DeKalb

[eeknight]

I keep almost writing a post about the shootings in DeKalb but then not finishing it. I guess something has to come out, like pus.



A few of the usual disclaimers: I'm not qualified to speak on the subject, and apart from minor coincidence and some friends in DeKalb, I don't have any particular reason to agonize about the NIU shootings more than any of the others. I was a jackpot winner in the birthplace lottery. I'm lucky to live here in the United States where horrors such as this are rare and can be contemplated in comfort and safety.

Seems to me that there are always more questions than answers. Mine are:

• Do we really know as much about brain chemistry as we think we do? Most of these guys seem to have been on one kind of medication or another -- or worse, off one kind of medication or another. I'm not saying the medications shouldn't exist or anything like that, but is enough emphasis being paid to trying to get at canker instead of mitigating the itch?


• We keep hearing about how mentally ill they are. Curiously precise mental illness. Pathological enough to think that murdering bunch of strangers and then yourself is some kind of solution, but not so insane as to walk into a police station or Fort Bragg and start shooting, or emptying your shotguns into posters of Burger King's spokesoddity rather than people, or driving up to campus and getting out of your car stark naked, painted blue, wearing your grandmothers old feather boa and then retrieving the guns from your trunk and walking across campus advertising your intentions. These guys seem to vector in to a sweet spot of guaranteed groups of unarmed potential victims (not much chance of an armed but off-duty cop killing an hour in a geology class or a state trooper stopping in), assurance of media attention, and ease of anonymous access.


• Would it be possible to put together a symposium or commission or something of psychiatrists, mass-psychology specialists, social workers, media experts and so on and figure out what feeds the fantasy in this kind of wacko and do our level best to deny whatever post-mortem attention they seek? The top five things we, as a society, should do when a horror like this descends on some community? Of course, details will leak out one way or another but for God's sake, if the loon made some kind of jihadi-style martydom video, let's not see it on 24 hour cable news. I'm not talking about laws muzzling the press, but more along the lines information that will help editors and producers make good decisions. Yeah, I know, Charles Whitman shot up UT Austin long before the advent of CNN, but I believe publicity through relentless media attention is part of the problem.


• I'm pretty ticked at the Sun Times for plastering the killer's face, or at least much of it, on their front page. I buy their paper now and then because I think their sports section is much superior to the Trib, and they have Ebert, but it'll be a while before they see any of my money again.


• I know doctor-patient confidentiality is important, but is there an ethical way to bring in family members or friends to assist the treatment process, make sure people take their meds and monitor effects, positive and negative?

Final notes:

• This is not a US pathology but a worldwide one. There've been school shootings in Germany, Scotland, Yemen, Russia -- the list goes on and on. One of the earliest was 1975 in Ottowa, Canada.
• Statistically, schools are the safest public places in the nation.
• And it's not the guns. Repeating rifles have been commonly available since the post-Civil War era, well over a hundred years now, but their use in this way in schools is largely a 90s phenomenon.