Running into it, not away from it.
Also, “Everybody has a mother who’s going to cry tonight.”
[NOTE: In line with Zamudio’s prediction about crying mothers, a neighbor of Loughton’s parents is quoted as saying that “Jared Loughner’s mother has been in bed, crying nonstop since Saturday…” Not surprising.]
I’ve got a new article up at PJ entitled, “Politics and the schizophrenic’s language: do mere words have the power to ignite acts such as Saturday’s shooting?”
Comment here, comment there, comment wherever you wish.
Sometimes when murders happen, the neighbors and people in the community who knew the perpetrator beforehand say he’d just been a quiet, nondescript person who’d always minded his own business.
Not so Jared Loughner. He was telegraphing signs of distress, disturbingly chaotic thinking, and menace to all and sundry. A great many people who knew him—or had encountered him, if only briefly—before he let loose on Saturday and became a mass murderer, have said they were not at all surprised when the killer’s identity was revealed to be Jared.
So why did his behavior not capture the attention of the mental health authorities in Arizona prior to the killings? After all, it’s not as though that would have been difficult to do; Arizona is a state with laws that encourage and facilitate such reporting for the purposes of involuntary evaluation and possible commitment:
Any person, including any of the students in Loughner’s classes who exchanged worried emails about his strange actions or any of his teachers who sought to have him removed or who wanted him to receive treatment, could have petitioned the court to have him evaluated for mental illness.
Unlike other states, which require that someone be an imminent danger to themselves or others before seeking to have them involuntarily committed for psychiatric evaluation and treatment, in Arizona, one need only be “persistently or acutely” ill.
I’m wondering whether it’s commonly known among the citizens of Arizona that they have this right. I’m wondering whether those who encountered Loughner’s disturbing behavior thought someone else might report him instead, or already had. I’m wondering whether they were afraid that, if they reported him, he’d find out and come to take revenge on them. I’m wondering what his parents thought was going on, how much they noticed, and what they tried.
[ADDENDUM: Dr. Helen has more to say, including offering the following quotes from the journals of fellow students of Loughner’s. This was no ordinary case of a slightly wacky student, as you will see:
From June 10:
“As for me, Thursday means the end to week two of algebra class. It seems to be going by quickly, but then I do have three weeks to go so we’ll see how I feel by then. Class isn’t dull as we have a seriously disturbed student in the class, and they are trying to figure out how to get rid of him before he does something bad, but on the other hand, until he does something bad, you can’t do anything about him. Needless to say, I sit by the door.”From June 14:
“We have a mentally unstable person in the class that scares the living crap out of me. He is one of those whose picture you see on the news, after he has come into class with an automatic weapon. Everyone interviewed would say, Yeah, he was in my math class and he was really weird. I sit by the door with my purse handy. If you see it on the news one night, know that I got out fast…”
Loughner was escorted out of school by police and asked not to return because of his behavior.]
[ADDENDUM II: As far as the parents go, they are “devastated and guilt-ridden,” according to a neighbor.]
Query for this spambot: ah, but can fun actually ever be captured and possessed? Does it not evaporate at the slightest effort to cage it?
Took me awhile to learn all the comments, but make enjoyed the article. It turned out to be very useful to me and most probably to all the commenters listed here! It’s always nice when its possible to not only be advised, but also engaged! I’m sure you possessed fun writing this article.
Spambot, for further useful and engagingly learnable commentary, I refer you to Willam Blake’s “Eternity:”
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
I’ve had an unusually busy day and run out of time. So your ordinarily-intrepid blogger is going to have a light day of posting today.
You can talk among yourselves about whatever you want. I also recommend watching this video as well as this, about two of the heroes who sprung to action on the day of the Giffords shooting.
Back tomorrow.
Giffords’ intern, 20-year-old Daniel Hernandez, rushed to give her aid right after the shooting and may have saved her life by elevating her head and keeping her from choking on her own blood.
In the understated manner typical of most true heroes, he later commented:
It was probably not the best idea to run toward the gunshots. But people needed help.
Hernandez was not the only one who acted on that “not best” idea. Fox News has revealed that, after the shooter had fired 31 bullets from the first magazine, a wounded woman came up to him while he was loading the second magazine and tried to wrest it away from him. Although he managed to get it into his weapon, it jammed, and two men were able to take advantage of the moment to tackle and immobilize him.
