR would probably argue that bulletproof vests should be outlawed, so as to make it easier for concealed-gun-carrying members of the public to fight back.
213: Yes, Yes, Yes. The "Death Highway" accounts for Tim McVeigh much better than his having been a loner does. Maybe the Edwardses, who seem to be first with all the good ideas, can make this into a campaign issue. I had an uncle who was a changed, hollow man after WWII. The social cost of this has been and will be tremendous.
227: Or should they be mandatory.
Say, there's a compromise everybody can get behind! Strong gun control plus universal bulletproof vests.
And helmets. There'd have to be helmets.
not Asian culture
Of course it's not "Asian culture." It's a subgroup of young immigrant or second-generation men with a particular culture; this one happens to be a subgroup of Asians.
If Asians have a thing for spree killings, why aren't there more spree killings in Asia? Recent history suggests that shooting up your school is as American as apple pie.
225: Wow. If it does turn out that he's a recent vet, I hate to say it, but actually the event could have beneficial effects on mental health treatment and support for vets. If someone goes postal while the war is still going on, it could make a difference; if it takes five or ten years, we'll all have moved on.
WRONG: When bulletproof vests are outlawed, only outlaws will have bulletproof vests. The answer is to remove all regulations on bulletproof vests to that the prices will drop to the point where everyone is wearing them at all times. They may not work, but they will work as a deterrent to this sort of thing.
Also, if everyone who wanted a gun could have a gun wherever they wanted whenever they wanted, this sort of thing might happen 10 times as often, but each time it happened there would be no more than 10 fatalities before someone successfully shot the gunman.
Shouldn't the title of this post (or at least the comments) be "It Would Be Irresponsible Not To"?
why aren't there more spree killings in Asia
Why, they pioneered the genre, you ignoramus.
230: So why do you associate it with being Asian rather than just a particular subset of poorly socialized geeks?
I should admit that when the first reports came out identifying the shooter as Asian, I thought "Did Kenneth Eng move to Virginia?"
They need to get the student reporters out of the press conference. Adult questions only, please.
Ogged's right about the particular subculture he's identifying; I know it too. But so far I don't think that's been any of the big shooters, which just supports my contention that it has to be crazy, not some "rational" macho honor thing.
The guy's sitting in LA, claiming that they should have been running into the buildings.
Since Columbine, I think that's actually the generally accepted practice, depending on the situation. The idea is that sealing off a perimeter just gives the shooter more time to kill the people who are inside. Who knows if that was an issue with this, though.
why aren't there more spree killings in Asia?
Ahem. (I was just making a point about this guy not necessarily being mentall ill; I'm not actually saying that Asians are likely to go shooting things up.)
Well, of course it's crazy. Killing your girlfriend because she dishonored you can be a macho honor thing. Killing random people never is. Nobody takes out a vendetta on an entire village, not since God stopped telling people to in the Bible.
241 -- I understand that's the generally accepted practice, but there was nothing from the video to suggest that police didn't go in immediately. The SWAT guy was listening to a grainy video from LA, and coming to the conclusion that these officers needed more training from his company.
FWIW, the police chief at the live press conference just said, "police entered the buildings immediately upon arrival."
Also, LB's comment upthread about this putting the bombings in Iraq in perspective is spot on. This kind of toll would be a light-medium day in Baghdad.
Nobody takes out a vendetta on an entire village, not since God stopped telling people to in the Bible.
Note: offer may be void in Vietnam, Cambodia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, and the Occupied Territories.
200, 211: Agree that things definately have gotten better in this regard over the past 20 or so years.
Most of the remaining problems of public understanding come in trying to figure out degrees of personal responsibility. And since that is indeed one hell of a tricky and convoluted issue, it's not surprising that's still a work in progress.
If this was Baghdad they'd have killed 300 more people as the campus was being evacuated. What's the point?
More interesting to my mind is the thing about this being the most successful one-man shooting spree in US history. Leaving aside concerns about accurate record-keeping, this does explain a lot about the popularity of suicide bombing, doesn't it? It seems like a suicide bomber beats this tally on a weekly basis in Iraq.
Most of the remaining problems of public understanding come in trying to figure out degrees of personal responsibility. And since that is indeed one hell of a tricky and convoluted issue, it's not surprising that's still a work in progress.
Agree that it's tricky and convoluted, maybe not even possible. Disagree that it's a work in progress. Public understanding has decided that if you do something horrible, you're personally responsible, period.
253 -- 'successful' seems like the wrong word to use, here.
254: That's just vastly overstated.
