Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old suspect in the Tucson, Ariz., shootings on Saturday that left six people dead, including a federal judge, and 14 wounded, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, dropped out of Pima Community College last fall after being suspended for a series of outbursts that alarmed classmates and at least one professor, according to news reports. Ben McGahee, a mathematics instructor, told The Washington Post that he had repeatedly taken concerns about the student’s behavior to college authorities. A fellow student in the class said that Mr. Loughner’s outbursts had “frightened the daylights” out of her and that she had feared he would bring a gun to the class. In a statement quoted by the Tucson Sentinel, the college said Mr. Loughner had voluntarily withdrawn in October. He had been suspended in September, it said, after five disruptive incidents over the past year that the campus police had handled.
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15 Responses to Classmates of Suspect in Congresswoman’s Shooting Recall Frightening Outbursts
11232247 - January 10, 2011 at 10:34 am
As routinely happens in cases like these (e.g. Virginia Tech shooter), everyone wants to know why someone did not do something with such an obviously disturbed man? Were not the prior warning signs clearly there to see?
The troubling answer is that for every Jared Loughner who chooses to act out his madness, we inevitably find hundreds of borderline psych cases (enrolled all across America) who have managed to keep their violent insanity just beneath the surface. You see, identifying a violently disturbed individual and actually having to deal with him are frequently two very different matters indeed.
The real question is, are we as a nation prepared to arrest and confine all of these types? Sadly, the answer is no easier said today than it was last Friday.
physicsprof - January 10, 2011 at 11:04 am
11232247, good point. It is always easy to “predict” things in retrospect. However, I disagree that the answer is troubling. To the contrary, if only some of the hundreds of psychopaths act out, this is not bad news. As to your last question, my answer is “no”. Freedom comes at a price, and absolute safety is not achievable.
la4097237 - January 10, 2011 at 11:12 am
Loughner wasn’t so disturbed as not to be able to hold his tongue when buying his Glock pistol and extended magazines back Nov. 30…either that or the gun shop salesman was deaf and blind.
greeneyeshade - January 10, 2011 at 11:45 am
From a site on high-capacity Glock magazines:
Q. Why do I need more mags? My pistol already came with two.
“A. There are multiple reasons. Front Sight, Gun Site, and many other top training facilities recommend that your defensive pistol should have at lest 4 magazines if not a couple more. This is for one in the gun, two on the hip and one spare. This ensures that you have the ability to carry 3 mags whenever you are carrying.
The other benefit of additional mags is less time spent reloading. The more loaded mags you take with you to the range, the more fun you can have before you have to stop and reload.”
Umm. “Fun?”
Make these things illegal. The Bill of Rights sites the need *militias” have to bear arms. Nothing at all there about “fun.”
greeneyeshade - January 10, 2011 at 11:46 am
Oops…should be “cites.” Heaven forbid I make a grammar mistake.
readrunwrite - January 10, 2011 at 12:02 pm
Five? Five incidents that the college had to handle before he was suspended? According to other sources, the professor was afraid to turn his back to this student. The professor, apparently, had asked the student to leave and he wouldn’t go. Why wasn’t the student arrested? If he had been, would he then have been unable to buy a handgun because of a criminal history? I don’t know.
If we can arrest a professor protesting budget cuts for “blocking students” while going to class, surely we can enforce or implement laws to protect professors and students from imbalanced and disruptive people in the classroom, and therefore begin a record of 5150 behavior.
I am pleased to say that the administration and police departments at my colleges have always supported me when dealing with disruptive students, going so far as to showing up and physically removing threatening students. If you are a nut looking to disrupt the education of other students and threaten me, I will tell you one time to get out. If I have to tell you again, someone is leaving in handcuffs.
physicsprof - January 10, 2011 at 12:07 pm
Ggreeneyeshade, I hope you agree on our right to disagree. I for one refuse to become an unarmed victim. Nanny state is not my dream. I take personal responsibility for my actions, my freedom and my safety and I do not want to be told that I am a second-rate citizen to be denied means of personal protection enjoyed by rich and powerful who are protected 24/7 by their bodyguards. I am involved in a competitive shooting and I often carry for self-defense. Your proposal to outlaw guns would thus inconvenience me greatly (leaving me without a hobby, which I derive much “fun” from, and also defenseless against common criminals, as I am not much able to defend miself against stronger and younger goons) and so I vote “no” on your motion too.
