Category Archives: Violence

Nevada Regents Approve Plan to Arm Professors

Inside Higher Ed: Professor’s Got A Gun

Next time, if an unhinged student chooses a campus in Las Vegas or Reno instead of Blacksburg, Va., Stavros Anthony wants Nevada’s colleges and universities to be prepared. After April’s shootings at Virginia Tech, the Las Vegas police captain and member of the Nevada Board of Regents proposed that the Nevada System of Higher Education protect itself against a similar attack, in part, by enabling faculty and staff members to become reserve police officers.

The Chronicle: Nevada Regents Approve Plan to Arm Professors

The Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents has endorsed a plan that would encourage faculty and staff members to go about their business armed with guns that could be used to thwart an attack like the one that took 32 lives at Virginia Tech in April. According to the Web site of KLAS, a local television station in Las Vegas, the regents approved a plan under which the system would pay a $3,000 fee for each faculty or staff member who wanted to take a 21-week training course in how to use firearms. The plan got mixed reviews from the students KLAS interviewed. —Andrew Mytelka

Threats Shut Down Colleges in Mississippi and Washington

Clarion-Ledger: Delta State officials “choosing caution” in closing school

Delta State University’s Cleveland campus was shut down at 2 p.m. today after the school received bomb threats in several buildings.

“We are choosing caution,’’ said DSU spokesman Rori Herbison in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech last week that left 33 students dead, including the lone gunman.

Yakima Herald-Republic: Threat of violence puts schools on edge

Officials at Yakima Valley Community College say they are acting “extra cautious” by closing day and evening classes at the Yakima campus today because of a threat of violence the college received Monday.

Also on Monday, students at Prosser High School were evacuated before noon and police searched the building after reports of a bomb inside.

The college received “threats of harm to people on campus” for today, Yakima police Capt. Greg Copeland said. After receiving the threat, college officials canceled today’s classes and activities in Yakima.

Brown, The Virginia Tech Massacre in Global Context

TomDispatch.com: Brown, The Virginia Tech Massacre in Global Context

Tomgram: Brown, The Virginia Tech Massacre in Global Context

Last January 16th, a car bomb blew up near an entrance to Mustansiriya University in Baghdad — and then, as rescuers approached, a suicide bomber blew himself up in the crowd. In all, at least 60 Iraqis, mostly female students leaving campus for home, were killed and more than 100 wounded. Founded in 1232 by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir, it was, Juan Cole informs us, “one of the world’s early universities.” And this wasn’t the first time it had seen trouble. “It was disrupted by the Mongol invasion of 1258.”

Just six weeks later, on February 25, again according to Cole, “A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives.” The bomber in this case was a woman.

In terms of body count, those two mass slaughters added up to more than three Virginia Techs; and, on each of those days, countless other Iraqis died including, on the January date, at least thirteen in a blast involving a motorcycle-bomb and then a suicide car-bomber at a used motorcycle market in the Iraqi capital. Needless to say, these stories passed in a flash on our TV news and, in our newspapers, were generally simply incorporated into run-of-bad-news-and-destruction summary pieces from Iraq the following day. No rites, no ceremonies, no special presidential statements, no Mustansiriya T-shirts. No attempt to psychoanalyze the probably young Sunni jihadis who carried out these mad acts, mainly against young Shiite students. No healing ceremonies, no offers to fly in psychological counselors for the traumatized students of Mustansiriya University or the daily traumatized inhabitants of Baghdad — those who haven’t died or fled.

We are only now emerging from more than a week in the nearly 24/7 bubble world the American media creates for all-American versions of such moments of horror, elevating them to heights of visibility that no one on Earth can avoid contemplating. Really, we have no sense of how strange these media moments of collective, penny-ante therapy are, moments when, as Todd Gitlin wrote recently, killers turn “into broadcasters.” Like Cho Seung-Hui, they go into “the communication business,” making the media effectively (and usually willingly enough) “accessories after the fact” in what are little short of pornographic displays of American victimization.

Finally, articles are beginning to appear that place the horrific, strangely meaningless, bizarrely mesmerizing slaughter/suicide at Blacksburg — the killing field of a terrorist without even a terror program — in some larger context. Washington Post on-line columnist Dan Froomkin caught something of our moment in his mordant observation that, at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner the other evening, with the massed media and the President (as well as Karl Rove) well gathered, “the tragic Virginia Tech massacre required solemn observation and expressions of great respect, while the seemingly endless war that often claims as many victims in a day deserved virtually no mention at all.” Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks took a hard-eyed look at the urge of all Americans to become “victims” and of a President who won’t attend the funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq to make hay off the moment. (“It’s a good strategy. People busy holding candlelight vigils for the deaths in Blacksburg don’t have much time left over to protest the war in Iraq.”); and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll offered his normal incisive comments, this time on “expressive” and “instrumental” violence in Iraq and the U.S. in his latest column. He concluded: “Iraqi violence of various stripes still aims for power, control, or, at minimum, revenge. Iraqi violence is purposeful. Last week puts its hard question to Americans: What is the purpose of ours?”

Sometimes, in moments like this, it’s actually useful to take a step or two out of the American biosphere and try to imagine these all-day-across-every-channel obsessional events of ours as others might see them; to consider how we, who are so used to being the eyes of the world, might actually look to others. In this case, John Brown, a former U.S. diplomat, one of three State Department employees to resign in protest against the onrushing war in Iraq in 2003, considers some of the eerie parallels between Cho’s world and George’s. Tom