Another entitled, abusive misogynist turns shooter. (Hospital shooting)
He ended one life before himself. He may have planned to immolate himself and possibly the rest of the building, but failed. Six of his seven victims will suffer pain and rehab, but this time, they live. To remember the seventh, we must understand what happened here, and how to make it stop.
http://time.com/4842987/new-york-city-bronx-hospital-shooting/?xid=homepage
Excerpt: After [the shooter] was forced to resign as a family medicine doctor amid sexual harassment allegations, he threatened his colleagues. He said he would kill them.
On Friday, [he] returned to Bronx Lebanon Hospital with an AR-15 assault rifle tucked under his white lab coat and opened fire in his old department, killing one doctor and critically wounding six other people at the hospital, according to law enforcement officials.
...
But [he] had a history of aggressive behavior. In unrelated cases, the doctor pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor, in 2004 after a 23-year-old woman told police [he] grabbed her, lifted her up and carried her off, saying, "You're coming with me." He was arrested again in 2009 on a charge of unlawful surveillance, after two different women reported he was trying to look up their skirts with a mirror. That case was eventually sealed.
It was not immediately clear if the hospital was aware of his criminal history when he was hired.
/excerpt
He bullied those he felt were his inferiors. He put on his manners for people who had status or power, like his lawyer. He argued with nurses, wouldn't take their direction as a pharmacy tech, and apparently sexually harassed others. He threatened murder when he was fired.
What triggered this? Possibly student loans coming due or failure to get a job due to his record. It doesn't matter. What motivated this was a deeply toxic worldview where he was entitled to whatever he wanted, be it a career, or women's bodies, or to take others out of the world. That worldview is what makes abusers.
We know that the single most accurate predictor of mass violence is prior domestic violence, with non-domestic sexual violence against women as a close second. It's not that abusers are necessarily gun aficionados, it's that the guns are both most effective for the cost and easiest -- literally point and shoot. If he has to work for a big kill -- has to learn to use a bow or how to build a bomb -- most won't. They may sit in a room and channel their grievances into trolling or MRA ratbastardry, but their grievance is our saving grace. They go through life on the easy setting, and when it's not as easy as they think it should be, they won't work for the skills to be effective with other tools of violence. Guns restore their cheat codes.
Federally, we're not going to advance this issue further right now. But we can move it at the state level. Law enforcement says that domestics are their worst calls for danger to the officer. We can convince LE to support revocation of licenses, refusal of new licenses or purchases, and confiscation of existing firearms upon conviction for crimes of violence against others, including misdemeanors. This is legal at the federal level right now. We just have to get our counties and states enforcing it.
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