Not riding the luge, just working with guns on campus

UPDATE III: The Daniel Kaufmann of the Kaufmann Governance Institute lays out the details:

This misses another huge challenge altogether, totally absent in the reporting by the New York Times and other main outlets: Amy Bishop had walked into the Faculty meeting, and sat quietly for a long while during its proceedings, with a fully loaded gun…

It is as if such ease of access to guns, and ability to carry them undetected (or detected?), even by high powered scientist professors in university campus, is simply taken for granted nowadays in the U.S.

UPDATE II: Everything old is new again. (h/t Greg Mitchell)

Three of these people are, according to current reports, dead.

Details to follow elsewhere from the Guardian:

A biology professor has been charged with murder after a shooting spree at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, left three dead and three wounded.

Amy Bishop, 42, was charged yesterday with one count of capital murder, which means she could face the death penalty if convicted. Three of Bishop’s fellow biology professors were killed and three other university employees were wounded.

University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were Gopi K Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson….

AH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop’s anatomy class yesterday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal.

“She’s understanding, and was concerned about students,” he said. “I would have never thought it was her.”

Bishop, a neurobiologist who studied at Harvard University, was taken in handcuffs to the county jail last night and could be heard saying: “It didn’t happen. There’s no way… They are still alive.”

Police said they were also interviewing a man as “a person of interest”.

Three others were wounded in the gunfire. They were identified as department members Joseph Leahy and Stephanie Monticello, both in a critical condition in intensive care, and Luis Cruz-Vera.

Sammie Lee Davis, whose wife was killed in the shooting, gave a phone interview to the Associated Press in which he said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting. He said his wife had mentioned the suspect before, describing the woman as “not being able to deal with reality” and “not as good as she thought she was”.

Giving new meaning to “publish or perish.” Or, as 2slugbaits noted in comments:

Huntsville always struck me as one of those towns that has a split personality. A high end BMW on one side of the garage alongside an old Ford F-150 pickup truck with a gun rack and a Confederate flag design on the back window….A town that was essentially founded by a Nazi scientist who is praised by deeply religious Pentecostals as a great man without a past worth mentioning. Huntsville seems to have a strange effect on people. I have a lot of friends who have moved there and after a few years they are barely recognizable….It’s a peculiar blending of a transient and rootless culture that was grafted onto a deep Old South culture. That must be how you end up with guys who are PhD rocket scientists during the week and then on Sunday they believe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs in 4004 BC. If you’re an unstable Harvard educated scientist, Huntsville is probably not a good career choice.