The New York Times has published this nifty graphic display that provides an excellent overview and explanation of the specific locations of the shootings at Virginia Tech last week. Definitely worth checking out.
This post from late last year reported on the dubious policy of the Dallas Police Department to deploy SWAT teams to bust peaceful poker games. To update that precarious state of affairs, Radley Balko passes along this long email from a fellow who was arrested during one of the raids, even though he was simply chopping veggies for the gamblers to eat. The following is a glimpse of what occurred during the raid:
The raid occurred around 7:40 p.m. I was in the kitchen area which was just inside the front door when suddenly there was loud banging from the door. Within seconds, the room was full of Dallas SWAT officers yelling for everyone to put their hands in the air. Behind the Dallas SWAT team came many more law enforcement officers and several camera crews for the A&E reality show, Dallas SWAT. The camera crewís chests were clearly marked as ìA&E Film Crew.î
Bear in mind that, prior to police entering, the place was virtually quiet. There was the sound of poker chips in the air, but not much else. The players were essentially professionals and working stiffs having funÖthere were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and other professionals. There was hardly anything ìdangerousî about the place at all. In fact, the cops found no weapons in the facility or on anyone there. The show of force and weaponry brought by the cops was simply outrageous and unjustified, given the circumstances, but, then again, are they enforcing the law or making a TV show?
Read the entire post. Feel safer?
Both surprisingly and refreshingly, the L.A. Times runs this insightful piece on several experts’ proposals to address various Los Angeles area traffic problems. The experts are a level-headed bunch, including Joel Kotkin, James E. Moore, Donald Shoup and Ted Bakalar. Inasmuch as the Houston region shares many of traffic characteristics with the L.A. area, several of the suggestions are equally applicable to local traffic. My favorite is by Kotkin:
What Los Angeles needs is a transit system that better reflects what it is ó a sprawling mid-density city. So build the world’s easiest-to-use bus system. This network should expand such transit innovations as the MTA’s Metro Rapid buses, which run in dedicated lanes, and Rapid Express buses, which make few stops. These systems are far less expensive to build than light rail or a “subway to the sea.”
My favorite sports talk radio show in Houston is Charlie Pallilo‘s afternoon show over at 790-AM, but I’ve always wondered why the quite bright Pallilo isn’t off making millions trading bonds or running a hedge fund. Moneyball’s Michael Lewis reports in this CondeNast Portfolio article about a market that is right up Pallilo’s alley — investing in professional athletes:
Wall Street is about to launch a new way to trade professional athletes the way you trade stocks. A piece of Tiger, anyone?
When financial historians look back and ask why it took Wall Street so long to create the first public stock market that trades in professional athletes, they will see ours as an age of creative ferment. Theyíll see a new, extremely well-financed company in Silicon Valley that, for the moment, sells itself as a fantasy sports site but aims to become, as its co-founder Mike Kerns puts it, ìthe first real stock market in athletes.î . . . The athlete would sell 20 percent of all future on-field or on-court earnings to a trust, which would, in turn, sell securities to the public. Theyíll also single out the birth of the first European hedge fund that runs a multimillion-dollar portfolio of professional soccer players, the value of which rises and falls with the playersí performances.
As a number of smart people seem to have noticed at once, professional athletes have all the traits of successful publicly traded stocks, beginning with enormous speculative interest in them. Americans wager somewhere between $200 billion and $400 billion a year on sports, and between 15 million and 25 million of them play in fantasy leaguesówhich is to say that a shadow stock market in athletes already exists. That market may not know everything there is to know about the athletes it values, but it probably knows more than New York Stock Exchange investors know about the N.Y.S.E.ís public corporations. ìPeople worry about lack of transparency in sports,î says the leading sports agent. ìMy newspaper this morning has two and a half pages of business news and 17 pages of sports. The day after the game, you know Peyton Manningís thumb is hurt. What do you know about the C.E.O. of I.B.M.?î
Let’s see now. You will soon be able to place a legal bet on a professional athlete over the Internet, but not on the outcome of a game?
Famed Houston plaintiffs’ lawyer John O’Quinn is used to doing the targeting in the lawsuits in which he is involved. But in the bizarre world of litigation swirling around the estate of the late Anna Nicole Smith, O’Quinn has become the target.
Howard K. Stern, a former attorney and companion of Smith, filed the defamation suit on April 13 against O’Quinn in federal district court in the Southern District of Florida. Stern bases his lawsuit on allegedly defamatory statements that O’Quinn made to the media while representing Smith’s mother in connection with litigation in Florida and the Bahamas that erupted after Smith’s death from a drug overdose earlier this year. Stern is alleging defamation and false light/invasion of privacy causes of action against O’Quinn, taking dead aim at O’Quinn’s multi-hundred million dollar net worth. This press release was issued by Stern’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood, a lawyer out of of Atlanta.