195: Read before you speculate:
Seriously depressed - highly unlikely; too immobilized to act.
Biploar - not likely; too immobilized or too expansive to focus.
Psychotic - What kind? There are many.
PTSD - Unlikely; too fragile and phobic to act
OCD - Maybe.
Narcissistic or Borderline Dissociative Disorder - Maybe.
Schizophrenic - See last sentence.
In fact, crimes committed by the mentally ill are not statistically different from the general population, a point to bear in mind before stirring the ignorance/hate pot. About that limb ...
253: That's why you play Counterstrike.
257: If you have an argument to the contrary, I'm all ears. Andrea Yates probably came as close to getting sympathetic coverage as anyone I can think of, and that was still horrible.
260: We've only even begun being able to talk about mental illness in a meaningful fashion within the last 30 to 50 years.
There wasn't even a "post-partum depression" argument (beyond anecdotes) to be made a couple of generations ago.
That we don't have things all worked out is hardly surprising. And to discount our *relatively* advanced state of thinking towards mental illness to the degree you did in 260 is simply ignorant of the history of the issue.
261: Our societal attitudes are no more primitive than our knowledge.
Oh, fuck you too. Yes, we're more enlightened than we were a century ago. Are we more enlightened than we were 20 years ago when Hinckley shot Reagan?
260 again: And you seem to talk about the Yates case as a slam dunk for freedom-from-responsibility due to mental illness.
It's arguably more a slam dunk for freedom-from-responsibility due to a complete fucking jackass of a husband. Without the husband, it's not patently obvious that the post-partum alone explains it.
What follows is that there is no place whatever for hatred in the minds of the wise. Only an utter idiot would hate the good, and it is irrational to hate the wicked, for vice is a species of mental disease comparable to illness in the body
263: Umm, okay clearly I've missed something here.
What's with the 'fuck you'?
Whatever. Believe what you like sir.
You two should settle this with pistols.
Could someone club this Anicius person to death for me?
Matt F--etc--hope your brother's friends okay. This is incredibly horrible, and VTech's in my thoughts and prayers.
210: I'm sorry, I still don't get this. Your'e familiar with a subculture of Asian-American boys that glorifies violence; check, so am I. I'm guessing you're using honor as shorthand for some desire for egotistical revenge? I've also known plenty of Iranian-,Pakistani-, Indian-, West African--, Italian-, Irish-, Scottish-, German-, Israeli-, Russian-, ETC boys--with their own subcultures--who had the exact same thing going on. Would you be making the same "doesn't have to be mentally ill" qualifications for those groups? Or not, just b/c you happened not to recognize that stereotype in your experiences of those groups? Are you saying that when it's a white guy or an Iranian guy who goes over the edge (b/c yes, it is almost always a guy, acording to the Wikipedia), they're *really* mentally ill, but since you've hung out with Asians, (you have some actual Asian friends!) you know they only have to be a little mentlaly ill to do something like this, b/c their culture is that violent?
267: I'm more of a chainsaw guy.
Gas powered baby.
I don't even understand what the argument is.
Public understanding has decided that if you do something horrible, you're personally responsible, period.
Can I get in on some of that fuckery? Because I don't think it's at all clear that "public understanding has decided" any such thing. Of course there are strong contemporary elements of denounce-the-wicked, but there are other things going on, too.
269: I assumed ogged was counting Iran as part of Asia., which seemed reasonable.
263: The "fuck you" was in response to your "simply ignorant about the history" swipe. I would contend that if you're talking about "work in progress" there ought to be some actual progress over periods shorter than a lifetime. And for that matter, the Rule in M'Naghten's case came down about 150 years ago. But whatever.
Perhaps it would help to explain what you mean by "freedom from responsibility due to mental illness". Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but I'm catching some subtext in your 264 that isn't sitting well. For the record, what I'm talking about isn't the merits of her diagnosis or defense, it's the vast numbers of people who rejected any possibility that her mental illness had anything to do with her legal or moral responsibility.
I assumed ogged was counting Iran as part of Asia., which seemed reasonable.
A nice save, but I wasn't, to be honest. I don't know of an Iranian-American faux-gangster gun-loving subculture, but maybe I've only happened to run into this with Korean/Vietnamese boys and it's actually all over.
Asia is a geographical area, it doesn't have a culture, obviously.
195, 258. One category I forgot to mention is antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy), a more likely candidate. But even here, I would urge caution: the populution of sociopaths are represented almost as equally among our corporate CEOs and politicians as in our prisons.
