Thread: NAU Shooting Flagstaff AZ

October 9, 2015

Northern Arizona University Shooting: 3 Hurt, 1 Dead In Flagstaff Campus Shooting
Paula Mooney

As impossible as another school shooting may seem, there has been a shooting at Northern Arizona University in the pre-dawn hours that left three people hurt and one person dead. Regarding the Northern Arizona University shooting, details are still flowing in, but the official Twitter account for Northern Arizona University has been updating the public about the shooting, providing further details and a phone number for parents and concerned parties to call.

The NAU Twitter account is also providing links for updates about the Northern Arizona University shooting. Some of those links that point to News.NAU.edu are down right now, likely due to the amount of web traffic the university’s servers are receiving as people try to visit the website for more information about the shooting on campus.

The “live” tab on Twitter for a Northern Arizona University search will bring up the latest updates about the shooting.



One person was killed and three other people were shot, and the shooter is in custody from the Northern Arizona University shooting. Thus far, there is no word on a motive, and authorities in Arizona plan a press conference for 9 a.m. ET — which is 6 a.m. Arizona local time.

This tragic Northern Arizona University shooting occurred only one week after a shooter opened fired in Oregon on a college campus. The shooting at Northern Arizona University took place at Mountain View Hall, reports this video from CNN, at approximately 1:20 a.m. local Arizona time, which translates into 4:20 a.m. ET.

On Twitter, the search term “Northern Arizona University” is a trending topic, with Twitter reporting 14,500 tweets about the shooting thus far. Most folks are tweeting news reports about the shooting at Northern Arizona University, while others are shocked and saddened that another shooting on another college campus has occurred. Indeed, since the shooting happened during the early morning hours, many students were likely awakened by the news of the shooting, while others are just waking up to new about the Northern Arizona University school shooting that occurred, wherein a total of four people were shot and one didn’t survive.

Initially, Mountain View Hall residents were warned to stay indoors by the campus Twitter account, however, the campus is no longer on lockdown. Authorities say they got a call about the shooting at the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff, Arizona. Later, the three people injured in the Arizona shooting were taken to the hospital, although their condition is currently unknown. Northern Arizona University is a very large school, with the Flagstaff campus enjoying approximately 20,000 students as part of their population, so no doubt plenty of worried parents want updates about the shooting on campus and the injured and dead.

The extent of the injuries of those wounded in the Northern Arizona University shooting isn’t known at this time, however, the shooting occurred at a dorm that houses Greek organizations. The press conference at 9 a.m. ET should reveal more information about the deadly shooting and whether or not police have yet uncovered a motive in the Northern Arizona University shooting that they can pass along to the public — along with more details.

http://www.inquisitr.com/2482368/nor...twitter-video/

See also Umpqua Community College

How We All Miss the Point on School Shootings

May 27, 2014 • • by Mark Manson •

Mass Shootings as Non-Political Terrorism

For a country that is so single-mindedly obsessed with terrorism, it’s jaw-dropping that almost nobody recognizes that school shooters use the exact same strategies to disseminate fear and their twisted agendas throughout society. Terrorists use violence and mass media coverage to promote political or religious beliefs; school shooters use violence and mass media coverage to promote their personal grievances and glorification.

When viewed in this way, our responses to the school shooters looks juvenile in comparison. Can you imagine arguing over whether misogyny made Osama Bin Laden plan September 11th? Or whether video games caused Dhokhar Tsarnaev to plant bombs at the Boston Marathon? Or whether heavy music inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City?

You would be laughed at.

And in fact, when anyone goes as far as to suggest that Islam causes terrorism, they are immediately and rightfully scolded for it. Yet when it comes to school shootings, these types of discussions are not only tolerated, but engaged in willfully.

It’s not that we should respond to school shootings the same way we respond to terrorist attacks. It’s that we already do. We just don’t realize it.

When Elliot’s creepy YouTube videos went public, declaring vengeance upon every college girl that wouldn’t sleep with him, every woman who had ever heard a guy mutter something similar suddenly felt a chill run up her spine. And that chill caused the video to be posted and reposted, sending more chills up more women’s spines until it had spread across the country. My guess is that’s exactly what Elliot would have wanted.

And we’ve seen this viral dissemination over and over again. After every school shooting episode, writings and videos of the killers get passed around on the internet. Television specials show and reshow the footage. Books are written. Experts are hired. Rinse and repeat.

Last year, I wrote that terrorism works because it takes advantages of psychological inefficiencies in our brains: we pay a disproportionate amount of attention to threatening events and we always overestimate how likely it is for a random event to happen to us. School shootings transfix us by leveraging the exact same inefficiencies in our minds. And once they’ve dominated this mindspace, we can’t seem to shake them out of it.

Yet, for some reason, while we seem to imagine potential terrorists everywhere — in airport lines, at stadium gates, in subway cars — we never see the school shooters coming. We’re always caught by surprise.

Hiding in Plain Sight

When we think of terrorists, we think of some alien “other” — the bearded, turbaned man hiding in some cave on the other side of the world. Because he’s so distant and different, we let him eat at our imagination — he could be anywhere, ready to strike at any moment, hiding in behind every bush, planting a bomb on every bus or plane. We clog our airports and blast warnings through our public buildings for some imagined bogeyman who is never actually present.

By contrast, we fail to spot shooter after shooter because they are so close to us and so much like us. We miss them because they are our neighbors, our classmates, our friends or even our family members. They are right in front of our noses and we ignore them for a whole host of trivial reasons. Maybe they’re too weird, or awkward, or they’re a loser. We don’t want to talk to them. We put our blinders on and pretend that they’re not miserable, we pretend that they didn’t just have that awkward outburst, we pretend they didn’t just make a joke about killing their own parents.

