When Rebel Girl was a child, a teenager and then a young adult, there was no place she felt safer than at school. School was where she went to see how the broken world could come together. She still feels that way, that what we all do together is ultimately world-mending – but it's different now and it was, she realizes different even then, back when she felt so safe; maybe she was just lucky.
Earlier this week, in Oxnard, a 15-year-old student was shot by another student, an 8th grader. The victim was reportedly openly gay and lived at a group home for abused and neglected children. This morning's newspaper reports that shooter's home life may have also been troubled, with his father's record of domestic abuse and drunk driving. No reports yet on the origin of the gun. The victim is now officially brain-dead, on a ventilator and the 14-year-old shooter is facing 50 years to life.
Then yesterday, in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, a graduate student who had stopped taking his medication, opened fire, killing 5, wounding 15 before killing himself. According to this morning's NY Times, the shooter "bought two of the four guns used in the attack — a 12-gauge shotgun and a 9-millimeter Glock pistol — six days ago, and they were legally registered to him, authorities said. [He]carried the shotgun in a guitar case and the pistols and ammunition strapped to his body, concealed by a coat…He proceeded through a side door to the lecture hall’s stage, and immediately opened fire without speaking. Forty eight casings and 6 shotgun shells were found at the scene, indicating more shots than initially estimated by witnesses."
UPDATE: Click on Cold Spring Shops, a blog by Stephen Karlson, a professor at NIU, for a closer look at that campus community in the aftermath of the shooting.
8 comments:
Be careful of those who speak of themselves in the third person. Their perception of reality is skewed left of the norm.
I agree - school used to be a place of "safety" and for a few children, the only place of safety. How do we reassure our students, our children, and ourselves, now, of our safety at school? It is so tragic - for both the victims and the shooters - imagine the dark place they had to be in to commit such an act. Thanks for blogging on this. It has been on my mind too.
The NIU shooter was reportedly not taking his psych meds. Why are crazy people allowed to purchase weapons?
Why are law abiding citizens NOT allowed to carry weapons on a college campus? The only person in the room with a firearm, once again, was the homicidal maniac.
We can not eliminate this threat but we must act to mitigate it.
I don't know about you Tora, but quite a few of my fellow college students lack the ability to even drive a car well.
I'd hate to see a lecture hall with 400 of them all packing heat, especially with the amount of confusion that probably results from a crazy guy walking in to a room shooting everything he's got...
Also, was the NIU shooter a law abiding citizen before he broke the law?
It's clear that we're on our own here in so many ways.
I have had students at the college who I judged as unstable (due to in-class and out of class behaviors that I found threantening and strange) but the criteria for intervention was such that I was told I needed to "wait until something happened" before the admin could do anything.
Yeah.
2:19 He apparently was law abiding, the guns were legally purchased just days before. That implies a degree of suspicion that the perps action was premeditated.
You know damned well he KNEW he was facing unarmed citizens. Even knife possesion is illegal on our California campii (Ed Code).
Personally, I am not comfortable with having to be armed just to obtain a measure of safety. There is something uncivil about that but how are we to mitigate the risk without some means to incapacitate a crazed shooter? Perhaps only trained employees should be trusted with weapons but something needs to be done.
There was that City Council shooting and the classroom shooting recently ...and more...all in a gun free environment. We're not talking crack alley. These victims were selected because they were safe targets for the perps.
I carry a gun because it's lighter than a cop.
We've had a shooting at our school this semester and another at a school 50 miles away. Both (I think) were about domestic arguments so we're still supposed to feel safe ... so long as we don't move in with that guy, I guess ... BUT.
On guns, I echo Bohrstein. Here in Louisiana we can even carry *concealed* weapons for "safety" but this does not appear to work very well.
Sometimes I have wanted to have a gun to carry at work, not because I want to use it or fear for my physical safety but because I have bullying colleagues and students and just knowing I was armed would actually make me feel better, I have imagined.
However I would *never* arm myself to go somewhere actually physically dangerous - it increases the danger.
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