Amy Bishop Shooting at the University of Alabama Huntsville

Lessons of the Huntsville Shootings

Our condolences and thoughts are with our colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. The importance of extending the scope of our campus behavioral intervention and threat assessment teams to reach faculty/staff concerns cannot be understated. Colleges and universities have developed student-focused teams, but it is past time to broaden the scope. Faculty/staff focused teams are something we need to pusher harder for across the country.

The media seems shocked by a shooting involving a female professor. Are we? Women are a rapidly growing violent demographic in our society, and have been for more than a decade. We should not be surprised by a female perpetrator. If we are, we're not paying enough attention. A female-perpetrated campus shooting has happened before (Louisiana) and will happen again, with increasing frequency. Shootings by faculty should not surprise us either, as there have been college-related shootings in Texas, Louisiana, and most recently Georgia by faculty and staff.

We also need to question the "tenure made me do it" media coverage, and the suggestion that softening the tenure denial blow might help. We ought to cushion that blow for other reasons, but not because of the specter of violence. 99.9% of those denied tenure don't kill people. Treating faculty as "more special" than other employees only feeds the culture that makes it so politically untenable to direct campus behavioral intervention/threat assessment efforts to faculty/staff concerns on most college campuses.

It has been suggested that we make already overworked, understaffed counseling centers available to faculty. How about for every employee we fire? Why stop at faculty? This idea could have merit for campuses with counseling centers if we could dramatically expand their resources, but could also perpetuate the "dump all our problems on the counseling center" mentality that has been so pervasive since Virginia Tech. It also feeds the incident-by-incident reaction model we use to address campus violence. Cho brought us widespread mandated assessment. Kazmierczak brought classroom and centralized door locking to the fore. Now, we should revise tenure procedures because of Bishop? We're reacting incident-by-incident rather than envisioning comprehensive prevention models that are driven by our campus culture, community, resources and vulnerabilities, not every other campuses'.

If there is anything about this shooting that is anomalous and interesting that has received NO media coverage, it is that this shooting doesn't seem to fit a pattern common to almost all campus mass murders/shootings, which is the murder/suicide pattern. Bishop called her husband after the shootings to get a ride home, did not mention the shootings, disposed of her weapon in a second floor bathroom, and was apparently arrested coming out of the building without incident or reported resistance. Campus mass killers are usually their own last victims. Why Bishop walked out is worthy of some further exploration.

This shooting will lead to calls for criminal background checks and revised hiring practices, too. But, campus shooters rarely have reportable criminal histories that would show up on a typical background screening. Criminal backgrounds are not predictive of mass shootings. Bishop's history, as reported so far, is of alleged and unproven crimes. It makes for media fodder, but may not be effective prevention.

This conversation ought to be about how we build and empower the cultures of reporting that are essential to getting red flags to those on behavioral intervention/threat assessment teams who can connect the dots, identify emerging patterns and interdict them. In the coming weeks, more and more of those red flags will come out about Bishop. The disconnect on most campuses is getting that information from those who have it to those who need it.

For more resources on this topic, please visit www.nabita.org