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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor and Nuclear Physicist, Nuno Loureiro, was shot to death last night in his own home. Loureiro was reportedly Jewish and somewhat vocally pro-Israel. No suspect is in custody. I cannot help but think that this might be related to the shooting at Brown University last week. My knowledge of the geography of the northeast United States is limited, but I believe the two locations are at most a couple of hours apart. The shooting at Brown seems to have targeted the class of a professor of Israel-US relations.
I think we are are now approaching five left wing domestic terrorist attacks in as many months. When I suggested we were on the verge of slipping into another Days of Rage after the Israeli embassy attack, everyone here pooh-poohed the idea. But my concerns have only deepened since.
I have to squint really hard to discern any kind of motive for the Brown shooting. The aforementioned professor was not present at the time since it was just a weekend study session led by a TA and not an actual class, and anyone who was specifically targeting her would have known this. Meanwhile, the two fatalities are a Christian student and a Muslim (-sounding) student. (Source: Wikipedia).
The woman killed, and according to some reports, targeted, was the VP of Brown's College Republicans (I suspect targeting, because there have got to be like five college republicans at Brown, and she was a good-looking young woman). Mukhammad Umurzokov, the other student killed, was Uzbek, so Muslim but not a visible minority. In my experience Uzbeks are generally culturally Muslim, but not pious in the Salafi/Deobandi sense we tend to associate with Islam, and tend to have a very strong sense of chivalry/responsibility, which checks out with reports that he was shot trying to shield her. Who knows whether any of these reports are correct yet, though.
Weren't there like 9 injuries? That's the kind of casualty ratio you get from randomly emptying a handgun clip into a crowd.
It's hard to tell right now, but this guy seems to have gone into a building, found a specific room, shot the people inside it, and then left. He probably only had the one gun, he didn't blast away and max out his kill count in the hallways, atrium, etc. That, plus his long wait, seems to me to suggest some kind of targeting - could be political, could be romantic, could be STEMlord snapping during finals, etc., but not the classic kind of nihilistic school shooting. When I wrote that comment, I didn't realize that it was such a large classroom (186 seats), Brown is a small university, but I also have no idea how many people were actually at the study session. We're all speculating in the fog of war for now, and Brown/Rhode Island appear to be trying to hush this as much as possible.
Could be, but it was also apparently a “Principles of Economics” class—that is, an entry-level sounding economics class, hence the large lecture size. So if it were indeed a STEMlord ragequitting from finals, the ragequitting action was likely not directed toward one (if any) of the courses causing him academic pressure.
Yeah I mostly say that because mass shootings seem to be pretty psychologically comorbid with suicide, and my small-n experience is that STEM guys tend to kill themselves in ways that are more clearly tied to academics, whereas non-STEM kids just kill themselves with drugs or over a breakup. Nobody's snapping and killing people over the pressures of being in Econ 101, but it's also possible there was some psychological motive of targeting the people who the perp thinks have it easy. We shall see (or not).
Mass shooters generally tend to kill themselves, engage the police in order to be killed, or surrender to the police. They don’t usually flee while avoiding security cameras. That’s what makes me think this was probably political.
Yeah, a similar thought occurred to me. My initial thought was that this was a student who snapped, but the fact that he (apparently) stopped shooting and walked away was pretty unusual.
Also, from the fact that he's evaded capture for a couple days it seems pretty likely that he had engaged in some planning and preparation so as to increase his chances of getting away with it.
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