I am entirely opposed to using sociopathy to exculpate corporate looters or cabinet level war criminals.
274: Look, I said things were a work in progress, a trivially true and obvious comment. You then said "No. They're not. This is the way it is."
I'm sorry if ignorant was the best I could come up with, but you set yourself up. I also apologize for not using the phrase "work in progress" in precisely the way that you prefer it to be used.
I'm not interested in continuing with the rest.
So Ogged, are you now just saying that "there are some Asian American boys who are really into gangsters and gunplay"?
That that seems a different, and less controversial, claim from what you say earlier, that you are aware of "Asian communities that are gun-happy and where male 'honor' is a big deal."
My sister breezed through the sociopathy section of her psych course because she had been married to one. Not a joke.
I feel pretty silly about this whole thing, but what I'm saying is that I knew a bunch of Asian boys who were really into guns and honor. They all owned guns, talked about (probably untrue) times when so-and-so shot some dude, and had retrograde views about keeping one's bitch in line, etc. (These weren't my friends, but we all hang out at the same pool hall, and were friendly.) It seems more likely to me that one of these guys who go off and shoot a bunch of people than, say, someone from the unhappy suburban kid stoner crowd.
Can we go back to 179? I'm fine with the idea that what we know about this guy is a sufficient reason for making the judgment that he was crazy, but does that mean he was crazy in some way which manifested itself at all in his life prior to this point? This isn't just a question about "warning signs," it's also a question about what it means to say someone is crazy.
You would expect that someone married to a psychiatrist would learn a thing or two.
280: Anectodally, I have experienced (East) Asian-American kids who respond powerfully to the (really over the top) themes of honor in (East) Asian cinema, such that what ogged said made sense to me. Again, anecdotally. This would be the same culture Better Luck Tomorrow was trying to portray, I'm thinking.
Also they play Counterstrike.
279: I'd summarize it more as you made a unnecessarily snotty comment and you'd now prefer that the issue be my use of a naughty word in response rather than the merits of your argument. But whatever, and no hard feelings.
I guess I don't see the connection between honor and massacring strangers, but I'm convinced that these dudes probably have a higher suicide rate than the population at large.
Is this post of Megan's talking about the same Asian-American cultural thing, you think? Actually, on rereading she's talking more about crime than about honor-related violence.
Speaking of honor, Virginia Tech's president should resign. It's bad enough that kids are killed on your watch, but with the questions about the two-hour lag between lockdowns, it's just unseemly to stay. He should announce his resignation, and say it'll be effective in a couple of weeks or whatever, when he's seen this through.
288: Me either, but it's a pretty common idea.
Is this post of Megan's talking about the same Asian-American cultural thing, you think?
Yeah, I just sent links to that post to a couple of people. Sounds similar, anyway.
I feel pretty silly about this whole thing, but what I'm saying is that I knew a bunch of Asian boys who were really into guns and honor.
I grew up around a lot of Asians, and had lot of Asian friends, and I knew immediately what you were talking about.
290: Ogged trolls his own blog, Part 39,402.
One more vote for the whole Korean/Vietnamese mafia thing - present in school, and the closest time I've ever come to being stabbed was when accompanying a friend out to an Asian dance club in an ill-fated attempt for him to hit on a co-worker.
Hypothesis: Ogged sees this machismo/honor thing as Asianish because he lives in California and/or because he has a larger number of Asian friends than most of us white people.
I grew up around a lot of Asians, and had lot of Asian friends, and I knew immediately what you were talking about.
Since the two of you share a brain, this doesn't count as independent confirmation.
Can we not have the "fuck you"s? I'd appreciate it if we could keep the thread about dead kids fairly civil.
Alameida's little sister could whip Megan's little sister.
284. "does that mean he was crazy in some way which manifested itself at all in his life prior to this point?" Indeed it does. He was heavily armed by all accounts, and one does not accomplish this on a whim.
290: Ogged trolls his own blog, Part 39,402.
Dude, when I do troll my own blog, you all think I'm serious and when I'm serious you think I'm trolling. I anticipate much anger about the school's reaction, particularly with regard to the lockdowns and the really decent way to defuse the situation would be the for the president to resign.
because he lives in California
This was in Chicago, but some of the guys were originally from California.
I'd agree it must be much more visible in California, but even in Chicago I've noticed what Ogged was talking about, particularly in "Tuner" culture, so here's another vote for "made sense to me." Of course the VTech shooter might not have been into vtech at all, nor even been asian.
I grew up around a lot of Asians, and had lot of Asian friends, and I knew immediately what you were talking about.
