Monday Morning Crisis Quarterback

The details of yesterday's shootings in Newtown, Connecticut were just starting to trickle in when my Facebook feed began to light up with posts from friends saying what they thought this story was really about. These sorted fairly clearly into a number of categories:

• It's really about the need for gun control.
• It's really about the need to allow responsible people to carry weapons to protect themselves and those around them.
• It's really about the state of mental health care.
• It's really about the need to be better parents to our kids.
• It's really about what we have become as a society.

I have seen other commentators opine as well that this is really about the need to put God back in our schools, although that particular one hasn't shown up on my Facebook feed. The Westboro Baptist Church apparently is going to picket the funerals, because it's really about tolerance of homosexuality in our country.
While each of these thoughts have their own argument behind them, and while I certainly have my opinions about the relative validity of those, I'd like to suggest that all of them are red herrings.

All of these theories help us (or at least those who believe them) feel better, because they all boil down to one message: this could have been prevented. And we desperately need to believe this could have been prevented, because otherwise this could happen again, and it could happen to us. If these theories are right, however, we can make the world safe and neat again, and sleep better at night.

In addition, we are drawn to stating what this story is "really about" because, frankly, we can't stand to really contemplate what this story is really about.

What this story is really about is that 27 people, 20 of them young children, were brutally murdered in a senseless act of violence that we will never truly understand.

We need to let ourselves sit with that reality and feel the feelings that go with it. Only then will we be ready to have reasonable discussions about what, if anything, can be done to stop it from happening again.

Everything about this story is wrong.

Based on as yet very sketchy reports, here's what we know:

An 8th grader at Cummings Middle School in Brownsville, Texas, showed a gun in the hallways at school this morning. Police were called. They ordered him to drop the gun. He didn't. He appeared to aim it at them. They shot him. He died. The gun turns out to have been an air pellet gun.

When I say that everything about this is wrong, I don't mean to imply it's not true. It's just wrong. It doesn't fit the model of a good day at middle school, certainly, but it doesn't even fit the model of a bad day. A kid is either armed or he's not -- none of this pellet gun stuff. He either wants to die and kills himself or doesn't and puts down the gun. The violence is either threatened or real. This entire episode occupies this weird no-man's land between the possibilities our brains know how to deal with.

Given that , perhaps it's not surprising that everything about the press coverage is wrong, too. The headlines read things like, "Brownsville police kill teen at middle school." While technically accurate, it sure leaves a lot of important information out.

Whose fault is this? The kid, for bringing the gun in the first place and refusing to drop it and aiming it towards police? The police for shooting when the kid wasn't actually lethally armed? The school for calling the police? The parents for this kid having access to the pellet gun in the first place?

I don't think I've ever seen a case that both so clearly begs you to blame someone and so clearly illustrates why blame gets in the way of healing. Now that this incident is over, we can all point to numerous places people "should" have done things differently. But by "should," we mean "if they had, this probably would have had a different outcome." That's really different than saying that the outcome is their fault. It's so easy to confuse "should have" with "I wish they would have" or even "next time, I hope they don't."

This happened. Period. It will never have not happened. Everyone involved in it has to make peace with that fact. While preventing it in the future may be a priority, accepting it as part of the past has to happen, too. The messy question of whose fault it was can only get in the way of that process.

Last week, parts of the United Kingdom were rocked by four nights of violent rioting. The initial incident began when a planned peaceful protest in the of the police shooting of Mark Duggan, a black man, in the Tottenham section of London turned violent. The trouble spread, first to other parts of London and then to other parts of the UK.

If you read the coverage of this, you will find two perspectives on what went wrong. The official view taken by the British government, is that this was senseless criminality by people who have no actual complaint against anyone but who are using the excuse to cause trouble. This was exemplified by Prime Minister David Cameron, who told the British Parliament that the Duggan shooting

was then used as an excuse by opportunist thugs in gangs, first in Tottenham itself, then across London and then in other cities. It is completely wrong to say there is any justifiable causal link.

On the other side, you have people who argue that, while the Duggan shooting itself may not be the cause of the unrest, the rioting is nonetheless based in people's deep dissatisfaction with their current situation. Writing on CNN.com, Matthias Matthijs notes,

The present moment . . . is defined by a more disorganized class politics of reaction, propelled by huge inequalities and a perceived injustice and indifference by the state to the fate of those involved.

So, which is it? Is this rioting the work of criminals who saw their chance and took it, or of the dispossessed victims of economic and judicial inequality? And why is everyone so sure they know the right answer?

Traumatic events often challenge deeply held beliefs about the world. Given this conflict, people have two choices. They can assimilate the trauma into their worldview, or they can change their worldview to accommodate the trauma.

Let's imagine, by way of example, that I strongly believe that the world is safe. Then, one day, I am mugged. What do I do with that belief? I can change it and decide that the world is dangerous. Or I can take a view of the mugging that allows me to continue to believe the world is safe. In that case, the mugging was my fault for being where I should not have been. In other words, if the world is safe, it must be my fault.

