The Northern Illinois University Shootings

UPDATE:

Correcting information his office released earlier Friday, DeKalb County Coroner Dennis J. Miller said five students, not six, were killed in the rampage, in addition to the gunman. Miller said the higher victim total was the result of confusion over the fate of a patient taken to another county for treatment.

"There was a miscommunication," Miller said.

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UPDATE: A coroner says another student shot at a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University has died, bringing the toll to seven, including the gunman.
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It's happened again:

DEKALB, Ill. -- A former student dressed in black walked onto the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on a packed science class Thursday, killing six students, wounding 15 and setting off a panicked stampede before committing suicide.

Police say they have no motive for the rapid-fire assault, carried out by the gunman who fired indiscriminately into the crowd with a shotgun and two handguns as students dove to the floor and ran toward the exits. At least two of the wounded were hospitalized in critical condition.

...University President John Peters said four people died at the scene, including three students and the gunman, while the other two died at a hospital. The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover.

Peters said the gunman was a former graduate student in sociology at NIU, but was not currently enrolled at the 25,000-student campus about 65 miles west of Chicago.

"It appears he may have been a student somewhere else," University Police Chief Donald Grady said. Authorities did not release any other details about the gunman or identify the victims.

Witnesses said the skinny gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the class was about to end around 3 p.m.

Officials said 162 students were registered for the class but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.

...All classes were canceled Thursday night and the campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents "as soon as possible" and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory. Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a week.

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.

So much violence within a week.

Based on accounts of what happened in Cole Hall, the Northern Illinois University shooting seems to be in the vein of the Virginia Tech Massacre. Cho Seung-Hui wanted to kill as many people as he could. The NIU shooter seemed intent on doing the same thing.

It won't be long and we'll know the name of the mass murderer at NIU. I think that's exactly what he wants. He wanted to be important and achieve a little immortality by committing such a heinous act. As horrible as this sounds, I think he was trying to break Cho's record.

I think the media attention to these sort of shootings serves to encourage others to act in the same unconscionable manner.

The public's morbid fascination for these things only compounds the problem.

I don't care about the shooter's identity. I don't want to read some rambling manifesto that he scribbled in a notebook. (There so often is one.) I don't want to be directed to links of his weird Internet postings. (There so often are Internet footprints to study.) I don't want to see the shooter's face or know his name.

A killer turned a lecture hall into a mass murder scene. He's not a celebrity.

Of course, the media have to report the story, but they don't have to give the killer the fame he undoubtedly sought. I believe that feeds the beast and helps to produce more killers.

Enough.

So many people are suffering and grieving because this lowlife chose to open fire, slaughtering SIX people, before he committed his cowardly act of suicide. He intended to kill more than he did, but killing one person is too many. This miscreant doesn't deserve attention, only condemnation.

The names and faces to remember are those of the victims, not the shooter.