By: Safety Guy

Safety Guy
Wed, 30 Nov 2016 12:50:54 +0000

Dr. Clark seems to me spot-on in his assessment of the perp. Something appears to have radicalized him, but we don’t know quite what or how. Why is this important? Because knowing the different ways violent radicalization works may allow us to develop more preventive methods.

Preventing terrorism may afford us the best “bang for the buck” we can get, as it does in self-protection from criminal assault. The OSU Lantern story on this violent young man at the beginning of the semester shows us that he is not just a cardboard cutout or strange “other” who we can easily dismiss. There is the possibility of mental illness, compounded by various social stresses. Or maybe he was really good at hiding his long-term radicalization. Again, we don’t know yet. But Daesh (ISIS) does know that there are unstable people in the world who can be affected over the internet. This appears to be one, whose story may never be known in its entirety.

Dr. Clark’s comments remind me of the late Dr. Peter Rossi, who with Dr. Jim Wright authored the first really good work on guns and violence back in the eighties. “Always refer to the data!”

So much hate on these internet boards!! Hatred by nameless, faceless folks who don’t realize the extent of complexity and ambiguity in the world, and the proper, very limited, role for hate.

Properly focused, hate may help you survive a violent assault. After the assault, hate needs to be dealt with appropriately and then put away. It’s corrosive and it has no place in a good analysis of events. We now need to see if this incident might have been prevented by some other means than jacketed hollow points.

We were very lucky that Officer Horujko was right there and immediately “performed the indicated response.”

Good shooting, Officer Horujko! Sometimes, violence has to be used to solve problems that we may have neglected earlier. Everyone, of every ethnicity, deserves to be treated with kindness, in word and in deed.

The older I get and the more I train (with or without weapons), the more I realize that the softer, less exciting ways to prevent violence are key to handling it. By the time violence sprouts and it “goes to guns,” one has probably made several errors and/or missed some chances at mitigation. Is this case one of them? I’m not talking about the officer; I’m talking about our community. Again, we don’t know yet, and there’s a good chance we will never know for sure. But we need to try.

Karl Spaulding
OSU Pariah Laureate
Spaulding.10