Of course, the most adaptive thing to do is a mixture of both of these. In my mugging example, the healthiest place for me to land is with a belief that the world is generally safe, but probably not as safe as I once thought it was, and that given that I probably should not go to that particular area. Unfortunately, very often people over-accommodate (the world is dangerous) or over-assimilate (it's all my fault). These beliefs often get in the way of people recovering after a trauma.

You can see these two tendencies in the analysis of the London riots. David Cameron's version holds that London, and the UK in general, is full of criminals just waiting for their moment to cause havoc. This is an over-accommodated belief. In the face of danger, he is saying that the world is dangerous. He is also not taking any responsibility at all for the situation. The view that the UK's inequality caused the riots is, in much the same way, an over-assimilated belief. Faced with danger, this view holds that the world continues to be safe, so this bit of danger must be our (or somebody's) fault.

Just as in my mugging example, however, there is a healthy middle ground. It says that yes, the world is generally safe, but there are those who take advantage of situations. Our actions, or the actions of governments, furthermore, can make it less safe. The riots are neither purely the anger of the dispossessed (what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was referring to when he called riots "the language of the unheard") nor the work of pure thugs. Like everything else in life, they're complicated. Denying one side or the other will only make it that much harder to recover.

As you almost certainly know, last Friday a massive explosion rocked Oslo, Norway. Shortly thereafter, a gunman opened fire at a camp run by the Labour Party on a nearby island. In all, 76 people were killed and many more injured. Many of the victims were children.

For a brief time on Friday, it was reported that a previously unknown radical Islamist group had taken responsibility for the attacks. The stories in the mainstream media generally represented two different views of this (we now know incorrect) fact.

View 1 was that this showed how dangerous Muslims in Europe are. View 2 was that this was a case of a small minority of Muslims twisting the religion to suit their own purposes and beliefs, and should not be viewed as typical of all Muslims or the religion itself.

Soon it came out that, in fact, the perpetrator in these attacks was a Norwegian citizen upset over immigration and multiculturalism. Two views quickly emerged about this as well. View 1 holds that this is the inevitable result of dangerous rhetoric on the part of conservatives. View 2 holds that this man is clearly mentally ill, and his actions should not be held against an entire political ideology.

There are certainly parallels between these two sets of views. Either the person responsible is representative of their group or they are the exception but not the rule. But there is one notable difference -- in the first scenario, neither view considers mental illness to be a factor.

What is going on here, in both scenarios, is people's attempt to distance themselves from those responsible. They are not like us. They are other. They are different. That means that we are not at risk of becoming like them, and we are less vulnerable to them because their difference may be easy to detect. In the first scenario, the difference in question is one of religion. American mainstream media is largely a Judeo-Christian business. From that perspective, Muslims, whether a handful of radicals or an entire religion, are not "us."

Once it was clear that the perpetrator was European, however, we regrouped. For those on the political left, it was easy to point to him as being on the political right. For those on the right, however, "othering" him was more difficult. He must be mentally ill.

I actually think that this perpetrator probably is mentally ill. Whether that is the whole story or political ideology also plays a part is open for debate. What is interesting to me, though, is that we tend not to consider that suicide bombers from Al-Qaeda, or Osama Bin Laden, or anyone in that general category may be mentally ill. Some of that is racism. Some of it is the ease of separating ourselves from them if we are not Muslim ourselves.

But if you consider it, the narrative of the Oslo massacre probably should be that these attacks were carried out by a deranged person or persons. What religion or ethnic group they are from is not, from that perspective, all that important.

Thursday night, Shannon Stone, 39, was at the baseball game with his 6 year-old son. The Rangers were playing the A's, and Stone wanted a foul ball. He yelled to Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton that he wanted the next ball. When a foul came Hamilton's way, he turned and tossed it towards Stone in the stands. Stone, a firefighter with the Brownwood Fire Department, reach out to get it and fell out of the stands head first, 14 feet. He was injured but talking and asked rescue workers to check on his son. Then he had a heart attack and died.

If you go to the ABC website, you can see the video of the fall, but not the landing. Stone fell behind a barrier, and was therefore not visible from the field or the stands aside from right near where it happened. The video is horrifying enough if you know how the story ends.

I was pleased to read today that counseling has been offered to the Rangers players and, specifically, to Josh Hamilton. Hamilton asked after Stone after the fall and was told he was awake and talking. He didn't find out that Stone was dead until after the game. Apparently Hamilton is a recovering addict, which will make bouncing back from this event even harder. Unfortunately, when we're under extreme stress we tend to act in our most ingrained and familiar ways. If you're an addict, that addiction is almost as automatic as breathing, and under stress it tends to rear its ugly head.

This is one of those stories that just isn't "supposed" to happen. Taking your kid to the ballgame is about as wholesome as it gets. So immediately, we start looking for someone to blame. If it's someone's fault, then this isn't just a horrible freakish outcome of perfectly reasonable actions on everyone's part. If someone's to blame, somehow the rest of us are safer.

