On September 16, 2013 our nation was faced with yet another tragedy. Aaron Alexis gunned down 12 workers in the nation's capital at the Washington Navy Yard, where he was working as an information technology contractor. This is a very controversial topic regarding how this horrific event could have been prevented. Our nation has faced many of these insane incidents but what we need to figure out is how this can be stopped.
Aaron Alexis was not known to be a very mentally stable person. There have been many cases of so called "red flags" regarding Alexis. In 2004, Alexis was arrested for shooting his Glock into two tires of someone's car and told police the man was disrespecting him. In 2008 Alexis was kicked out of a metro Atlanta club for damaging the furnishings, according to a police report, and was later arrested for disorderly conduct. In 2010, police arrested Alexis after he allegedly fired a bullet through his ceiling into a neighbor's apartment. And lastly, in August of this year, Alexis told police that people were following him and a microwave machine was sending vibrations through this body.
The police notified the navy for many of these incidents. The question is why didn't the navy do something earlier to prevent this tragedy. Aaron Alexis was clearly viewed as a person with a mental illness and seemed very dangerous in many aspects. The families of the 12 that were lost mourn to this and probably ask the question "how could this have been prevented".
I ask myself the same question. I feel like this could have easily been prevented if the navy took into account the "red flags" in Aarons past. I feel terrible for the families who lost loved ones because of a mentally unstable person that could have been stopped.
ReplyDeleteJust to be a bit provocative: isn't the whole tendency to say "how can this possibly happen"? Just a way of expressing an anxiety about addressing the issues that could potentially resolve such problems? In other words, we reserve the lamentation "oh how could this happen?" for those issues that we know to be very politically charged, and it becomes a safe way of addressing them and expressing sympathy while saying "but of course I won't actually do anything."
ReplyDeleteMaybe we need less sympathy here? Or maybe this is a case where sympathy actually represents something like its opposite, an unwillingness to actually consider the plight of the victims? Thoughts?