Another Day, Another Mass Shooting

Student says books in his backpack saved his life during FSU shooting: http://t.co/hOEt56UePr pic.twitter.com/t1al9BcXhy

— ABC News (@ABC) November 21, 2014

Myron May, the man who shot and wounded three people at the Florida State University library yesterday morning before police killed him, was mentally disturbed:

May’s Facebook page shows he posted mostly Bible verses and links to conspiracy theories about the government reading people’s minds. Records show May was licensed to practice law in Texas and New Mexico. According to a Las Cruces, New Mexico, police report last month, May was a subject of a harassment complaint after a former girlfriend called to report he came to her home uninvited and claimed police were bugging his house and car. Danielle Nixon told police May recently developed “a severe mental disorder.” “Myron began to ramble and handed her a piece to a car and asked her to keep it because this was a camera that police had put in his vehicle,” the report said. The report also said May recently quit his job and was on medication.

In the wake of this latest tragedy, Beth Elderkin wants to talk about how almost all such “active shooters” are male:

[T]here’s no way to deny that almost all active shooters of the past decade have been men. Even Paul Elam, founder of men’s-rights site A Voice For Men, called the FBI’s statistics “reasonable” in an interview with the Daily Dot. But does that mean masculinity is, or should be, part of the conversation? According to researchers, the answer is yes. An increasing number of sociologists, including [Michael] Rocque, who authored a study on school shootings in 2011, say gender should be treated as a key component in how we address active shootings and other violent acts. And we’re not just talking about mass shootings; FBI statistics show that in 2012, more than 80 percent of arrests for violent crimes were men.

Update from a reader:

So can we acknowledge now that male brains work differently from female ones? Obviously I don’t mean that it’s always for the better! But then couldn’t these differences also partially explain the lack of gender parity in certain professional fields? Testosterone is powerful stuff.

Tyler Lopez, meanwhile, blasts the NRA’s position on these incidents and how to stop them:

The gun lobby acknowledges the problem of mass-shooting incidents in the United States. Its solution calls for arming more people who could potentially stop a shooter and for rapid-response training focused on minimizing casualties. This is part of an increasingly pervasive, insidious gun culture that accepts mass shootings as inevitable. But by this logic, the first victims—friends, loved ones, children—are expendable. The first victims of a mass shooting are a mangled human sacrifice on the altar of Second Amendment rights.

Until a shooter pulls the trigger to begin his slaughter, he is merely a guy with a gun. The gun lobby insists that the government should allow people to carry firearms into all public places. (Gun advocates continued to push for expanded open-carry legislation the morning after the Tallahassee shooting.) After all, who are we to judge a man simply because he is proudly displaying a gun by his side? In this world, the first victim is merely an alarm for others to respond.