In this case, the Rangers, following a fall by a fan last year, had their railings looked at and pronounced up to code and safe. Hamilton was indulging a fan wanting a ball for his kid, something in other circumstances we would say makes Hamilton a great role model. Stone was doing what fans do, and if you look at the video it doesn't even look like he was reaching unreasonably far to do it. No one did things wrong, and yet this situation is terribly wrong.

Going to the game won't be any more dangerous this weekend than it was last, when I took my own 6 year-old to a game. But boy, it sure feels like it.

Last June, 7-year-old Kyron Horman disappeared from his elementary school without a trace. All eyes have been focused for quite some time on his stepmother in connection with his disappearance, but no arrests have been made and she remains a free woman and, for all I know, an innocent one. Now there is a push to put surveillance cameras in all elementary schools in Oregon, under a proposed law dubbed "Kyron's Law." Kyron's own school got cameras shortly after he disappeared, funded by a private citizen.

As a school administrator, there have been many times I wished I had video footage of an incident. The "he hit me first" thing gets very old, very fast. As more and more kids have cell phones, there have even been a couple of times when kids recorded an incident themselves, although more often than not the person recording was doing so to post it on YouTube, not to aid in the investigation.

One might argue that, had their been cameras in Kyron's school the day he disappeared, he might have been found by now. But I think that those who advocate for putting in surveillance cameras would go a step further, arguing that either he wouldn't have disappeared or that he definitely would have been found right away. That is, most likely, not true.

Surveillance cameras in schools give people, and particularly parents, a false sense of security. Because they might prevent some problems, we think they prevent all problems. But surveillance cameras are problematic themselves.

First of all, no matter how many cameras you install, there will most likely be someplace the cameras aren't. This is how most of us want it, because as much as we want to protect our kids, we don't want someone filming them in the bathroom or the locker room. This raises a larger issue, which is that there is a need to balance privacy with safety, and parents tend to be a stickler for both.

Second, if there are cameras and someone wants to snatch a kid or otherwise harm him, that person will go where the cameras aren't. That means that while the hallways and classrooms and buses may be safer, the bathrooms and locker rooms are more dangerous. In the case of Kyron Horman, if indeed his stepmother is responsible, she simply would not have used the school as her "alibi."

Third, and this is the toughest one for parents to wrap their heads around, we can't watch our kids 24/7. We do our best to keep them safe, and at some point we have done all we can. At night, when my kids are asleep in their rooms, I assume they are asleep in their rooms. I don't have a camera there, I don't sleep on the floor, and I don't check on them all that often. Could they disappear? Yes. Is that likely? No.

The fact of the matter is that Kyron's disappearance made the news because it was so rare. Kids do not disappear from school in the middle of the day. They disappear, if they disappear, from the neighborhood or the bus stop or walking to or from school, or even from their homes. But they don't go missing from their schools because that is actually a pretty hard place to snatch a kid. And putting in cameras may make it even harder, but is that really where you want that money to go? You can almost certainly do more to protect children by putting another layer of wood chips on the playground of every school, or posting another adult on their walking route. And that doesn't even take into consideration what educational use that money could be put to.

Once again, we, as parents, have to face up to the fact that dropping off our children at school is an act of faith. We also have to face the fact that parents are really not any better at protecting children than schools are. If Kyron's stepmother harmed him, the greatest risk he faced was not going to a school with no cameras, it was living with a family with her in it. And while cameras might have brought her to justice, they wouldn't have changed that risk factor one bit.

Depending on your politics and personal tastes, Keith Olbermann is a liberal pundit, a newsman, an overhyped sports reporter, a propagandist, the voice of the nation's conscience, or a traitor to his country.  Last evening, he added one title most can agree on -- unemployed.  Olbermann, the host of MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann, announced on his show last night that he was leaving the network.  Rumors vary between him being fired and him leaving over a money dispute.  Last night's show was his last.

Olbermann had a decidedly and unashamedly liberal bent to his show.  He openly loathed Fox News, which he called "faux news," and particularly Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, who often took top honors on his "Worst Person in the World" feature.  Throughout the Bush administration, he ended his newscast by stating how many days it had been since the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq.  He was suspended last fall for violating the network's rules about political donations by reporters after he donated to three congressional campaigns, including Gabrielle Giffords. 

Even if you loved Olbermann's politics, there was plenty to squirm about in Olbermann's style.  He often used the same kind of "anyone who disagrees with me is an idiot" kind of rhetoric that he criticized in O'Reilly.  His segments with guest commentators often fit the formula:

• Introduce story by stating the facts intertwined with Olbermann's opinion
• Introduce guest
• Ask guest whether Olbermann's opinion is the only reasonable one, as he thinks
• In unlikely event guest disagrees, restate opinion as fact and wait for response

If you were looking for the news, the whole news, and nothing but the news, you didn't tune in to Countdown.

