SENTINEL WATCH March 10, 2008 Issue

SCHOOL SHOOTERS AND MALL GUNMEN—DISARMED

ROSALIE E. DUNBAR, NEWS EDITOR

ON VALENTINE'S DAY, February 14, 2008, a former graduate student opened fire at Northern Illinois University, shooting 21 people, five of them fatally. Then he shot himself. Just over a week before this shooting, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In addition to the school shootings, there have also been attacks in malls that have ended with the shooters turning their weapons on themselves. One of them left a note that said, among other things, "Now I'll be famous."

There's something wrong about thinking one is leaving a legacy of fame by committing an unthinkable crime—and also expecting to escape the consequences. As Mary Baker Eddy put it in her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "The murderer, though slain in the act, does not thereby forsake sin. He is no more spiritual for believing that his body died and learning that his cruel mind died not. His thoughts are no purer until evil is disarmed by good" (p. 290).

The question for the rest of us is: How do we disarm evil and still maintain the innocence and joy that are part of interacting on a college campus, in a shopping mall, and other public places?

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