Eric Harris’ friends later said that he would often “joke” about blowing up the school and murdering classmates. Even after they discovered he was building bombs in his basement, they never put two-and-two together. They just couldn’t believe it. Not Eric. Not the guy they had played video games with and toilet papered girls’ houses with.

Meanwhile, the wrong sarcastic word at the airport and you can be held in jail for days.

An FBI study on school shooters found school shootings are never a result of a crazy person “snapping.” Most shooters do have serious mental health or emotional issues, but they all plan their attacks months or even years in advance. And as they plan, they almost always “leak” information about the attack beforehand, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes in incredibly obvious ways.

Both Harris and Rodger had the police called on them multiple times due to suspicious behavior. Both of them had a history of strange and violent outbursts towards friends and those close to them. Both put their intentions and their angry rants up on the web for everyone to see. Elliot Rodger wrote and re-wrote his plan out, sometimes including murdering his family members and stealing their car. He wrote that if someone had just searched his room, it would have all come apart, he would have been found out. Eric Harris wrote almost the exact same thing 15 years earlier.

Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 people, turned in paper after paper that depicted gruesome killings and gun violence. He had a history of mental health issues and had been reported to the campus police four times for aggressive and antisocial behavior, particularly towards women. One of his professors went so far as to tell the board that she would rather resign than teach another class with him in it.

Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, also had a history of mental illness and inappropriate anti-social behavior. And he too, began sharing his intentions online through forum posts and audio. Lanza had paranoid delusions about mass media and the government, and began to argue that school shootings were justified as a form of protest or revolt. People humored him and ignored him. No one realized he had a small armory of semi-automatic weapons in his house.

Then there are those who are simply ignored. Dylan Klebold was suicidally depressed for over two years. He fantasized and wrote about killing himself liberally. Despite getting into trouble with the law, turning in school assignments that glorified murder and suicide and failing most of his classes senior year, his parents and friends claimed that they had no idea something was amiss. George Sodini, a middle-aged Pennsylvania man who shot up an aerobics class full of women, wrote in his journal that since he spent the past 20 years of his life alone and miserable, there was no reason to think that the next 20 wouldn’t be lonely and miserable as well. His mother had been emotionally abusive. His father hadn’t had a meaningful conversation with him in over 30 years. Simply put: he had nothing to live for. So why not take some revenge on your way out?

Gun control gets the headlines. Mental health care gets the headlines. Violence and video games and misogyny and internet forums and atheism — the list is endless at this point.

Here’s what doesn’t get the headlines: Empathy. Listening to those around you. Even if you don’t like them very much. We have come to live in a culture where it’s taboo or unacceptable to simply check in with people emotionally and offer some empathy and understanding. I’m not saying this would magically fix all gun violence. I’m just saying that all of these things — the lack of gun laws, the lack of health care, the inability to have basic conversations with friends and neighbors about what’s going on with them, these are all extensions of a callous and self-absorbed culture that lacks any real empathy.

Despite being relevant and important discussions, the glamorous headlines are ultimately distractions — they just feed into the carnage and the attention and the fame the killer desired. They are distractions from what is right in front of you and me and the victims of tomorrow’s shooting: people who need help. And while we’re all fighting over whose pet cause is more right and more true and more noble, there’s likely another young man out there, maybe suicidally depressed, maybe paranoid and delusional, maybe a psychopath, and he’s researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world.

And no one is paying attention to him.

http://markmanson.net/school-shootin...ampaign=buffer

Top: Colin Brough.
Bottom, left to right: Nicholas Prato, Kyle Zientek, Nicholas Piring.
Image Credit: Screenshot/ABC15

GOP presidential hopeful Ben Carson stirred up controversy with his recent comments related to the mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/4400...ing-time-soon/

During a Tuesday interview on “Fox & Friends,” Carson was asked what he would have done had he been in that classroom during the incident:

“I’m glad you asked that question. Because not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me… I would say, ‘Hey guys! Everybody attack him! He may shoot me but he can’t get us all!'”

http://video.foxnews.com/v/453565496...#sp=show-clips

Well, it appears that a gunman on the campus of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff overnight was stopped because of the actions of bystanders.

Around 1:20am Friday, 18-year-old NAU freshman pulled out a gun in a parking lot near a dormitory. After a post-party confrontation between two groups of students, the shooter reportedly fired multiple shots, wounding three male students and killing Colin Brough, a junior business major.

All of the victims were members of the Delta Chi Fraternity, but Jones was not.

An unidentified witness told the Arizona Daily Sun in Flagstaff: http://azdailysun.com/news/local/a-m...524a8e3e2.html

“We had just left a party and were standing in the street getting ready to walk home when a guy walked up with a pistol and just started shooting. I heard five or six shots and then my friends just tackled him. They got him really quick…

He didn’t get a chance to hurt himself. I saw him in handcuffs when the cops came.”

NAU Police Chief Gregory T. Fowler told reporters that the shooter didn’t appear to be targeting the campus.

The school was never placed on lockdown, and today’s classes were not cancelled, although counseling was available at a restaurant inside NAU’s North Union building.

There’s no word yet on the motive behind the shooting, nor on the conditions of the three wounded students. But if not for the decisive behavior of the students who “tackled” Jones, the carnage may have been much worse.

http://www.ijreview.com/2015/10/4420...ersity-campus/