I'm writing about Keith Olbermann today, however, not because of my personal feelings about him leaving MSNBC or even about the show itself.  Keith Olbermann deserves a nod because of something absolutely unheard of which he did, on air, with great frequency.  Keith Olbermann apologized.

When you are as unabashedly partisan and fiery as Olbermann is, you wind up saying a lot of things that make people mad.  And certainly, Olbermann stood behind the majority of what he had to say nonetheless.  But every once in a while, Keith Olbermann had the good sense and the good grace to admit when he was wrong.  A terrific example occurred after Olbermann raised questions and spoke, in a way that some felt was offensive, about the rape accusations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  He later tweeted,

Rape has touched my family, directly and savagely, and if anybody thinks I have addressed it without full sensitivity, then that assessment is the one that counts, and I apologize.

Read that again, because you won't hear apologies like that from media people -- or from anyone else, really -- very often.  He doesn't say, "sorry if I offended you," or even, "sorry that I offended you," both of which imply that the problem is the offense taken and not what was said.  He says, "If I offended you then my words were offensive, and so I'm sorry."

Most recently, Olbermann delivered a passionate and, in my opinion, moving commentary the night of the shootings in Tucson on January 9th.  He discussed the current political climate but, unlike many other liberal commentators, he didn't put the blame on the right.  He said,

Vio­lence, or the threat of vio­lence, has no place in our Democ­racy, and I apol­o­gize for and repu­di­ate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inad­ver­tently encour­aged vio­lence. Because for what­ever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

So, why am I bringing this up on a blog about trauma and crisis response?  Because very often, after a major incident, the impulse of those in charge is to circle the wagons and vehemently deny any responsibility.  The result is that those affected, who are primed to be looking for someone to blame, have a reason to step up their blame of those in charge.  Few and far between are people in authority willing to say, "This shouldn't have happened, we didn't want for it to happen either, and we will be carefully reviewing everything to make sure it doesn't happen again," let alone, "We screwed up, and while we don't think this is entirely our fault, we are willing to take some of the blame.  We're sorry."

It's always easier to blame those who are upset then to take a good long look at yourself.  Failure to do so, however, often makes it worse.  Whatever you think of Keith Olbermann, his show, or his politics, I hope that, with his departure, we don't also lose his excellent example of how to apologize gracefully and sincerely for the mistakes we all make in this world.

The week since the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which killed six people and injured an 12 in addition to Giffords, has been full of discussion about our political discourse.  On one side, we have people pointing to the fact that Sarah Palin's website had a map with gunsight graphics over several congressional districts -- including Giffords' -- during the campaign, and to political rhetoric like "2nd amendment solutions" and "lock and load" as being responsible.  On the other, we have people pointing out that the shooter was almost certainly seriously mentally ill.

What both sides have in common is the very human trait of seeking a reason for a traumatic incident.  Studies have shown that humans are hard-wired to see patterns and causation, and if there isn't any we tend to see it anyway.  From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes a lot of sense.  In order to survive in the wild, animals need to have very good and detailed information about what a threat looks like, how to know when it's coming, and how to avoid it.  Understanding that something can't be avoided is not very helpful.  So if there is any chance at all that there is a pattern, we will find it, but we're not great at knowing if there isn't one.

If you ask me (and you did, because you're reading my blog), the choice between blaming this on political rhetoric and blaming this on mental illness is a false dichotomy.  Yes, it seems extremely likely that the shooter is mentally ill.  I don't have enough information to know if he is so ill that he is not criminally responsible for what he did, but it would be ludicrous to suggest that his mental state did not play a part in this tragedy. 

At the same time, mental illness occurs in a context.  The delusions that people experience are influenced by the culture in which they live.  You can see this clearly if you imagine someone with a psychotic mental disorder, in some completely other time and/or place.  I doubt people in the middle ages thought the CIA was monitoring their thoughts through their dental work, and I'm guessing that few such people in Mongolia believe they are Jesus.

This man's delusions apparently centered around illiteracy, mind control, the constitution and the government.  Did he ever see Sarah Palin's graphic or listen to Sharon Angler speak?  I have no idea.  Did he hear the negative tone of current discourse about the government?  Almost certainly.  That is the context of our culture. 

That having been said, that doesn't mean that toning down the rhetoric would have prevented this particular person from killing people.  It might have prevented him from killing these particular people on this day.  And maybe it would have held off the violence for long enough for someone to recognize that he really needed help.  We don't know.  We can't know.  And we don't like that.

What do I take from all this?  As they say, the best we can do is the best we can do.  And whether you blame rhetoric or illness or both for this situation, it's clear we can do better with both.  Talking about armed rebellion and resistance with regards to public figures is not OK, whether it caused this or not.  It adds to a culture that devalues those with whom we disagree, and that can't be good for us, with or without this instance.  And there are hundreds or thousands of severely mentally ill people who don't get decent help and, as in this case, sometimes don't even get noticed, because of the stigma associated with their disorders and the devaluing of its treatment in our society.  That isn't just bad for them.  As we learned this week, it's bad for everyone.  We can do better. 