Yeah, I knew what ogged was talking about too. The girls were so, so much saner.
302: I considered the Chicago angle; hence my "or he knows more Asians than the average honky" possibility. Which I bet you do.
I think B is on to something with 297. I could (fill in the ethnicity) say this about several other 1.5/2nd generation immigrant groups that I have spent time around.
I don't think it's a cultural thing -- or rather, it is cultural, but it's not attributable to a particular ethnicity. Rather, it's a zero-sum kind of thinking about the world, a lack of stigma for some activities (suicide) than is common in the U.S. mainstream, and a very great sensitivity to the perceived loss of face or honor.
ogged & others -- It's plausible that is just sampling bias. I knew a bunch of non-asian kids who were `into guns and honour' as you put it. People got killed too though in much more targeted ways. None of us were asian, but then again hardly anyone one was where we were.
Which I bet you do.
True.
I could (fill in the ethnicity) say this about several other 1.5/2nd generation immigrant groups that I have spent time around.
I believe it, but I'm ignorant of the others.
I grew up on the East coast, and while it was less obviously a large-scale subcultural thing, it was certainly there among my friends.
Armchair subtextualizing, but learning about an ancestral culture with a traditionally high focus on status and respect after being pre-assigned in your own life to the role of wimpy nerd might do that to a person.
In Western Canada I've seen the machismo / honour thing and pseudo-gang culture manifest (in various flavours) among Asians, whites, blacks, African and Middle Eastern immigrants, etc. Saheli's description of it as a multi-ethnic free-floating dynamic makes the most sense to me at the gut level. [The Asian gangs attract the most attention -- to the point where there was a specific slang term for Asian gangs in high school, "V.C." -- but that doesn't necessarily mean much.]
302: Just way too early. We don't know what the administration knew or thought it knew when it was making the critical decisions.
310: agree on the western canada thing. I'd missed Saheli's description, which was more articulate version of what I was trying to say in 307.
312: Depends -- do you want to accuse him of privileged insensitivity, or make fun of his primitive ethnicity? He can go either way.
An asian kid at my college challenged a friend of mine to a duel after said friend insinuated that the asian kid and his girlfriend had had sex(the girlfriend was a very devout christian). He then followed him into a bathroom during a class and smashed my friends face into the mirror.
He later wrote an oped in the school paper defending honor.
Hoorah for anecdotes!
I don't quite buy into the "immigrant groups" generalization. Some, sure. But it ain't immigration and Different Cultural Backgrounds(tm) that creates this, or at least that's only a minor part. It's a combo, I think, of a sense of difference from the mainstream culture (either b/c of ethnicity or b/c of general geeky isolation) + adolescent male energy and aggression. And I think you have to have enough people who feel they're in the same subgroup for them to self-identify it as a "Korean" or "gamer" or "whatever" thing. IME, b/c of where I'm from and who I hung out with in high school, I'd identify it as being Asians and/or Chicanos (and definitely not the kids whose parents immigrated from Mexico; b/c I hang out online, I'd also tend to see it in some cases as a hyperintelligent sociopathic white geek thing. If you're from somewhere else, I'm sure you'd see it in different subgroups.
316: How many faces of random bystanders did he smash into the mirror?
258:
Please, I know a little bit about mental illness. Serious depression, for instance, is highly likely to manifest in aggression and agitation in men; I'd wager that a high number of the guys who go find and kill their exes and kids, or do some kidnapping/murder/suicide number with the kids, are seriously depressed about a breakup or a divorce.
315: But "honky" is not conditional! Can one be a honky only some of the time?
Also, me making fun of somebody's privileged insensitivity? Talk about the pot calling the kettle honky.
311: Dave L. is right, but I think Ogged is on to something. The question is when people will start seriously suggesting resignation and how long it will drag out. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a version of what Crooked Timber refers to as the "Galbraith score" (=anybody who says four times that he won't resign, will).
Be that as it may, I think this is an absolutely horrible, heartbreaking situation to be in as an administrator. My God, can you think of anything more horrific to have to explain, relive, endlessly review to figure out What You Did Wrong -- especially when there may actually be nothing.
God, I really do feel bad about this digression. Really all I wanted to say is that "crazy" isn't necessarily what's going on here, since it's not all that hard to prime young men to kill people and I can see how a particular background (by which I don't just mean ethnicity) plus an emotional trauma could set someone off who might otherwise have lived a pretty normal life absent this trauma at this time.
Apparently I can't write in English today. Please fill in the missing words in my last two comments so they read coherently. Thank you for your cooperation.
