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 Loughner had voluntarily withdrawn in October.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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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.
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.
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.
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.”
Oops…should be “cites.” Heaven forbid I make a grammar mistake.
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.
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.
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?
Until we stop worshiping the idol of individualism, these kinds of brutal behavior also are very likely to continue.