And if I'm wrong, and neither of these things are at fault, and I'm just seeing patterns where there aren't any, I think our society will benefit from fixing them anyway.  It's certainly worth a try.

Tomorrow:  What pulled at our heartstrings in the Tucson coverage, and why

There are two things I often say about school shootings.  The first is that, if someone enters a school hell bent on killing the first person they see, then the first person they see is going to die.  The second I sometimes say to teachers when we talk about lockdowns -- most people who come into the school mad are not going hunting for you.  They're going hunting for me.

Today, a 17-year-old student at Millard South High School in Omaha, Nebraska, bore this out.  At about 12:40, he shot both the Principal and the Assistant Principal.  He then drove off in his car and, sometime less than an hour later, killed himself.  Both administrators are in the hospital, one in critical and one in serious but stable condition.  The shooter was a recent transfer student to the school whose father is an Omaha police officer.  He apparently used his father's gun.

What are we to make of an incident like this?  People's reactions are pretty predictable.  Here are a few that might seem familiar: There needs to be stricter gun control. Kids see too much violence on TV. Our schools aren't safe. It's poor parenting. There must have been signs. Kids today have no respect for adults. He shouldn't have been able to get anywhere near those administrators with a gun. We need metal detectors in schools. These statements all fit rather nicely into two basic categories:

Category #1:  This must be preventable and someone is to blame that it wasn't prevented.
While it is of course possible that this was preventable and that someone messed up, it is also entirely possible that everyone was as prepared and aware as they possibly could have been, and the signs just weren't there and all the procedures in the world wouldn't have stopped it.  You can install metal detectors, but that won't stop shootings in the parking lot or the foyer.  Criminals will find ways to get guns.  Good parents have messed up kids.

We want to blame somebody because the alternative is awful.  We can't really wrap our minds around the idea that something this scary could happen even when everything is done right, because that means that none of us is safe.  Which brings us to our next category:

Category #2:  I'm scared for my children's safety.
This is an interesting one, because, in fact, no children other than the shooter himself were injured in this shooting.  However, it's not much of a stretch to imagine why a parent would feel their child was in danger if someone is shooting people in the school office. 

Most parents have a pretty skewed understanding of how dangerous schools are.  School shootings, when they happen, are all over the news.  This makes them seem much worse and more common than they truly are.  The reality is that kids are safer for the six or so hours they're in school than they are any other time of the day.

Good parents also view protecting their children as one of their primary responsibilities.  Even though schools are, on the whole, very safe, they are the one place that parents have little control.  When parents drop off their babies (and yes, even the high schoolers are their babies) at school, they are taking a leap of faith that the school will do for those children what the parents would do in an emergency.  When there is violence in schools, it preys on the fears and insecurities of parents not because schools are so dangerous, but because parents aren't there.  Parents overestimate the chances that they would be able to protect their children if they were present.  The fact is, they couldn't do a better job in most cases, and in a lot of cases they would be worse.

All of this wends us back to my second stock comment about school shootings -- the shooters aren't going for the teachers or kids, they're going for the administrators.  I haven't seen many statistics on that issue.  It's certainly true in some cases, as it was in Omaha today.  However, by no stretch of the imagination is school administration the profession where you are most likely to be assaulted on the job.  You might be surprised to know that it isn't law enforcement, either.  It's actually health care.  How many of us think, "I don't want to become a nurse, it's too dangerous?"  Yet another example of how bad we are at estimating our actual risks.

My heart goes out to the families and staff at Millard South.  School is closed tomorrow, and that makes the healing process harder in a lot of ways.  It's hard to open school in the middle of a police investigation, however, so one can hardly blame them.  Walking back through those doors is going to be really hard.  And a lot of school administrators in other schools are going to be a little more jumpy at work tomorrow.

The New York Times ran an article today about Staff Sgt. David Senft, who died in Afghanistan in mid-November.  All indications are that Senft killed himself with his roommate's firearm.  This was at least his third attempt at suicide.

Senft was on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, and had also done one tour in Iraq.  It seems that everyone who knew him knew he was depressed and traumatized by his experiences in the wars, most notably responding to the site where a helicopter carrying wounded servicepeople had been shot down in Iraq.   After one of his previous attempts to kill himself, Senft admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital and his deployment to Afghanistan was delayed.  In Afghanistan, his superiors were concerned enough about his suicide risk that they took away his weapon.

Senft family wants to know why, if everyone knew he was in this much trouble, he was allowed to deploy to Afghanistan and why, if he was enough of a danger to himself to take away his weapon, he wasn't sent home.  These are decent questions, and the army says they have three different investigations into Senft's death going on.

