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.
Ken:
“This town is unaccustomed to shootings and multiple deaths,” Garner said. Thank goodness we can now all arm and protect ourselves from those rabid students, teachers, profs, etc.
I’ve probably been to Huntsville at least 100 times. Maybe 200. I’ve even given a few guest lectures at UAH’s Shelby Center. 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. Megachurches alongside ramshackle mobile homes. Highly educated people living in high end McMansions on the outskirts of Madison county right alongside poverty and ignorance. 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. The running joke in the office is to speculate how long it will be before a couple gets divorced after transferring to Huntsville. 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.
Unless this woman routinely carried concealed then this action was to some degree pre-meditated.
The idea that arming everyone on campus would prevent this ignores the recent incident near me where a violent ex-con soon to be lifer three-strikes permanent con walked into a coffee shop and fatally shot four armed uniformed cops in Lakewood Washington. Now the cops reacted and at least one engaged the suspect physically and that officer or another got a couple of bullets into him doesn’t counteract the fact that we got four dead cops from a single small department.
If everyone in that room had been armed and known to be so the end result would just be more people dead, if you get the drop you can kill or wound a lot more people than can pull guns on you. Life is not a god damn western.
I believe in the right to self defense and have three brothers who at various times in their lives carried concealed, but it is not fricking magic, the first person to get a gun out and deployed has a huge advantage.
Apparently, this women killed her brother years ago, and there is some sort of odd coverup of that police report, involving a now-US Congressman (a Democrat from Maryland). This story has got legs!
aconservativeteacher.blogspot.com
Bruce:
A littl sacarsm, perhaps?
That “a violent ex-con soon to be lifer three-strikes permanent con walked into a coffee shop and fatally shot four armed uniformed cops” is one of the better demonstrations of the futility of gun control I’ve seen.
I’m not sure where Kaufmann’s going with the “gun ban laws” nonsense. If you take a look at their laws, you’ll see that someone like Bishop would not have had any trouble getting a gun in Europe, and that’s going through legal channels.
“If everyone in that room had been armed and known to be so the end result would just be more people dead”
I doubt that – she would have looked for another way/opportunity (if press descriptions of the meeting are accurate this was clearly premeditated) but I don’t think guns are the primary issue. I suspect the fact that she got away with murdering someone once before plays a larger role here, along with her victims’ disbelief that one of their own would do something like this.
slugs,
You’re a typical Yankee snob. You fail to point out any good features of the community including the K-12 educational system in the Huntsville area.
“In the 2007–2008 school year 22,839 students attended Huntsville City Schools, 77% of all students scored at or above state and national ACT averages, and of the 1279 members of the graduating class, “approximately 92% of the students indicated that they planned to enter a post-secondary institution for further study, 43% obtained scholarship & monetary awards,” and “received 2,988 scholarships totaling $33,619,040, had forty-one National Merit Scholars, three National Achievement Scholars, and two perfect ACT scores.”
Not bad for a small city.
You’re a liberal hick to put up this statement: “then on Sunday they believe Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs in 4004 BC.”
Absolutely no class, slugs.
Alleged Ala. killer was suspect in attempted bombing of Harvard professor in 1993
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/02/ala_slay_suspec.html
MG,
I said that Huntsville was a city with a split personality. I pointed out that it has extremes at both ends of the education scale and both ends of the income level. The image wasn’t one of a community that had mixed these different cultures, but one of grafting one culture onto the other. Apparently you completely missed the point.
And I do know rocket scientists in Huntsville who on Sundays believe in the literal Creation story.
slugs,
Yeah, I was a little hard on you. But you go overboard.
The reality of Huntsville is that the overall transition has been underway since the late 1940s. The population was small prior to the development of Redstone Arsenal and Marshall Flight Center. It had been a transportation shipping center I recall.
Huntsville is not unlike many smaller rural communities throughout the nation that underwent changes associated with the subsequent presence of government installations, particularly those that involve high technology.
When was Amy Bishop ever very stable since reaching adulthood? It doesn’t appear that location played much of a factor if the various articles are to be believed.