Tag Archives: crime

Evil, Good, and the Boston Bombing

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I realize that I’m about to anger a lot of people right now, but I saw a few things about the Boston bombing last night on social media that were upsetting, not just to me, but to others as well.

And these are just my opinions. They don’t reflect anyone else’s, nor my company’s opinions.

Also, I must note, anybody is allowed to say whatever they want. Freedom of speech is important. However, just because you can say something does not mean you should, especially not in the immediate wake of a horrific event. Why not wait a day or two?

People were saying these things long before the death toll was known and long before others could find out if their loved ones were still alive, with intact limbs. They could have waited 24 hours for families to be notified of death and maimings.

Why not wait a day or two? Think it over from the victims’ point of view, and then if you still think it’s important enough to post, and unlikely to hurt someone, post it then.

1. It is totally inappropriate to immediately use the bombing to make snide remarks about guns, whether you are pro-gun or anti-gun or in between and ambivalent.

In the immediate wake of a massive epidemic of ebola that killed three people, you wouldn’t be posting things about how “Well this goes to show that measles is/is not totally harmless,” would you? (It isn’t, by the way. Measles can and does kill and maim people on a fairly regular basis. But that’s beside the point.)

2. It is totally inappropriate to immediately be claiming these people were actors, or that the government did it, or any other conspiracy theory about the bombing.

The plain fact is, at this time no reputable information has been released about who did it, and much of the other conspiracy talk is actually garbage, easily debunked for those who take 10 seconds to check Snopes.com.

I do think it is particularly awful to accuse actual victims of being actors. I talked to several people who were either there themselves or had relatives there yesterday. They’re real people and they were really frightened. And real people have lost their lives or their limbs to this bombing.

3. People were also posting graphic images on Facebook, of blood-strewn streets. That’s fine with me, but it’s not fine with everybody–there are some very squeamish people out there, and again, this was long before everyone knew their relatives were safe. And the phones were shut down for a long time too, so they couldn’t necessarily check.

How would you like to be looking at a photo of a bloody street and wondering if that blood or limb is your daughter’s or husband’s? It doesn’t sound too appealing, does it?

All that said, there’s a nice Mr. Rogers meme going around Facebook right now about how whenever something terrible happens, people try to help, and that you will always find helpers. I’ve seen a few stories about the helpers already, and will be collecting them here.

Boston Marathon explosions attract an outpouring of help from city’s residents

Overwhelming kindness follows Boston Marathon blast

The good outnumber you

How A Decade Of Disasters Helped Boston Hospitals Handle The Marathon Bombings

IRS extends tax deadline for Boston bombing victims

Canadian runners lace up to show support for victims of Boston Marathon bombings

Athletes Going the Extra Mile to Support Boston Marathon Bombing Victims

How to help after Boston Marathon bombing: Relief funds spring up

The Shootings

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I don’t really have a lot to say about the Friday shootings in Newtown, Conn., other than to say how very sorry I am. Of course this is unhelpful.

I do have a few scattered thoughts on the subject, however.

1. People started looking at gun control issues almost immediately. This may or may not be helpful; I don’t know and take no position on it. However, I do wonder why so little talk about mental health issues is occurring.

2. People need to be wary about oversimplifying this problem. It is large and complex, and solutions are not likely to be simple, easy or cheap.

3. People forget the past very quickly. Whatever efforts toward solutions and preventions are made, they should recall that school violence is not a new thing. The horrors of Newtown are fresh in our minds; the memories of Columbine have not yet faded. But please, in the rush to find reasons and solutions, do not forget earlier victims. Remember that school violence takes many forms.

Remember Newtown, remember Columbine, remember Virginia Tech, yes, but also remember Bath, and the 45 people who were killed there.

They were killed by bombs, placed in their school with fiendish deliberation over a period of months by a member of the school board–not recently, but in 1927.

First, the killer detonated bombs at his own farm, so that rescuers would be far away. Then, he blew up most of the school–though as it turns out, one wing was spared because the bombs in it failed to go off. Finally, he filled his truck full of shrapnel and drove to the school to blow it up, slaying some of the adults desperately trying to rescue children from the wreckage of the building.

School violence takes many forms, has many causes, and perpetrators include the young and old. Most are men, but yes, there are women as well. Some have been students or school officials (like the Bath bomber), but others were not. Some have used bombs, some have used guns; some have used both or neither.

It is always horrifying.

Poison, Snakefighting, Racial Slurs, and Deathtraps

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Life is really kind of weird, when you think about it.

Today I got yet another shot–this time, a flu vaccine.