I have no idea who, if anyone, screwed up here.  I am, as the name implies, just a Monday Morning Quarterback.  However, I do know that it is much easier after the fact to look back and see what might have been done differently than it is to make predictions looking forward.  Anyone -- in the military or not -- who ever comes into contact with someone who may be at risk of suicide has to make a judgment about how big the risk is.  It's easy to look back now and say Senft was a big risk -- obviously, since he killed himself -- but what is obvious now was not necessarily obvious then.

Could this have been prevented?  Probably.  In fact, we could probably eliminate most of the suicides in the military if we disarmed all military personnel, stripped them naked and locked them in empty rooms.  Everyone recognizes that we don't want to do that.  But where is the line?  How many other soldiers like Senft came across however he did and turned out to be OK?  How do we balance the risk of a suicidal soldier with the risk of severely restricting someone who doesn't need those restrictions?

After a suicide, it's very typical to start pointing fingers about who should have or could have done something differently.  In this case, the finger is being pointed at Senft's superiors.  No doubt they're pointing fingers at themselves, too.  Maybe they deserve it.  Or maybe, this is a case where although they could have done something differently, no one at the time thought they should have.  Sometimes, you just can't know.

Nicole John, 17, died at about 4:15 AM on Friday, after she climbed out onto a ledge outside a 25th floor apartment in Manhattan and fell onto a 3rd floor outcropping.  John, who was the daughter of U.S. Ambassador to Thailand Eric John, was to have started classes at Parsons New School of Design this fall.  A statement from Parsons indicates that the school's "crisis management team" will be available to counsel those who were at the party that Ms. John was attending when she died, or others affected.

To answer what seems like the natural question, there is plenty of evidence that John was either drunk or under the influence of some other substance when she fell.  It appears she may have decided to step out onto the ledge to take a picture -- a camera was found near her.  The host of the party, who is 25, has been arrested on charges relating to having alcohol at a party with a minor present.  Ms. John had a fake ID, and had been at a club with friends until about 2 hours before.

The crisis management team at Parsons has an interesting job to do here.  Since John was a new student, the number of people affected by her death is probably lower than would be in even a few weeks.  However, those who are affected are probably also new students, many away from home for the first time, all relatively young, and therefore particularly vulnerable.  One could imagine that having a new friend die tragically just as school was starting would color your freshman year in school, and beyond.

The themes the team can expect to hear are complicated, too.  Those who were not at the party are likely to be angry, and not to be comfortable with that anger.  Ms. John did something dangerous when she drank too much, and that caused her to do something she would never have done while sober.  Her friends are going to be mad -- at the people who were there, at the host of the party, and at Nicole John herself.  But being mad at the person who died is never easy, because it's hard to reconcile being angry at someone and being sad that they're dead at the same time.

For those who were at the party, you can add a layer of guilt on top of all that.  Folks will feel guilty that they didn't stop her, guilty that they let her get drunk, and guilty that they themselves may have been too impaired to realize what was happening.  On top of that, there has been an arrest, which, rightly or wrongly, makes them wonder if something they express at this point will make the police look at them.  So they feel guilty, but may be afraid to talk about it for fear that their guilt will make them look, well, guilty.  Our society doesn't deal well with the difference between someone feeling guilt because they could have done differently and someone being guilty of a crime.

As for Ambassador John's family, one can only imagine what they might be experiencing.  All of the above seems likely.  Published reports suggest that Nicole John was not new to drugs and alcohol, and perhaps this was the moment they knew was possible but prayed would never come.  Or perhaps they didn't know, or couldn't acknowledge, the trouble she was headed for.  No one deserves to die the way Nicole John did, no matter what else they may have done.  And certainly no parent deserves to get the phone call the Johns family got early Friday morning.

A driver for Hartford Distributors, a beer distributor in Manchester, Connecticut, opened fire in the warehouse this morning around 7 AM.  He killed 8 people and wounded two others.  Police responded, and as they closed in on the gunman, he killed himself.  That much, everyone agrees on.  I think most if not all of us would also agree that, regardless of his motives, this kind of violence cannot be justified.

This story is not nearly as clean as that storyline would appear, however.  The driver had just been in a disciplinary hearing in which he was shown a video allegedly depicting him stealing from a company truck.  He was given the choice to resign or be fired, and he chose to resign.  He began shooting essentially as soon as the meeting was over.

As if that weren't complicating enough, the shooter was allegedly being harassed by coworkers because of his race.  He was one of two African-American employees, and his family says he showed them pictures of racial epithets and a stick figure being hung by a noose, taken in the company restroom.  He also reported being referred to by the "N word."  After he shot the other employees but before he killed himself, he reportedly called his mother and told her "I shot the five racists."  Then he shot himself.

