As more details emerge about the Ft. Hood shooter, it’s looking more and more like ideology (as opposed to personal dissatisfaction or psychosis) was the primary motivating factor behind Thursday’s massacre (the death toll rose to 13 on Friday), but that hasn’t stopped others from sounding off in nonsensical ways on t.v. For example, Dr. Phil said that “this is a different war,” opining that the ongoing war in Afghanistan and Iraq is somehow more stressful than previous wars throughout history and must’ve caused the shooter, a highly educated individual, trained in how to handle mental health crises, who’d never been closer to combat (before yesterday) than the stories he’d heard about it from his patients in offices here on American soil, “break from reality” under the stress. Don’t think so, Phil.
In other news, there was another mass shooting on Friday, and the motive in this one is crystal clear. It happened in Florida, where a disgruntled former employee of an engineering firm returned, two years after being fired, to the firm’s offices, with a handgun, shot one former co-worker dead, and wounded five others. As in the Ft. Hood case, this shooter was taken into custody alive, and my prediction is that there will be enough evidence of premeditation and planning to defeat any “insanity” defense (based on the stress of being unemployed, the stress of possibly being deployed, etc.), which probably wouldn’t go over much better in a Florida district court than it would in a court-martial at Ft. Hood.
Remember a few weeks ago when several Harvard researchers were poisoned by the chemical sodium azide in their coffee? Well, there’s been another sodium azide poisoning right here at the University of Kansas where I teach a course, but this one’s different. This incident apparently involved just one person, a graduate student who ingested sodium azide while working alone in a lab and was found in critical condition (which has since been upgraded to “good”). I was reluctant to write about it initially because I don’t want to embarrass anyone involved, but I decided to weigh in because the local media seems to have completely bought in to the explanation that the student’s ingestion of sodium azide was “accidental.” I guess that’s possible (it has happened), but I’m skeptical, and I hope that University officials, behind the scenes, are skeptical as well. People who work with chemicals like sodium azide don’t usually ingest those substances by accident. In addition, I think it’d be tough to accidentally ingest enough sodium azide to put oneself in critical condition. The local media has reported that the chemical could’ve been inhaled or absorbed through the student’s skin, but given the size of the dose that the student must’ve received to cause a near-lethal reaction, I think that’s doubtful. It’s possible that a crime like the one committed at Harvard was committed here, but given the circumstances of this case, I’m more concerned that the ingestion could’ve been intentional, in which case the University would want to make sure that the student has access to ongoing mental-health services after being released from the hospital. Sodium azide has been used as a suicide agent in the past. If someone has access to it and ingests a sufficient quantity, it can cause cardiac/respiratory failure resulting in death relatively quickly, and there’s not really an “antidote,” so emergency medical intervention is largely limited to managing the effects until they wear off. Fortunately, treatment was timely and successful in this case, and even though the student’s name has not been mentioned, I want to reiterate that the purpose of this post is cautionary and that the student may not have attempted suicide at all.