muquddus - January 10, 2011 at 1:58 pm
There will always be a section of the population who need or are on medications for psychological reasons. Why did the parents and family members not intervene (we don’t know the full story). However, we can control some of the other catalyts – especially the tone of our conversations and political discourse. Lately, a good many politicians seem to have contributed to this climate of intolerance and hatred…what can higher education do to tone down this rhetoric?
sivachok - January 11, 2011 at 3:19 pm
Until we stop worshiping the idol of individualism, these kinds of brutal behavior also are very likely to continue.
ancient - February 13, 2012 at 5:12 pm
These points are very well made, but I suspect that real judges would cringe at the indefinitess of some of the key issues that tend to arise. For example, the issue of “extra benefits” often arises when talking about student infractions, but they are left very open to interpretation. The recent Ohio State situation is a case in point. Are tattoos, for example, really worth anything? Once in place, they certainly have no monetary value. Or, are athletes the only ones who have ever been paid more than they might be worth for a job? These decisions had to be made on non-specific events that a judge would probably have to disregard for lack of evidence.
The real problem is that most NCAA rules are made relatively nitpicky because they really do not trust each other to do the right thing. Thus, the NCAA feels like they have to make an example out of any “significant” instance that arises. That calls for arbitrary decisions which possibly have no identical relationship to any other cases and thus appear to be inconsistent, and probably are. It would be difficult to find any resolution outside of making a lot more rules that would satisfy the persons who dislike the present system.
After many years of dealing with athletic eligibility for a number of teams in a conference, I can only point out that 18-22 year olds can find some really inventive ways to test the system and Solomon himself would probably scratch his head in bewilderment.
darccity - February 13, 2012 at 6:25 pm
Due process? Evidence? Of what???
The NCAA is a cartel, pure and simple. Its only purpose is to create and protect the jobs of college athletic departments and to increase those employees salaries. And they do a marvelous job at it. All colleges lose money on intercollegiate sports programs, even the largest, Ohio State; incomplete accounting sometimes makes it appear that sports is profitable for the biggest programs, but only because the athletic department shares university services and facilities at little or no costs. Athletes come out the worst on the deal: concussions, no salary, too exhausted to study effectively, low graduation rates, lost scholarships, and virtually no chance of making the pros.
trterry - February 14, 2012 at 12:45 am
A monkey in a circus has more rights than an a prospective or active player subject to the NCAA.
A child that has 3 or 4 schools competing for their services as a sports player should have no more restrictions than a child with a high SAT score having 3 or 4 schools competing for their acceptance.
The so called free education given a sports player is no different from the free education given the high SAT score student. The “crowing” that the school does about getting the high SAT student & adding to their US News tally is no different than the crowing about how many 3 point basketball shots the student got. — just louder.
If anyone else tried this they would be sued for an anti-trust violation!
The justifications of college administrators and trustees are not much different & of no higher moral value than Thomas Jefferson & others justificatiion for owning slaves — they would go broke if they had to pay them and let them out of the quarters.
Many years ago when there was a press story about a child consulting with their high school coach & their parents (who had only been on a college campus for a football game or as a part of the cleaning crew). I asked why they didn’t hire a lawyer or consult a lawyer on a pro bono basis. I was right quick told that that was not allowed.
12080243 - February 14, 2012 at 10:35 pm
Excuse me, it’s sad to say, but tenured faculty don’t get due process in the face of tyrannical administrators and their ally faculty. College athletes as well as faculty must wrest power from those who wield it. They ain’t going to give it up voluntarily.
Chauncey M. DePree, Jr., DBA, Professor, School of Accountancy, University of Southern Mississippi
zeigrog - February 15, 2012 at 8:50 pm
From long experience I can say that the Division I and II NCAA Athletics mentality should have no place in higher education in any country. I moved to Canada over 40 years ago to escape from any relationship with it. Now I’m just hoping that athletics in Canadian universities don’t follow the same path. Hopefully they will maintain a Division III “mentality”–that is, financial aid for scholars with proven financial need only! Don’t laugh…
zwakausu - May 25, 2012 at 1:50 am
I agree with Claudia. Cloud services will drastically ease the challenges of power and infrastructure that many HEIs in Africa now face. The downside is that some fear their positions may become redundant and they may lose their jobs. Some have also expressed concerns about control, although I feel that institutions can still maintain some measure of control over their content and data.