This situation is messy on many levels, and messy situations have a lot of impact and need a careful response.  In this instance, I imagine the following groups need support:

• the survivors, who have experienced believing they were going to die
  
• the families of the dead, who have lost a loved one violently and suddenly
  
• the families of the survivors, who will have lasting fears for their loved ones' safety
  
• the family of the gunman, who must come to terms with what he did and grapple with the two disparate versions -- that he was being fired for misconduct and/or that he was the victim of racial harassment
  
• the administration of the company, who have lost employees "on their watch" and may feel guilt, either because they fired the gunman or because they didn't respond appropriately to harassment complaints
• the union, which would have represented him in the meeting this morning and which may have had harassment reported to them
• anyone who actually harassed the gunman, who may now feel responsible (or may now feel his actions prove them "right" in their racism)

That's a lot of groups, and what makes it even trickier is that they are all going to need intervention and support separately.  You can't very well put the families of the victims and the family of the gunman together in a room to talk about how they're feeling, at least not if you want it to be productive, let alone healing. 

Add to this the fact that there are likely to be one or more lawsuits flying in various directions, and everyone knows it.  This means that anyone who feels guilty -- whether it's their fault or not -- is going to be pretty uncomfortable talking about those feelings for fear that what they say winds up in court. 

I hope this workplace has access to a good crisis response team of some kind.  I hope that team has an excellent coordinator.  They're going to need to assign people carefully and make sure they have enough to cover all the bases, because no one in this situation is going to be able to support more than one group, and in some cases perhaps only one individual.  They sure have their work cut out for them.

The CEO of British Petroleum, Tony Hayward, spent some time racing his yacht off the Isle of Wight yesterday.  To put it mildly, this has not gone over well in the United States.  Charlie Kronick of Greenpeace called the mini-vacation, "rubbing salt in the wounds" of Gulf Coast residents.  Larose, Louisiana resident Bobby Pitre told the Associated Press,

Man, that ain't right. None of us can even go out fishing, and he's at the yacht races. I wish we could get a day off from the oil, too.

Taking the sentiment further, Florida resident Raymond Caniveri is quoted by the BBC saying Hayward does not "have the right to have free time at all" during the oil gusher.

I certainly understand why people are mad.  There is no relief in sight for those who live near or depend on the Gulf for a living.  Watching the person in charge take a break rather publicly feels kind of like your surgeon going out to lunch while you're on the operating table.  It seems like she should have her mind on the situation at hand.  But is it really that simple?

Let's start with a reality check.  Tony Hayward is not, himself, trying to plug the oil well.  His company is, and we'd like to think they have their best people working on it.  Tony Hayward is not one of those people.  It's not his job to be one of those people.  And given that this isn't his area of expertise, I personally do not want him to try.  I do want him to make sure that the best and the brightest are working on it and have everything they need to do it successfully.

For the second reality check, let's go back to that example of a surgeon.  It is certainly the case that if I'm having, say, an appendectomy, I expect my doctor to stay in the room the whole time.  But what if I'm having 18 hour brain surgery?  In that case, I actually don't want her in the OR continuously -- she's going to be tired and hungry and need to go to the bathroom, among other things, and she will start making mistakes.  In these situations, my expectation (as well as standard practice) is that the first surgeon hands off to a second one and goes for a break.  This is true for all kinds of prolonged critical situations, from search and rescue to firefighting to transatlantic pilots.  No one can be on the job continuously, and we don't want them to be.

So what did Tony Hayward do wrong?  White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel had it at least partially right when he said this was "part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes" by Hayward and BP.  While it may be true that my brain surgeon can and should get a break during my surgery, she doesn't need to walk past my family in the waiting room saying, "Well, that's about all I can take for one day.  I'm off to the French Riviera.  Have fun!!"  They want her to act like she cares, and that is all that Gulf residents are asking of Tony Hayward.

In addition, when my surgeon goes to get a nap and some lunch, she's leaving someone else in charge.  While there probably was someone else in charge of operations relating to the oil catastrophe yesterday, no one seems to know who it was.  This left the impression, rightly or wrongly, that the whole company was taking the day off.  This, too, was bad public relations and could easily have been avoided.

Does Mr. Hayward deserve to have any time off?  I think he does.  He's not going to be very helpful if he's a complete wreck.  If he had spent yesterday lying in a hammock on his back porch, most likely no one would have noticed.  Someone else could have briefed the press, and if anyone asked he would have been unavailable.  Instead, he chose to blow a giant raspberry at the people of the southeastern United States.  That was probably not the best choice.

In February, a professor in Alabama was charged in the shooting deaths of three of her colleagues at a faculty meeting.  Soon after, it surfaced that she had also shot and killed her brother in 1986 in an incident that was ruled at the time to be an accident.  Today, she was charged with murder in her brother's death.  Because the Alabama charges will take precedence, it is unlikely but not impossible that she will ever go to trial in Massachusetts.

The details of the brother, Seth Bishop's, death are worth looking at, because in hindsight this case is pretty odd.  In 1986, his sister loaded a shotgun in her bedroom, fired a shot and then brought the gun downstairs.  She and her mother, who was in the room at the time, reported that as she tried to unload the gun it went off, killing him.  She then left the house and tried to steal a car from an auto dealership.  She pointed the gun at police when they arrived but was eventually convinced to surrender.  In her room, authorities found a magazine article about another highly publicized case where a man killed his parents and stole a car from an auto dealership in an attempt to escape.  However, in this instance the sister was held for only a couple of hours before she was released without charge.