In other news, Sheriff Dupnick has again used his podium as an opportunity to spout off on his personal political views. Highly inappropriate and highly unusual.
And Gabrielle Giffords is reportedly now able to respond to simple commands like squeezing a hand and giving a thumbs up, indicating that the left side of her brain—where the bullet entered—is still at least somewhat functional.
Here’s more information about the wonderful little girl who was murdered in the incident. In a strange irony, she was born on 9/11.
And here is more about the others who died in the shooting, as well as Judge Roll.
Sad, sad, unutterably sad.
As for the shooter, here’s some more background on him. Not much new. It’s clear there were all sorts of red flags that he was disturbed, but none we’ve heard of so far seem to have indicated any propensity for violence.
I’m listening to an interview on Fox with a Dr. Steven Rayle, an emergency room physician who was an eyewitness to the shooting. He reports that the shooter was only a few feet from Giffords when he suddenly began to fire, and then after he shot her he fired rapidly into the crowd at random, 15-20 rounds from what Rayle believes to have been a semi-automatic weapon. He reports that the firing only lasted 8-10 seconds before the shooter was tackled, he thinks by an aide of Giffords’s. No one fired back at any point, according to Rayle, who played possum till the firing was over, and then got up and ended up being one of the people who helped to hold the shooter down.
Rayle also reports that most of the people who were attending the gathering were shot. Being a doctor, he afterward rendered aid to the stricken. He said that Giffords herself was conscious after the shooting, which he found to be an encouraging sign.
[NOTE: The hospital spokesperson reporting on Giffords’s condition said he is very optimistic about her prognosis. That is very good. I recall that when I was a teenager, an across-the-street neighbor of mine was shot point blank in the side of the head (temple, I believe) and recovered fully. In that case, it was a small caliber gun, but it surprised me that it was even possible to survive such a thing.]
[ADDENDUM: Some of the victims are being identified, according to Fox. In addition to Judge Roll, who was apparently there just by chance to do some shopping and came over to say hello, one of the slain was Gabe Zimmerman, a 30-year old staffer engaged to be married. The 9-year old girl who died was Christina Taylor Green, who was brought there by a neighbor in order to see government in action.]
This is truly terrible news:
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by a gunman at a public event in Tucson on Saturday. There are conflicting reports about whether she was killed.
The Pima County, Ariz., sheriff’s office told member station KJZZ the 40-year-old Democrat was killed. At least nine other people, including members of her staff, were injured.
Giffords, who was re-elected to a third term in November, was hosting a “Congress on Your Corner” event at a Safeway in northwest Tucson when a gunman ran up and started shooting, according to Peter Michaels, news director of Arizona Public Media.
I knew virtually nothing about Giffords before today, but here’s her website.
This is a dreadful development, something that should strike anger and horror into the heart of every American. I hope it is a completely anomalous event rather than the start of some vile trend. Is the next step to have every public official guarded in the same way the president must be?
[ADDENDUM: Bystanders took down the shooter and he is in custody. He had walked up to people and shot them point blank in the head. I’m wondering, though, whether there was any police presence in the crowd at all. If not, why not? Isn’t it standard to have at least one police representative at an official gathering of this sort?
According to Fox (as of 3 PM), Giffords is still alive and in critical condition, and in surgery. Right now, a representative from the hospital is on the line, and at 1:30 Arizona time there will be an official briefing from the hospital.]
[ADDENDUM II: Federal judge John M. Roll has been reported killed in this event, according to Fox.
They just amended that to say he was wounded and is in the hospital.]
This past Thursday I wrote a post that generated quite a bit of back and forth in the comments section, about the supposed vaccine/autism connection. An issue that’s somewhat related to that discussion is how to decide whether an observed increase in a disease or syndrome is just a coincidence, or a meaningful pattern—and, if the latter, how to determine the cause of the uptick.
These questions are also vital in the case of the phenomenon known as the cancer cluster. One was recently in the news, a dreadful grouping of cancer cases in children residing in the smallish town of Clyde, Ohio. One family even had two children with leukemia; what are the chances of that, and what could be the cause?
