Gun-free zones
I had a doctor’s appointment the other day, and as I arrived I noticed a huge sign on the door announcing that I was entering a gun-free zone. As I sat in my chair waiting, I pondered—not for the first … Continue reading →
Category Archives: Violence
Some additional details on the New York terrorist attack
In the aftermath of the New York terrorist attack, there are two companies that must be especially unhappy about this particular attack: Uber (the perp had been an Uber driver) and Home Depot (the truck was rented there and had … Continue reading →
Mass murdering man of mystery [Part IIIA]: Revisiting Columbine in the light of Las Vegas; revisiting Las Vegas in the light of Columbine
[Part I and Part II.] When I first read about the Las Vegas concert shooting it struck me almost immediately that the mass murder it most resembled was Columbine. And yet I’ve been surprised that almost no one else I’ve … Continue reading →
Paddock’s computer missing its hard drive
This should come as no surprise. Paddock was no dummy: Paddock is believed to have removed the hard drive before fatally shooting himself, and the missing device has not yet been recovered, sources told ABC News. Investigators digging into Paddock’s … Continue reading →
Messing with the Las Vegas shooting timeline
This news sure isn’t going to engender a lot of trust in the police’s competence and/or veracity: The gunman in the Las Vegas massacre first shot a hotel security officer about six minutes before opening fire on an outdoor concert, … Continue reading →
For Columbus Day: statues with footnotes
A little over a month ago, in the heat of the war against statues, New York’s Mayor de Blasio expressed the thought that perhaps an explanatory note might be helpful in dealing with the dreadful conundrum represented by the offending … Continue reading →
Gun control changer
Leah Libresco, who used to write for the statistics site FiveThirtyEight (headed by Nate Silver), describes how the more she studied—in the mathematical, statistical sense—about gun-inflicted deaths and gun control, the more she changed her mind on the subject: Before … Continue reading →
Mass-murdering man of mystery [Part II]: Charles Whitman’s motives
[Part I can be found here.] One of the strangest mass murderers in history was Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter of 1966. It was a big big story and a profound shock at the time, and those of us … Continue reading →
Paddock may have targeted still another music venue
Yesterday I advanced a theory about the grandiose and psychopathic motives of mass murderer Stephen Paddock. As evidence for my contention that he didn’t much care what open-air crowd he fired into and from which high-rise hotel, I cited the … Continue reading →
What about banning bump stocks?
So far, I’m with this guy on the question of a bump stock ban: …as much as it pains me to say it and with full knowledge of the potential implications for a slippery slope, I think we need to … Continue reading →
Mass-murdering man of mystery (Part I): why did Paddock target the country music concert?
First let me address the general topic of the conspiracy theories that have been flying around ever since the Las Vegas killings. I think that in a way the talk is understandable. After all, nature abhors a vacuum, and at … Continue reading →
Who was Stephen Paddock?
And why should we care? After all, there’s a very good argument to make for not giving shooters such as Paddock the attention they probably craved in life. But there’s also a desire to make sense out of something so … Continue reading →