I don’t get these for myself, so much, as for other people I might come into contact with. My own immune system is pretty effective against these types of things, but apparently 90 percent of people who die of flu and flu-related causes are age 65 or older. And I do meet a lot of older folks, and would prefer not to make them sick. Plus there are infants and other people out there who can’t get the vaccine, and I don’t want to make them sick either.

It’s just a little strange to think that putting a little bit of a dead virus into your system can rile up your immune system enough to stop a live one. But it works, and it saves lives and misery.

Here are some other things that make very little sense, at least at first glance. … some of them make very little sense at last glance either, or at all the glances in between.

  • Why do people think natural is good? Cyanide is natural. Arsenic is natural. As far as I can tell, nature pretty much wants to kill us.
  • No, kindergarten doesn’t lead to a life of crime and debauchery. It may very well lead to a life of longing for naps and playtime, though.
  • If every major university made you defeat a snake in order to get your doctoral degree, you’d get… well, you’d get a site with helpful advice for scholarly snakefighting. Now I wonder how my dad subdued his assigned snake in order to become an official Ph.D.
  • The term “Monday” is apparently a racial slur. I honestly hadn’t ever heard that one before, and it’s kind of sad; Mondays (the day of the week, please) are already universally hated, and now here’s another little bit of odium to heap upon them which they haven’t even really earned.
  • When Switzerland isn’t being persistently neutral, producing cool folding knives and protecting the pope, it is apparently a deathtrap.
  • Finally, the Library of Congress has a notation for Klingon. But does it have Shakespeare in the original Klingon?

Strangulation? In North Dakota?

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When I wrote this story about sexual assault, I also talked to Mary Thysell a little bit about domestic violence, an even more common problem, and strangulation came up.

I said I was fairly certain that in Minnesota, choking someone meant additional penalties under the law, and Thysell corrected me, pointing out that “choking” and “strangulation” are not the same thing.

She gave me a brochure: Strangulation in North Dakota.

I wish this brochure didn’t have to exist.

In it, described in accurate, dispassionate and clinical language, it states that strangulation counts as “serious bodily injury” in North Dakota’s Century Code, and therefore constitutes an aggravated assault.

It also states there are four types of strangulation: Hanging, manual (bare hands), chokehold (elbow bend compression) and ligature (using a cord-like object).

All very matter-of-fact. Other than a list of “common trauma victim thoughts and stages,” there’s very little indication of the shock, terror and desperate attempts to survive these people must undergo.

Are there any other reasons to strangle someone than attempting to kill her, or him? At best, the strangler can’t possibly care if he kills or permanently damages the victim, can he?

What does it feel like to know that a loved one is trying to kill you, or maybe just doesn’t care whether he or she does?

Here are some facts from the brochure.

  • 10 percent of all violent deaths are from strangulation.
  • It only takes 11 pounds of pressure placed on both carotid arteries for 10 seconds to result in a loss of consciousness.
  • Brain death occurs in 4 to 5 minutes.
  • Death can occur in 11.5 seconds if both arteries are cut off or blocked.
  • Underlying brain damage can mean that death occurs several weeks later, too.

I still wish the brochure didn’t have to exist.

Pants-Wearing Killer: An Addition

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Apparently pants-wearing spree killer Anders Breivik actually played World of Warcraft as time off from planning his killing spree, not as a way to plan it. The news story got it wrong. In fact, most of the entities covering the trial took that same exact slant.

Plus, there’s even quite a bit of confusion on how the other game, Modern Warfare, could possibly be used as a “wargame.” Breivik wasn’t making a lot of sense when he said that, apparently.

I don’t know. I don’t play that game.

I do have to confess, however… I very often do wear pants.

Tired of Blaming Video Games

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Are people ever going to stop blaming video games for murder sprees?

I’m getting a little bit tired of these sorts of articles, not just as a person who plays video games but as a person who has more sense than a brain-damaged turnip.

First of all, let’s look at the headline. “Norwegian killer used computer wargames to plan attack.” Which “wargames” did he use? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is not a wargame. It’s a MMORPG. While there are a few large-scale battlegrounds, you’re not going to learn a whole lot of strategy that applies to the real world by playing them unless you can cast magic spells in real life. (Hint: You can’t.)

At least this particular article doesn’t actually go so far as to blame the video games for the killer’s obvious mental issues.

An important point here is that correlation doesn’t equal causation. I don’t know if a lot of murderers play video games or not.

I do know that a lot of murderers wear pants.

Hey, maybe that merits an article.

I already have a headline for it.

Norwegian killer wore pants during attack.

Remembering Columbine

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Apparently they’re considering making a miniseries about Columbine on Lifetime. This has been quite controversial, as many of the survivors of the horrific school shooting that occurred there don’t want the miniseries to be made.

