More Murder and An Exequy

Asia McGowan, shot to death by her former boyfriend at Henry Ford Community College.

Announced on the same day:

• A murder-suicide at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, MI (ex-boyfriend kills former girlfriend)
• A Gettysburg College senior strangled his ex-girlfriend on Thursday.

Virginia Tech will reopen Norris Hall, where the shootings took place. It will contain a Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention.

Emily Rachel Silvestein, sophomore, strangled by her former boyfriend at Gettysburg College

I was tired last night, so have now added some things:

I (still) have no answers, and only a few incomplete theories. My sense about the mass shootings is that, somehow, the school violence has "trickled up" with a generation, from high school shootings to college shootings, to killing your ex-girlfriend on campus. I am tired of the latter crime being classed as "domestic violence," because 1) it fails to address the growing violence against female teens and young women by the boys and young men who sought intimacy with them; 2) it isolates these cases instead of viewing them on a continuum of location specific motivated killings, i.e. why school ? I'll grant opportunity its due, but there is something more to it. In the mass killings there is the constant reiteration that school is not safe, that no one can save you, that innocence is no protection. One need only think of the anomalies in the pattern (Nickel Mines, where the Amish children were gunned down, is hardly ever mentioned, since the killer was not a student or a member of the Amish community) to see that any theory is too narrow and the violence too wide: home, school, church, but I often have wondered why the school was the target at Nickel Mines. What did it, does it, symbolize ? All of the killers are male; the magnitude of their rage and destruction of life, unfathomable. Unforseeable., we keep hearing. Maybe Berryman's guess in this stanza from a Dream Song is as good ---or better--- than anyone else's: do they "fe[el] less/ and more about less than us ?"

Dream Song 34
My mother has your shotgun. One man, wide
in the mind, and tendoned like a grizzly, pried
to his trigger-digit, pal.
He should not have done that, but, I guess,
he didn't feel the best, Sister,—felt less
and more about less than us . . . ?

In every room I teach in, I subconsciously learn, by the end of the second week at most, how many ways there are to get out the door, the windows, whether the door is locked to the outside, where the nearest exits are out of the building. I can't ever remember doing that until Virginia Tech.

PS. Does anyone know how to get rid of those damn daisies (??!!!) that the template has morphed my bullets into ? Not only are they glaringly inappropriate for this post, but for any list I might make, ever.