Are We Afraid of Suicide Bombers or Homicidesuicide School Shooters

A gunman dressed all in black stepped on stage in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday and opened fire on a geology class. A short time later, five students were dead and the gunman had killed himself on the lecture hall stage. Twenty one others were wounded, at least two of them critically. Early Friday, the DeKalb County coroner said another student shot at the lecture hall had died, bringing the toll to seven, including the gunman.





It was the fifth school shooting in a week in the U.S.





You read that. Correct. This was the fifth school shooting in a week in the U.S. After the shooting spree the gunman turned the gun on himself and committed suicide. The unidentified 27-year-old man grew up in the Chicago suburbs and was enrolled as a graduate student at another state school far removed from the site of Thursday's bloodbath at Northern Illinois University. If this gunman intended to kill himself, then why did he have to take innocent people with him? Why did defenseless students sitting in a college lecture hall have to become part of this person’s plan to kill himself?. You may think this sounds insensitive of me, but how would you like to be the parent of one of these students? Put yourself in the place of parents who have just sent their child off to college and then find out that their child was just shot down and killed by some deranged person who just walked on the stage of a lecture hall stage and opened fire.





I think the most alarming part is that this was the fifth school shooting in the United States this week. If an individual has to worry about being killed sitting in a college class in this country, well we are no better off than the Israelis who have to be on guard sitting in their local pizzeria worrying if an Arab terrorist will decide to blow himself up and them as well. The one advantage that the Israelis have is that they have a pretty good idea of what the terrorist might look like. On college campuses students don’t have that advantage. The killer could be someone’s roommate. The killer probably looks no different than the boy next door. It almost seems like guerilla warfare where the enemy hides in the trees and is camouflaged so well that you don’t know where he is until someone is dead.