In the event this one makes it to trial (highly doubtful, in my view), it sounds ready made for Court TV.
Take a sick baby and an anxious mother;
Put them in a Ronald McDonald House waiting room in the Texas Medical Center with other patients and their relatives;
Add in that the mother decides to breastfeed the child in the waiting room;
Toss in a somewhat intolerant observor of the breastfeeding who registers a complaint about it, and
Presto!
All hell breaks loose.
Following on this post from yesterday on the murderous rampage at Virginia Tech on Monday, Gary Lavergne, the director of admissions research at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the foremost experts on Charles Whitman’s 1966 sniper attack from the UT Tower, provides this insightful Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed on the legacy of Whitman in relation to this week’s attack:
In Sniper in the Tower I concluded, and later the FBI’s premier profiler, John Douglas, in his book Anatomy of Motive would agree, that “[Whitman’s] actions speak for themselves.” Any cause-and-effect theory, whether organic (brain tumor), chemical (amphetamine psychosis), or psychological (military training or child abuse), embracing the idea that Charles Whitman’s judgment or free will was impaired, is not consistent with what he did. He carefully planned every move and detail, and he succeeded in doing what he set out to do — murdering people and getting himself killed in spectacular fashion. The Whitman case taught me that sometimes our zeal to champion causes important to us or to explain the unexplainable and be “enlightened” blinds us to the obvious.
Charles Whitman was a murderer; he killed innocent people. We should not forget that. In Virginia we appear to have a Whitman-like character. It is vitally important for all to remember that there is only one person responsible for what happened in Blacksburg, and that is the man who pulled the trigger. But in Virginia the diversions have already begun. As I write this, less than a half-day since the senseless killing of nearly three dozen innocent people, Web headlines on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC read: “Did Virginia Tech’s Response Cost Lives?” “Parents Demand Firing of Virginia Tech President, Police Chief Over Handling,” “Students Wonder About Police Response.” Ironically, those headlines are juxtaposed with pictures of law-enforcement officers administering medical treatment and hauling wounded students to safety. Next to those pictures are videos of Virginia Tech’s president and chief of police, in pain and in the midst of a nightmare, bombarded with sensational questions from irresponsible reporters. [. . .]
Before we identify and learn the lessons of Blacksburg, we must begin with the obvious: More than four dozen innocent people were gunned down by a murderer who is completely responsible for what happened. No one died for lack of text messages or an alarm system. They died of gunshot wounds. While we painfully learn our lessons, we must not treat each other as if we are responsible for the deaths that occurred. We must come together and be respectful and kind. This is not a time for us to torture ourselves or to seek comfort by finding someone to blame. Maybe as a result of the tragedy we will figure out how to more effectively use e-mail and text messages as emergency tools for warning large populations. We may come up with a plan that successfully clears a large area, with a population density of a midsize city, in less than two hours. Maybe universities will find a way to install surveillance cameras and convince students and faculty members that they are being monitored for their own safety and not for gathering domestic intelligence. All of those steps might be helpful in avoiding and reducing the carnage of any future incidents. But as long as we value living in a free society, we will be vulnerable to those who do harm — because they want to and know how to do it.
Read the entire piece. Plus, check out Larry Ribstein’s observations on the effect that over-regulation may had on the tragedy.
Only Professor Bainbridge has the special insight to note that NBA referee Joey Crawford’s suspension-drawing ejection of the Spurs Tim Duncan in a game last week confirms the core of the Professor’s approach to corporate governance — “Whether on the court or in the board room, the power to review is the power to decide.”
Given the well-chronicled problems with the Harris County Crime Lab’s handling of DNA evidence, the proposal made in this Roger Koppl/New York Post op-ed focusing on the misuse of DNA evidence in the Duke lacrosse team case makes a lot of sense:
DNA is no magic bullet of truth when the testers are aligned unambiguously with the prosecution. During the testimony in which it was revealed that [prosecutor Mike] Nifong and [DNA Lab director Brian] Meehan had agreed to hide the DNA evidence, Meehan referred to Nifong as “my client.” Instead of serving the truth, Meehan’s forensics lab was helping its “client,” the prosecutor.
When forensic scientists work exclusively for the prosecution, we should expect errors and abuse. Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped exonerate nearly 200 people wrongly convicted of crimes. A study of the first 86 such cases, published in the journal Science, found faulty forensics played a role in almost two-thirds of those convictions.