Ogged's not a honky; he's a snooty bourgeois immigrant. You guys need to get out more.
323: And, indeed, there are plenty of young men who've killed people who go back to living pretty normal lives.
I've led a pretty sheltered life violent-people-wise, but isn't there a big huge weird line between killing people you know and their friends and associates because you're angry about something (maybe a 'sane' angry violent guy) and killing a whole bunch of strangers (looks 'crazy', whatever that means from someone with no psychiatric knowledge).
323: I guess I just don't buy there being much particularly correlating ethnicity to that sort of upbringing. Your experience suggest it, but it's just your limited sample.
"crazy" isn't necessarily what's going on here, since it's not all that hard to prime young men to kill people
Or, perhaps there's an alternate explanation. Let me think.
327: They'd seem to be pretty different things to me.
Not to those Asians, LB. Totally bad with distinctions; something about the rejection of Western dualisms.
By the way, since we mentioned RAs earlier in the thread, it's worth mentioning that the identity of the first victim has been released, and he was the RA in the dorm where the first shooting was. Here's his myspace.
it's just your limited sample
Yeah, totally. I mean, it's not a predictive model. But if I hear that an Asian guy with a 9mm and a bulletproof vest went on a shooting spree, I think "Yeah, I know the type."
331: Oh you feel bad about the digression, do you?
Please to pop in head to point out that someone's actions can be influenced by mental illness without that fact being exculpatory.
327: Depends if you're getting paid for it.
Oh Jesus, this is going to horrible, with the names of kids trickling out. Their poor poor parents.
exculpatory
This word is the sound of scooping the innards out of a cantaloupe.
Their poor poor parents.
Only an immigrant would say this as one of his initial reactions. *Maybe* a non-immigrant girl.
That kid's poor twin brother -- can you imagine losing a sibling like that?
I don't understand why the news reports aren't identifying the type of guns used. All NYT is reporting is that "two handguns" were found near the body, and I didn't see anything about the make and model of guns in other press reports. Seems odd to leave out that crucial bit of information. Has anyone been reading from better sources than me?
333: And I figure `yeah, i know the type', but he's not asian in that case.
In other words it's the 9mm & shooting spree that correllate for me, not the asian.
now my anectdotal evidence isn't priveleged (at least, normalizing for upbringing etc.) but the difference suggest that the ethnicity isn't really important.
It's true; white parents don't love their children as much as middle-eastern parents.
(Yes, I've heard this claim made by middle-eastern parents.)
Wow, the university website already has a podcast by the president. (Scroll down.)
341: I think I heard that it was two 9mms.
I've seen reports that say two 9mms and also one 9 and a 22.
346- Becuase 33 is a lot of people to kill.
Starting from a blindingly ignorant perspective, I'm surprised by the handgun thing. I thought you had to be pretty close to someone to have much of a shot of hitting them with a handgun; the numbers this guy racked up sounded like picking people off from a distance. But I really don't know what I'm talking about.
Aren't the reports that he was shooting people in classrooms?
I'm surprised by the handgun thing. I thought you had to be pretty close to someone to have much of a shot of hitting them with a handgun
As I understand it, he was going into classrooms.
This guy must have been a good shot. They're suspecting ex-military, right?
332: Uggh. So now myspace is going to allow every murder victim to become an "actual person" instead of an "anonymous victim".
My psychological defenses are crumbling all around me. Bad day to stop taking anti-depressants.
Becuase 33 is a lot of people to kill.
Quite a lot of stock 9mm's hold 15, and the Glocks hold 17. If you've got a few extra mags, it'd be possible to unload quite a few in a short period of time.
I guess, but 60 people is a lot to be able to get fairly close to -- weren't they fleeing? Most classrooms have two doors.
343: Some of us do, and are mocked for it.
When you walk into a classroom with a 9mm and begin firing, people have a tendency to duck and run and scramble. Picking off more than a handful would be tough unless you know what you're doing.
This seems to happen when these things happen. The thing of it is, these things do not happen nearly as often as we think these things happen, when you think about how many things could happen in relation to the number of people in this country.
The homicide rate right now in Philadelphia is a structure: it calls out for a structured explanation.
This killing is a rupture, a breach, an unusual moment, a horror. It's unseemly to get a big discursive machine rolling where we talk about insanity and Asians and gun laws or The Times in Which We All Live. The answer to the question "Why?" may well be no bigger or more dramatic than the perpetrator's individual personality and circumstances. Which is big enough: we contain multitudes, all of us, even the most idiosyncratic.
