Love Lost: A Valentine's Day Massacre
YOU HAVE TO WONDER IF THE UNLIKELY MADMAN WHO opened fire inside a classroom on an Illinois College Campus yesterday choose the date for his bloody mayhem with deliberation. Or was he in charge of his faculties at all?
On Valentine's Day, a thin, white man dressed in black and carrying four guns suddenly appeared before a geology class with more than 162 registered students and randomly opened fire. Today he was identified as 27-year-old Stephen P. Kazmierczak, a friendly, likeable and studious graduate student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Il. who recently became erratic after he stopped taking an unidentified medication. He previously attended Northern Illinois University, 65 miles west of Chicago, where the shooting started about 3:07 p.m. Thursday. Five students were killed and seven more were in critical condition as of this
morning. Four of his victims were young women. The gunman then killed himself, putting him out of his misery. And the hunt for clues as to why he went 'postal' begins.
The gunman's father, Robert Kazmierczak, addressing reporters outside his home in Lakeland, Fla., wept and beseeched the media to "Please leave me alone. ... This is a very hard time for me."
It was the fourth school shooting in the U.S. this week. According to the Washington
Post, "On Feb. 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at
Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In Memphis, Tenn., a 17-year-old is accused of
shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school gym class, and the
15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school has been declared
brain dead."
The slaughter temporarily refocuses the nation's attention away from politics and the madcap
follies of pretty starlets, but our
shock over such horrors is dwindling. This latest school shooting comes less than a year
after Seung-Hui Cho, a senior
English major, killed 32 people in a premeditated attack on the Virginia Tech campus in
Blacksburg, Va.
The shooting was just one of several horrific cases making headlines in recent weeks, including
the shocking killings of five women inside a Lane
Bryant clothing store just 70 miles east of the Illinois campus, and the macabre murder of a New
York psychologist.
The latest massacre temporarily breaks through the noise of our lives to steal attention. But in
the background there is the constant radioactive buzz of the Iraq War, the ethnic
violence in Kenya, the genocide in Darfur, the saber rattling of Russian President Vladimir Putin. And with all this in mind, I keep
hearing Billy Bragg's yearning for mankind's great leap forward. Check it out, say a prayer, and
God bless.
Posted February 15, 2008
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