Miss-takes

from the San Diego Union-Tribune
Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed that the shooting at the dorm was a domestic dispute and mistakenly thought the gunman had fled the campus.

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.

He defended the university's handling of the tragedy, saying: “We can only make decisions based on the information you had on the time. You don't have hours to reflect on it.”

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger is correct in his statement that they didn't have hours to reflect on it, "it" being the reasonable threat which an at large shooter might be considered to pose to the community. However, we have years of "domestic dispute" related violence to reflect on and increasingly frequent incidents of school based violence where the perpetrators are invariably male and the victims in sickening majority are female. How many more years and bodies does anyone really need to reflect on it before we realize that violence is violence, regardless of whether it is qualified in thought or word by "domestic"?

A lack of understanding or effective strategy in the absence of available experience can be considered ignorance. In this situation, no claim to ignorance is even remotely acceptable in the decision that the issue was resolved with the shooting of one woman in a dorm. In fact, it would seem that even an appeal to mass and sustained stupidity is far fetched at best. This and related incidents are examples of gender motivated violence, plain and simple.

The qualifier "domestic" needs to be abandoned as an outdated characterization of the circumstances of and motives for such violent acts. It is grossly inaccurate. Moreover, it perpetuates dangerous beliefs which are adopted and utilized by all of us, but most notably and tragically by law enforcement officials in their moments of critical decision making.

Law enforcement, policy makers, hell... society as a whole needs to stop believing that when a man chooses to attack or kill a woman, it counts as an isolated, contained, and tacitly excusable act providing the woman was ever in any way involved with the man. Such a man is a threat. That campus should have been locked down until he was found or the students could be evacuated.

Not convinced that sexist attitudes are responsible for the remarkable failure to make a connection between "domestic violence" and "real" violence? In the AP "list of deadly campus shootings", an ubiquitous companion to today's story, notably absent is this one which occured almost to the hour exactly two weeks ago (1, 2, 3, 4 - it's not hard to find).

SEATTLE (AP) — A University of Washington researcher was shot to death in her office Monday morning by a former boyfriend who then turned the gun on himself, police said.

Officers responding to reports of gunfire found the two dead in an office on the fourth floor of Gould Hall, the university's architecture building, Assistant University Police Chief Ray Wittmier said.

The 26-year-old woman was granted a restraining order last month against Jonathan Rowan, according to court documents.

Campus police were not aware of the restraining order, Wittmier said.


update1: Fella says "What the hell is with 'dispute'? It's not like these are situations where two people were arguing because they can't decide who is going to kill and who is going to get killed. 'Dispute' is not the right word for this." So it seems as a whole, it's a poorly stated excuse. Imprecise speech in general might be excusable here given the shock of the situation were it not the case that the thought patterns and attitudes underlying that statement may well have been the ones which continue to put each of us at risk of being killed by stray "domestic disputes".
update2 just turned into a post. Go here.