We reach for the bigger conversations because they're a hedge against the truly depressing meaninglessness of one person killing many people for a reason no bigger than that one person. We want this to mean something. In all likelihood, it doesn't, save for the grief and pain and suffering that people occasionally inflict on other people to no end or purpose. There is violence in this world that we should debate, but this doesn't seem likely to be one of those cases.
About the only issue I can see here has to do with the lapse in security. *That* cries out for some further explanation: why no lockdown? What part of the system, or which individuals, broke? But even here, it's worth it to wait a bit and see what went wrong, exactly.
This guy must have been a good shot.
Perhaps not. I think he shot over 60, and something like 33 have died. He might have just been going into crowded lectures and doing a lot of close range shooting.
Most classrooms have two doors.
Dunno. Maybe these didn't. And I've also read that he chained the building doors shut so people couldn't get out.
349: not that close. and in a closely packed area, missing your target doesn't mean missing a target. If it were two semi-auto hanguns, that is a very high rate of fire. Even firing into a room full of students fairly indiscriminately, I'd expect a lot of hits. A lighter calibre might have reduced the fatalities a lot....
They're suspecting ex-military, right?
Oh, god do I hope this isn't true. That's the last thing every poor guy who comes home from Iraq with psych problems needs -- to be treated like a bomb about to go off. I hope it's just a fucked up college kid.
Okay, now *I'm* icked out by the detailed knowledge of how easy/hard it would be to kill a bunch of people with a 9mm.
Our President has made a second statement which doesn't mention the right to bear arms. A relatively smart move, by Bush standards. His handlers explained things to him.
I've known that type of East Asian gangster too. An odd thing is that some of them clean up their act more or less on schedulae and go into professions. Others get killed. (One girl went from beatnik Rastafarianism to banking.)
I'd call it urban American immigrant culture. The connection to Asia is only moderate. (Kung-fu movies are sort of a hybrid, Americanizing Asia and Asianizing the US, but much more the former I think). I think that a big part of it is that immigrant parents can't give their kids many clues about everyday American life. My son used to say of Anh that he had no common sense -- he didn't pick up on normal cues the indigenous 12-year-old Americans did. But by 18 his was totally cool.
They're suspecting ex-military, right?
I haven't read this anywhere, except maybe as speculation upthread.
Good shot? Really?
Big buildings make it harder for anyone who can do something about it to find him, small rooms make it harder for people to run / more likely to try the "hide and hope he doesn't shoot me" vs. "run like hell"; in those situations a handgun would work fine.
Until someone with a rifle or large numbers of people with handguns showed up.
If this turns out to be a kid back from Iraq, this could get as confusing as it is ugly, political-discourse-wise.
364: I'm extrapolating a little wildly from a party I was at. Some guy decided to shoot another guy he thought was sleeping with his girlfriend. Anyway, ffter the first shot, the place was chaos. He shot maybe a dozen rounds out of a pistol, hit 4-5 people (there were 5 injured but I think one might have been from something else), none of them the guy he was aiming for. Nobody died, but how much of that was luck and how much the fact he was shooting a .22 I don't know.
366- Huh. I haven't read upthread, so that wasn't where I saw it, but I don't recall now where it was that I did see it. May have been completely unsubstantiated.
354: Oh, but it doesn't have to stop there.
What Tim said in 359.
Well, yeah, which I also said in 50, in the language of the common man. But no one here is really offering policy solutions to prevent something like this happening again.
"It has also been reported that the gunman lined up several students and shot them execution style."
Yikes.
374: Honestly ogged, I don't think there are any policy solutions that can prevent something like this happening again.
I don't think there are any policy solutions that can prevent something like this happening again
It wasn't a complaint.
Link for 375. Still searching for the military reference.
373: Gee thanks Neil, you should be a therapist.
That site must be a godsend to goth kids everywhere though.
The report linked in 368 says "a" classroom; and a .22 is also about as non-lethal as you can get and still be a firearm. And chained doors... what a freaking mess.
(random question - how frequently do the perpatrators survive these kinds of mass shootings? what are they like afterwards?)
I think it's very unlikely that he executed them. Here's an eyewitness account that gives you an idea of how the thing went down. Here's the website of the German teacher mentioned in that account. I hope he is not dead.
SB, 338: not a 'foomp.' So sad.
Are they sure it's handguns? If the guy isn't trained, that's... well, a really high death count. I guess we don't know much yet, but it'd have to be a pretty big engineering class.
