politricks and other distractions

Another Reason to Be Proud I'm a Woman

You know, we women were really dragging behind in some crucial social spheres. We especially have lagged behind in our incidence of serial killing.

Up til now, I always thought men murdered more due to testosterone, the most dangerous drug we're not currently controlling in this country. Would anyone disagree with me that there'd be less violence nationwide if high school boys went on the pill like so many girls of that age? The girls get their hormones regulated (and yet they're still pretty wacky). Why can't we even consider that testosterone is dangerous and should be looked at?

Then we get this story that proves all my hormone theories wrong:

"Ex-Postal Worker Kills 5, Then Self
Calif. Shootings May Be Nation's Deadliest Act of Workplace Violence by Woman

By Sonya GeisWashington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; A03

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 31 -- A former Postal Service employee opened fire at a Southern California mail distribution center where she once worked, killing five workers and critically wounding another before taking her own life late Monday night, authorities said Tuesday.

The 44-year-old woman shot three employees in a parking lot, three more inside the postal building, and then turned the gun on herself, officials said. Experts called it the nation's deadliest act of workplace violence ever committed by a woman...

The fact that the perpetrator was a woman was "very unusual," Mantell said. The typical profile of a workplace shooter is a male loner, paranoid and fascinated with violence, who has made previous threats and has little in his life outside work, he said.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said men's tendency to identify more with their work can lead them to be more devastated by the loss of a job than a woman would be in the same situation. Furthermore, he said, women tend to use violence to defend themselves, while men are more likely to use violence as an offensive strategy.

"So a woman is much less likely to respond to a loss of a job by firing back. A man is more likely to be violent because he wants to regain control," he said. Fox also noted that many earlier acts of violence by postal employees were done by copycats after a seminal 1984 shooting. "So should people in the Postal Service be nervous? In some sense, yeah," he said 'It's a very large workplace in which people identify with the guy on the line.'"

Funny. In the time it took to copy that text out, I went back to the Post site and they've already moved the story out of any current edition. How quickly such stories become old news.

So here's my first murder entry, folks. See how little we even notice these stories anymore? And really what this story is about is mental illness, which left untreated (perhaps, seems likely), ended up causing the murder of 7 people.

There are no winners in these stories. Tonight at least 7 families are in pain. Somebody is wondering what they could have done to stop it. Somebody else just wants to die.

And the beat goes on.

posted by dcnative @ 9:08 PM