Maryland School Resource Officer Who Engaged and Killed School Shooter Almost Certainly Saved Additional Lives

Scott Adams had a Persicope type video on Twitter where he claimed he read a tweet which claimed that the Maryland school shooting story proved that guns in schools don't stop shootings, because, hey, the kid still did some shooting, right?

He likened this to claiming that police are completely ineffective in stopping murders because murders still happen.

Sure -- but fewer, you dummies.

Unlike another school resource officer who recently made news, Officer Blaine Gaskill rushed towards the sound of gunfire and engaged the shooter in "less than a minute." Two students were "severely" wounded before he got there, but Gaskill shot and killed the shooter even as the shooter was firing upon him.

The Party of Science is really exploring the studio space in postulating that this kid, had he been left alone, would have just stopped and not shot more kids.

Strangely, this deranged little corpse now has a memorial page on FaceBook asking people to "celebrate his life."

By the way, Scott Adams also uses his "non-expert amateur profiling abilities" to profile the Austin bomber in that clip. He says the bomber is "probably white," which I agree with -- or at least I'd agree with the idea that he prefers to attack black victims.

Serial killers usually target victims of their own race but I would imagine that bombers don't have the same psychology. There's usually a sexual hatred/sexual vengeance component in serial killings, with the serial killer exacting a symbolic vengeance for the people in his life who he feels have wronged him and spurned him, and usually these victims are the same race as the killer.

I don't know if this is even close to true of a serial bomber. There's not a sexual vengeance kind of angle here; the bomber is killing remotely. There is no need to be close to the victim to see the victim's pain.

So while, if these were ritualistic serial killings, I'd guess the killer was probably black, I wouldn't say that in the case of a serial bombing.

I'd say he has a grudge against black people, and is probably white, though he could be black, too (also nursing a grudge against his fellow black citizens).

I think people are over-reading the fact that two white guys were injured by the tripwire bombing. A tripwire blows up whoever steps on it. In this case, it was white guys, but the bomber wouldn't have known that.

I'm guessing he was white and decided it was too dangerous to poke his white face into black neighborhoods now that the city was roused to alert about a bomber, and so retreated to an area he felt he blended in better, the area around the hiking trail. (Which I think a commenter said was a whiter area.)

The people whose houses he specifically went to place bombs on their doorsteps were black, so I figure those victims were specifically chosen, and are being taken by the police as the bomber's preferred victims. That's who he's most interested in hurting -- the tripwire bomb was set because he's interested in hurting people generally, but didn't have any specific target in mind with that one.

On the other hand, one could say the bomber, like a serial killer, as just leaving bombs he knew well and therefore felt comfortable in, which might suggest he's black. (Or: a white guy who lived for a while in these neighborhoods, of course.)

Police haven't said yet who these new FedEx bombs were addressed to. Obviously if those were addressed to non-black victims, my guesses would change.

Update: The sixth recent bomb in Austin, this one an incendiary device left at a Goodwill near Brodie, TX, is believed not related to the previous series of spree bombings.

posted by Ace of Spades at 08:31 PM

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