This particular article on the issue seems to point the finger at “the media” for not letting the story die. The Columbine tragedy wasn’t, after all, that unusual–school massacres have happened before, and they will happen again, unfortunately.

This is undoubtedly true. However, Columbine was a bit different than some of the other school shootings. One, the shooters were students. This isn’t always the case. Two, they seemed fairly normal. That’s not always the case either. Three, no one could quite figure out what their motives really were. Even they might not have known.

The death toll at Columbine was 15, if you include the two gunmen who died at their own hands. I wrote about some of my thoughts on the matter earlier here. Others had their own ideas.

Hardly anybody remembers an earlier school tragedy that claimed the lives of 45 people in Michigan. Many of the slain were students, but not all of them. In this particular case, the murderer deliberately drew emergency workers to another location (beating his wife to death and then blowing up his farm) before blowing up the school. Then, after people came to help, he set off another explosion (killing himself in the process).

As it turned out, the perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe, had been buying explosives and putting them in the school for months.

It was May 18, 1927.

Extra Crazy

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Jared Lee Loughner, who murdered six people and wounded 19 more over the weekend in his attempt to murder Rep. Gabrielle Giffords this weekend, was, I think, very, very crazy.

That’s not a technical term, obviously, and I’m not qualified to diagnose anything, but a lot of people have been using the term “schizophrenic” to describe Loughner’s writing and his series of bizarre, incoherent and ranting videos.

BoingBoing has done an excellent job rounding up the primary sources about Loughner. Here is information about his social media activities. Here are his YouTube videos, along with complete transcripts. (These are what said “schizophrenic” to me, by the way.) Here’s a summary of the beliefs of one of the groups that Loughner may have been influenced by.

The New York Times cautiously left just “hints of alienation” in its headline, but its summary of Loughner’s beliefs is disturbing and as far as I can tell, accurate. The Atlantic’s James Fallows had an interesting piece about “the cloudy logic of ‘political’ shootings.”

There’s plenty of talk about how the toxic political atmosphere may have led to the shooting, but I’m not so sure. There were a lot of violent and scary threats when Bush was president as well; I am surprised so many people seem to have forgotten about that already, given how short a period of time it’s been since then.

I tend to be cautious about drawing those sorts of conclusions. One thing I’ve noticed while studying history is that everyone thinks the times they’re living in are especially violent, that the children of their era are especially disrespectful, that their lives are faster-paced — than ever. Everyone in every era believes this.

I don’t know. What do you think?

The Devil of the Details

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Some people like to make life a little tougher than it is.
-”Tougher Than It Is,” Cake

The petty dictator who finds fulfillment in tormenting other people in countless tiny ways is getting to be a familiar figure in fiction. We find him funny in movies and on television, often shown in some sort of position of minor power over the protagonist, who must find ways around “the system,” whatever that system happens to be.

You know the time. You’ve probably met one. These are the people who insist that every form be turned in, not just complete and on time, but also on the correct weight and size paper, using a black pen and heaven help you if you have used the incorrect format for the date.

These people are not sticklers for detail. I know sticklers for detail, and they (okay, sometimes we) are more than happy to help you sort out “you’re” and “your” and “it’s” and “its.” We seriously think you’ll find it useful, which may show that we’re delusional, but hey, at least we like to help out.

On TV, these petty dictators are usually bosses. I have never had a boss like that, for which I am extremely grateful. While these TV bosses are fictional,  shows do get one thing right–some people like to put themselves in positions of power over other people for the sole purpose of forcing them to jump through hoops. They tarnish the souls of the people they come into contact with and are a sort of low-grade evil influence.

It isn’t fair, but in this context I usually think of Dennis Rader, the BTK (Bind-Torture-Kill) serial murderer who slaughtered 10 people.

Most of these petty tyrant types aren’t killers or even criminals, obviously! Most of the time they adhere to the rules strictly themselves, which obviously doesn’t include murdering people.

But I can’t help but think of Rader, who was a supervisor of the Compliance Department and was in control of nuisance cases, like animal control. He was described as overly zealous and strict, a bureaucratic bully. One story has him measuring someone’s grass. Another has him allegedly shooting a dog for no reason.

The vast majority of the soul-tarnishing people, though, are just ordinary people who, for some reason, enjoy making other people miserable.

Whatever else you do today, don’t be that person.

Sad, Hilarious Police Report

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We had several odd police incident reports Sunday, including the awww-inspiring following:

There are mean kids at the park who will not let them play with the equipment.

Mean kids gone upon officer arrival.

Hopefully the mean kids never came back. And here are the other strange ones:

Reports a new Toyota (no plates) weaving and hitting the curb. 

Checked. Just a bad driver.

And the things people call 911 for:

911 call. Reports he is upset because he was asked to leave the bar.

Male left before officers arrived.