E-mail notification sent out at 9 misses students who have early classes like engineers.
Not sure I agree about this kind of thing being an anomaly. The crazed gunman who shoots up a campus is a pretty well-established trope by now.
Well, yeah, which I also said in 50,
I hadn't read the whole thread.
Fox News:
One of his friends was in a Norris classroom targeted by the gunman, Jenkins said.
"He was very fortunate," Jenkins said. "He said every single person in the room was shot, killed and was in the ground. He laid on the ground with everyone ... he played dead and he was OK."
The victims seem to have been in foreign language classes. Shame on bphd for leaping to the conclusion about engineers being responsible.
I don't think there are any policy solutions that can prevent something like this happening again.
I kind of wonder whether this will just be like the Pittsburgh flight on Sept. 11 -- that nothing can stop this from happening again, but that if it happens in the future people might be slightly more likely to think "We have to tackle him and take him out, because he's not going to stop until he's dead."
N.b. I am fully aware that "tackling" an armed person is pretty insane.
382- I agree it doesn't make much sense. Not sure who "reported" it.
387: I was merely going off the fact that the school is V Tech. And I wasn't leaping to a conclusion, just stating a mild speculation that even at the time I acknowledged was merely that.
327
I don't think there is much of a line at all. Don't a lot of mass killers start out on people they have a personal grudge against and then move on to complete strangers? If you are going to make distinctions how about between suicidal and non-suicidal killers?
381: It doesn't take much of a bullet to kill a human being if it hits in the right place.
Wikipedia has characteristically good coverage.
392: Sure. But if someone is going to be taking potshots at me from a distance, I'd really rather they use a .22 than pretty much anything else.
393: Maybe? Hiding and barricading the doors seemed to work pretty well for a lot of people.
The girl who was shot in the hand and had the presence of mind to help barricade the classroom doors (the gunman left and tried to return) deserves a medal.
#384: there's a difference between representation and reality, a complicated one to be sure. I think we imagine the "crazed killer on campus" in a way that doesn't match up to the reality of any single "crazed killer", and we imagine it far more intensely and more often than it is an actuality of any kind.
Ogged did say it back in #50, but it bears repeating, given the speculation since. We want this to mean something. It almost certainly doesn't. Which makes it far worse.
Ogged's not a honky; he's a snooty bourgeois immigrant Mexican.
I am fully aware that "tackling" an armed person is pretty insane.
That's how the guy in Chapel Hill was stopped. A former Marine bartender burst out of a building and tackled him while he was reloading.
not a 'foomp.' So sad.
Your melons go "foomp"? I don't understand.
(I remember foomp, and fondly. But I thought it was the sound of a child attaching childself to one's leg.)
395.1: Agreed. But a .22 is still very much a real gun.
395.2: Also agreed. It's the situation where you can't barricade yourself away from the guy where the optimal solution for the group who are trapped might be rushing the gunman. The problem is that that's less likely to be the optimal solution for the ones doing the rushing.
397: If all you're saying is that we can't prevent people from going dangerously mad, then of course. But I think there's still probably some reason why it's so often schools, for instance.
Because young people are less stable and schools are full of the people they know.
And I'm willing to suspect that there are different ways that people who have gone dangerously mad end up acting that out, and that these ways are to some extent culturally dependent.
I think 404 is surely a big part of it, but there have been shooters who haven't been themselves students. E.g., the guy in Stockton, CA who shot up a school full of elementary kids. I suspect there's something having to do with the idea of schools as being in loco parentis: students are perceived as "vulnerable," no matter what their age.
And they seem very much public places. There's got to be some connecting thread having to do with people feeling that they've been disrespected, erased, unacknowledged, and wanting (therefore) to make their anger/pain be as public and noticeable as possible.
If by 'culturally dependent' you mean 'more likely to conduct violence with guns rather than knives', I'll spot you that, but there wasn't a deeper meaning for Columbine (the final report didn't blame bullying or video games), and even the Montreal shooting, linked to deep misogyny, needed a whole lot of mental imbalance before it turned violent.
Schizophrenia generally shows up during the age when people are in school.
B, you're overthinking. 404 is right. Adults who shoot up schools are probably just looking to create anguish, and they know that people are especially anguished by the deaths of their children.
Although "make their anger/pain be as public and noticeable as possible" is surely right. Hence the shooting spree.
So the consensus is "these things happen, it's meaningless," and the fact that these things usually happen at schools in the last twenty years is just coincidence. Huh. Okay. I don't care enough to argue about it.
