Solutions, not excuses

Female biology professor kills three at the University of Alabama after being denied tenure:

Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon, university officials said.

The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.

According to a faculty member, the professor had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again.

Sadly, women are feeling pressure and turning to violence at times, just like men but posts like this one at Newsweek by Kate Dailey will just keep talking about the rarity of female violence, and lead to excuses, rather than solutions.

For less PC reading on female violence, try Patricia Pearson's When She Was Bad...: Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence.

Video games do not lead to violence according to researcher

A researcher finds no evidence of a link between school shootings and video games:

A researcher at Texas A&M International University has concluded that there is "no significant relationship" between school shootings and playing violent video games.

Writing for the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, Prof. Christopher Ferguson criticizes the methodology used in earlier research linking games to violence and aggression. He also points out that no evidence of violent game play was found in recent high-profile incidents such as the Virginia Tech massacre, the Utah Trolley Stop mall shooting and the February, 2008 shooting on the campus of Northern Illinois University.

I never thought much of the theory that video games caused violence. The New York Times did a study of rampage killers and found that very few of them even played video games. They looked at 102 rampage killers and found "in only 6 of the 100 cases did the killers have a known interest in violent video games. Seven other killers showed an interest in violent movies." School shootings are complex, to blame them on video games is naive. I am glad a researcher is making that point more clear.