The answer comes not in the mind and heart gripped with understandable fear, but in the math which says every that, every now and then, statistically speaking, there will be such an increased incidence, a cluster occurring by sheer chance. It is very difficult not to act emotionally, from the gut, and insist that where there’s smoke, there must be fire.
Cancer clusters such as the one in a 12-mile radius around Clyde are reported and investigated, as well they should be. Cancer most definitely can have an environmental cause, and if that’s the case it needs to be uncovered. But the vast majority of cancer clusters are statistical glitches, although the people involved can find that very difficult to accept. Human beings want and almost need to find a cause for horrible events (or even good ones); it’s just our nature.
But true cancer clusters that have an environmental cause have certain defining characteristics. One of the best articles I’ve ever read on the issue appeared over ten years ago in the New Yorker. Written by Atul Gawande, and entitled “The Cancer Cluster Myth,” it offers this sobering quote:
“The reality is that [cancer cluster investigations are] an absolute, total, and complete waste of taxpayer dollars,” says Alan Bender, an epidemiologist with the Minnesota Department of Health, which investigated more than a thousand cancer clusters in the state between 1984 and 1995. The problem of perception and politics, however, remains. If you’re a public health official, try explaining why a dozen children with cancer in one neighborhood doesn’t warrant investigation.
Note that statistic: more than a thousand cancer clusters in Minnesota alone in a single decade, none of them found to be anything more than statistical bumps. No doubt many people would conclude that wasn’t because some environmental problem isn’t causing them, it must be because the investigations were inadequate in some way and/or even corrupt and compromised. But I would not be among those making that claim.
What are the characteristics of meaningful cancer clusters? Red flags are rare cancers rather than common ones, the same exact type of cancer rather than ones in a generally similar category, a particular cancer in an age group or other population that doesn’t usually exhibit it, or an extraordinarily high rate (for example, one environmentally caused cluster in Turkey featured a rate 7,000 times higher than usual, although the rate needn’t be quite that high to be significant). Most neighborhood clusters almost never feature any of these characteristics.
Note that in the situation in Clyde, the involved children have many different kinds of cancer, and mostly leukemia, which is (unfortunately) the most commonly-occurring childhood cancer. And even then, the two children suffering in a single family have two different types of leukemia. The childhood cancer cluster in Clyde also involves brain tumors and lymphoma, two other of the most common forms of childhood cancer. This is highly unlikely to be a meaningful cancer cluster—although it’s completely understandable that the parents there are frightened out of their wits. But exhaustive investigations have produced no smoking gun.
That’s because there probably is none. But tell that to the parents of Clyde.
Oh boy, speaking of depressing news, we now have this:
The words “mother” and “father” will be removed from U.S. passport applications and replaced with gender neutral terminology, the State Department says.
“The words in the old form were ”˜mother’ and ”˜father,’” said Brenda Sprague, deputy assistant Secretary of State for Passport Services. “They are now ”˜parent one’ and ”˜parent two.’
I’m wondering whether this new directive could lead to all sorts of soul-searching and angst about which parent is the primary parent #1 and which the secondary #2. We wouldn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, would we?
And I suppose it wouldn’t have been enough to have two types of passport application forms, one traditional and one with the new gender neutral expressions, and allow people to choose.
But the whole thing has inspired me to a rewrite of a great classic (apologies to the genius of the original):
Hi Parent One, hi Parent Two,
Here I am, a form declarant who
Can’t decide which one of you is
My primary parent so I’ll just say “screw this.”
I’ll stay home and not go traveling
My trip plans are fast unraveling
Rent a movie, on Netflix then
Have some ice cream with some M&M’s to mix in.
Life has gotten very complex,
Should I also, list my mom’s ex
My stepdad who, really raised me
Even though I don’t recall he ever praised me.
Life’s relentlessly PC now,
Everybody, with a plea now
It’s the right way, dontcha see now,
But excuse me I think I must go and pee now.
Here’s the original, just in case you want a refresher:
[ADDENDUM: I just remembered another pop culture connection. The Coneheads of Saturday Night Live fame foreshadowed this development in the 70s:
Much humor derives from the Coneheads’ use of over-technical dialogue, such as referring to food as “consumables”, and saying “I summon you” to ask to speak to another person. The somewhat popular term “parental unit” also comes from the sketches.
We are all Coneheads now.]