I'd also add to 404 if you want a controlled environment where no one is likely to be able to resist, an elementary school is about as vulnerable as it gets. Too many variables in a mall.
Again, "the fact that these things usually happen at schools" isn't coincidence at all: it's teen angst being taken out against their peers (who are likely viewed as creating the angst). Have there been that many more adults shooting up schools than adults shooting up other places? Not that I recall.
401: Ugh. Near certain death beats certain death every time (eg: UA 93), but when the guy could run out of ammo / kill himself / get tackled by someone else before he gets to you...
412: I really wish there was a deep meaning, or something to blame or ban. But if a teenager or college kid snaps, it's going to be taken out on a place where there are a lot of teenagers and college kids... I'm not sure they 'rebelling against the in loco parentis' bit gets you all that much, or a workable solution.
And when adults snap, they usually shoot up their workplace.
320 "Please, I know a little bit about mental illness. Serious depression, for instance, is highly likely to manifest in aggression and agitation in men"
Aggression or suicidal ideation only manifest themselves on the rebound, not during the trough of depression when the subject is too immobilized to act.
I don't think that trying to understand cultural phenomena boils down to finding "something to blame or ban."
I also think that it's probably relevant that these mass shooters are virtually always men, but, hey.
I also think that it's probably relevant that these mass shooters are virtually always men, but, hey.
419: I blame the patriarchy, which has purposely excluded women from gun culture. But live in hope, B; things do change.
So? Typical response from an 8 year old.
419: I don't either, but people are offering explanations that seem plausible and saying that there's no deeper meaning behind that, not just shrugging and moving on. We live in a culture where guns are accessible; where violence is glorified; when people snap and go violent, they go where they generally go.
I'm not sure what else there could be to say; the Columbine motivations aren't like the Montreal one or the Amish one and don't seem to be like this one, so I don't think it's going to boil down to a broader cultural phenomenon than that.
422; The thing is, if violent aggression is an ordinary facet of depression in men, what's the point of noting that it only occurs after, rather than in, the deepest trough? It still makes 'depression' a not-unlikely explanation for an act of violent aggression.
Ok folks, I put up a new thread to continue discussion on this topic, because the site is slowing down with all the refreshes on what's become a quite long thread. Move along.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino:
"He was horrified and his immediate reaction was one of deep concern for the families of the victims, the victims themselves, the students, the professors and all of the people of Virginia who have dealt with this shocking incident"
However, Bush's actual first reaction (through Perino) was apparently:
"The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed....... Walking into a school hall and shooting people is clearly against the law.
Most reports are merging the two statements. Apparently Perino didn't realize at first that this wasn't a good time to just reiterate a talking point.
I actually do think that there's probably some underlying issue of adolescent boys and young men, in particular, feeling socially isolated and emotionally incompetent, that their feelings are ignored by the broader world and that they themselves have no way to express or deal with them. And feeling a sense of grievance about this, and blaming whoever's most immediately at hand: girlfriends, schools, parents, ex-wives. Whoever is in a position where, according to our usual beliefs, they're supposed to "understand" the guy.
Yes, prevalence of guns is surely a big issue. And glorification of violence *is* a way of giving meaning to these events.
422: Allow me to elaborate: whether or not someone is feeling just up enough to do something violent doesn't mean they don't suffer from depression. Also, please get over yourself.
These things *don't* usually happen at schools. If you're talking shooting of more than one person, they usually happen in poor neighborhoods and houses. If you're talking in public spaces, guess what? campuses are one of the few major public spaces we have where people come and go freely in large numbers. Saying, gee, why do public events happen in public spaces doesn't go very far on the speculator-o-meter. If you were going to compare mass shootings in the last forty years, you'd find "fast food places" being in a pretty comparative race with schools. Which says nothing about schools or about fast food places: it says something about public spaces being the premier place to go wacky with guns and large numbers of people.
If you want a correlation between "kids in schools" and event, Columbine and imitation events are reasonable arguments, up to a point. This one? I have no reason, yet, to think it's comparable.
If you were going to push an interpretation, why not push masculinity, given what's being said about a GF? But the harder thing is the possibility that this is a random shading of difference between a kid who breaks a window or has a screaming match in public and a kid who shoots people. Or a non-kid, for that matter. We want so much to have a solution, a policy, a thing to do about this.
This killing is a rupture, a breach, an unusual moment, a horror.
"Leopards break into the temple and eat the sacred host. This happens again and again. Soon it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony."
Anyone else find it odd that three of the first ten deaths on the MyDeathSpace are attributed to dump trucks?