Y'know, people suck sometimes. And sometimes they're just stupid.

[kyrielle]

Six dead in Mississippi shooting. The gunman killed five people, injured nine (one critically) and then killed himself.

You know, these tragedies are always awful. Loss of life in such a fashion is in some ways harder to take than the careless hand of fate, like storms. But.... Just some outtakes from the article:

...co-workers said the 48-year-old assembler had had run-ins with management and several fellow employees.

...

Several co-workers said they were not surprised when Williams was identified as the killer.

"When I first heard about it, he was the first thing that came to my mind," said Jim Payton, who is retired from the plant but had worked with Williams for about a year.

Steverson said Williams was known as a racist who did not like blacks. And Payton had said Williams had talked about wanting to kill people. "I'm capable of doing it," Payton quoted Williams as saying.

Again and again in the articles, you see that he told people he was capable of killing, that he threatened people. WHY was this man still employed there, why had he not been dealt with in some fashion, WHY?

At least no one quoted in the article said that this couldn't be predicted. People often say that, but then if you listen to what else it said, what they really mean is no one wanted to look at it, so it wasn't predicted, even though the signs were there.

In this case, the signs were there but at least they're not pretending they weren't. How much longer do we have to go before we develop better ways of dealing with these things? Are there better ways? Or are we just stuck with letting these people go off....

Don't mind me, just a bit of pessimism spawned from a nasty situation.

Comments

I think people choose, consicously or not, to ignore it.

[tigerchild.livejournal.com]

We don't really need a better system of predicting this, it's right in our very human instinct.

Problem is, most of the time people don't *want* to think about stuff like this, or how it relates to them. It's kind of like the people who don't want to consider how their kids could be victimized, or to be realistic about sexually predatory behavior. The whole stranger-danger farce, and all that.

I think we will be stuck with letting those people go off unless there are more people willing to listen to that little voice that tells them there's danger and are willing to act on it and report/make a stink about it--even if there's a chance they could be wrong. I'd much rather someone be wrong about someone being 'serious' when really they were blowing off steam, than wrong that they could never do something like that and a bloodbath ensues.

[canyoncat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I read the original story I thought to myself "someone should have seen this coming". Sad.