It's easy for me, 24 years later, to describe this in such a way that it seems the police were at best incompetent in this case.  How does someone try to steal a car and hold police at bay with a shotgun and not get charged?  I can understand believing the shooting was an accident, but the escape wasn't.  Why didn't her actions cause police to look more carefully at the shooting?

The thing that gives me pause every time I read about it, however, is her mother.  Judith Bishop says she was in the room when her daughter shot and killed her son, and she says it was an accident.  How can you watch your own child be murdered and stand by the murderer?  How can you not at least be angry at the reckless behavior that caused the accident, if you really believe it was an accident?

I can't know what was going on in Judith Bishop's head that day, but she has to have been stunned.  Whether or not she was actually in the room, her daughter had shot her son and he was dead.  Her first reaction -- the typical reaction -- would have been "this isn't happening."  So on that level, it makes sense that she told the police that it didn't happen, at least not on purpose.  Admitting to the death of her son was hard enough.  The possibility that her daughter did it intentionally would have been too much to process and accept right away.

Once the shock started to wear off, presuming that the shooting was intentional, Judith Bishop was faced with an agonizing situation.  Not only was her son dead, but the only person to blame was her daughter.  Her choice was to say that her daughter did it intentionally and, effectively, lose a second child soon after the first, or to stand behind her daughter and help herself believe that this was all a terrible accident.  She didn't make the right choice, but she made an understandable one.

If Seth Bishop's sister had been charged in 1986, she most likely would never have gone to graduate school or gotten her job in Alabama.  Most likely, her three colleagues would still be alive.  The charges today are little comfort to those families.  Following traumatic death, our minds naturally turn to blame.  Today, I'm guessing those families are pointing their fingers at Judith Bishop, who now, finally, has tragically lost her second child.

image:  Braintree High School 1986 Yearbook

A 52-year-old taxi driver in Cumbria, England, shot and killed his twin brother, the family lawyer and 10 other people, wounded 25, and finally killed himself yesterday in a rampage that lasted almost three hours.  News reports say that the gunman was upset about what he perceived as an unfair distribution of his father's estate and sure that his brother and the attorney were conspiring to do the same with his mother's.  In addition to his brother and the lawyer, he shot at fellow cabbies and drove down the street shooting at random strangers.

This is a horrible incident in any country.  A lot of the questions being raised in the British press are the same ones we would expect if this happened in the United States:  Were there warning signs missed?  Why did it take police so long to catch him?  As is natural after an incident like this, people are searching for someone to blame, because they need some way to reassure themselves that this sort of violence can be stopped.  Who knows, maybe this could have been.

One question that is coming up rather prominently is a little different than you would expect in the United States, however.  How did he get the guns?  The United Kingdom has notoriously strict gun control laws.  Even police officers are not automatically given permission to carry firearms, and most of them don't.  In order to get a permit for a gun, you have to have a legitimate reason (self defense is not considered a legitimate reason), a letter from your doctor, two character witnesses, not have been imprisoned for three years or more, have a face to face interview and have a personal inspection of where you are going to keep the gun.

I heard an interview on NPR yesterday with a local journalist about the question of where the guns came from.  Towards the end of the interview, the questions turned to  the provenance of the guns.  She said that police would be investigating whether the shooter was licensed to have a gun, and that "if he wasn't, that will be very bad."
Can you imagine someone saying that in the United States -- that it would be very bad to learn that a shooter didn't have a permit for a gun?  I doubt it.  We are used to the idea that people who are not supposed to have firearms have them anyway.

When this journalist says that finding out the shooter didn't have a permit would be "very bad," she's not talking about it being bad for the police or the government.  She's not talking about it looking bad.  What she's saying is that finding out that this man could get a gun illegally would mean that others can get them too.  That would be dangerous, and it would represent a complete shift in how Britons think about gun violence in their country.  In England, you don't generally worry that everybody is packing heat.  If this shooter could get a gun, it would mean that things are a lot more dangerous than they thought they were.  It would be very bad.

We all live with the knowledge that we are in a certain amount of danger.  If you live in a war zone, you make your peace somehow with that so you can sleep at night.  If you live in the United States in a relatively quiet town, the amount of danger you have to make your peace with is much less, but it's not zero.  If you live in Cumbria, England, there are various ways you could be subjected to violence or sudden injury or death, but being shot, until yesterday, was not something you had to worry about a whole lot.  Today, they're very worried. 

The good news, such as it is, is that it turns out the shooter did indeed have a license for his guns.  On the one hand, that means that a potential mass murderer was licensed, which increases the calculation of the odds that someone else is out there, licensed and ready to crack.  On the other hand, it also means that there isn't a hole in the wall keeping guns out of everybody's hands, and so maybe the people of Cumbria, at some point, will be able to return to not worrying about it quite so much.