The time has come to free forensic science from the pressures of prosecutorial bias. To that end, crime labs should become independent of police and prosecutors, and public defenders should be given greater access to forensic advice and testing. Crime labs should be independent, operating under the supervision of an officer of the court, who would be responsible for assigning forensic evidence to laboratories and ensuring that all crime labs in the system are following proper scientific procedures.
Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.
The Virginia Tech tragedy reminds me, sadly, of what John Lott said in his article that I posted a few days ago. He said students were sitting ducks because of college gun laws. If only one student had been carrying a gun — and guys in Blacksburg know how to handle guns — it might have been very different.
The simple truth is that Americans themselves remain unwilling to take drastic measures to restrict gun availability. This is rooted deep in the American belief in individual freedom and a powerful suspicion of government. Americans are deeply leery of efforts by government to restrict the freedom to defend themselves. A sizeable minority, perhaps a majority, believe the risk that criminals will perpetrate events such as yesterdayís is a painful but necessary price to pay to protect that freedom.
William Anderson, commenting on Columbine after the 9/11 attacks, but equally applicable to Virginia Tech:
When the police arrived after hearing reports of a massacre under way inside Columbine High School, they did not storm the building to catch the criminals. Instead, these heavily armed officers, wearing their famous coalscuttle helmets, surrounded the outside of the school, “sealing the perimeter,” according to their spokesmen.
Inside the high school, Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold were running freely through the halls, merrily killing and wounding unarmed teachers and students as they tried to escape. In the end, the police didnít even have to fire a shot, as the two miscreants ended their own lives. Thus, people were treated to a worthless show of force by the authorities, which did almost nothing to save anyone caught in the building.
David Kopel channels that thought in this WSJ ($) op-ed:
At Virginia Tech’s sprawling campus in southwestern Va., the local police arrived at the engineering building a few minutes after the start of the murder spree, and after a few critical minutes, broke through the doors that Cho Seung-Hui had apparently chained shut. From what we know now, Cho committed suicide when he realized he’d soon be confronted by the police. But by then, 30 people had been murdered.
But let’s take a step back in time. Last year the Virginia legislature defeated a bill that would have ended the “gun-free zones” in Virginia’s public universities. At the time, a Virginia Tech associate vice president praised the General Assembly’s action “because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus.” In an August 2006 editorial for the Roanoke Times, he declared: “Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.”
Actually, Virginia Tech’s policy only made the killer safer, for it was only the law-abiding victims, and not the criminal, who were prevented from having guns. Virginia Tech’s policy bans all guns on campus (except for police and the university’s own security guards); even faculty members are prohibited from keeping guns in their cars.
Few differences are as clarifying as attitudes towards “gun control”. (The quotation marks give me away.) (1) Control advocates trust the authorities to protect us — and to somehow enforce gun control (consider long-standing attempts at heroin control and consider how carefully the DMV screens auto drivers); and (2) Gun control advocates cannot distinguish between the gun and the owner. Mere access makes us all equally dangerous. I have problems with both thought patterns.
And even amidst the terrible carnage, courage and humanity still shine:
A 76-year-old Jewish-Romanian lecturer was hailed a hero after blocking his classroom door long enough for many of his students to escape the Virginia Tech gunman, before being shot dead.
Liviu Librescu, a Holocaust survivor, pressed himself against the door of the classroom while shots were fired in the corridor and surrounding rooms. He stood firm, attempting to barricade the door, while his students clambered out of the windows.
The last person to see Professor Liviu Librescu alive appears to have been Alec Calhoun, a student at Virginia Tech who turned as he prepared to leap from a high classroom window to see the elderly academic holding shut the classroom door. The student jumped, and lived. Minutes later, the professor was shot dead.
There is no meaningful distinction between one relativeís grief and anotherís sorrow as the bereaved converge on Blacksburg from as near as Roanoke and as far as India. But it is worth reflecting on the significance of Professor Librescuís life of quiet heroism, which encompassed the Holocaust, a career of internationally admired teaching and research, and a final act of sacrifice that saved at least nine other lives.
The son of Romanian Jewish parents, he was sent to a Soviet labour camp as a boy after his father was deported by the Nazis. He was repatriated to communist Romania only to be forced out of academia there for his Israeli sympathies. A personal intervention by Menachem Begin enabled him to emigrate with his wife to Israel, from where he visited the US on a sabbatical in 1986, and chose to stay. The appalling ironies of his murder by a crazed student after a life of such fortitude and generosity will not be lost on anyone who hears his story.
Yet neither should those who mourn him forget the role that America played in his life. As for so many other survivors of the mid-20th centuryís genocidal convulsions, the US was for this inspiring teacher both a beacon of hope and a welcoming new home. Founded on the idea of liberty, it also made, for him, a reality of that idea. Let those he saved now make the most of it.
Update: The NY Times has more on Professor Librescu here.