It's All Right There.....

....in the media following the murders at UAH.

The relentless Monday-morning quarterbacks (even though they mention the fallacy) imply that something ought to have been done back in the day when the woman killed her brother. This, flying in the face of a lack of any details, and that every official (the officials whose job it is) declined to pursue charges in the case. Somehow, the enormity of what this person has done last week appears to mean she should be retroactively charged with her brother's murder....and the fallacy involved in this is not discussed further, of course.

Some elderly official, maybe the DA or sheriff, is interviewed and pressured to say he thinks "-maybe it should have been followed up more." Did he think so at the time? Interview doesn't ask that question. Why does he think so now? Ditto. This trails off into a series of nulls.

Now an assault case from the interim has been unearthed, in which our UAH shooter pled guilty to a simple assault (Note: no shooting or murder involved here!), and which immediately segues into the presumed failure (and thus presumption of a liablity) of UAH in not pursuing a detailed background search on the woman.

Even more interesting is the talking heads nibbling around the edges of the notion that this individual's whole life formed a pattern. What kind of pattern? We can only assume that the discovery of her previous life would have kept her out of UAH, so that she never would have gunned down her tenure committee.

But what if she were condemned by her record to wiping merchandise across a laser at Dollar General? What if, one day, being unable to get 40 hours and benefits, she brings in a box of poison donuts and feeds them to her coworkers? Presumably the death of people with only high school diplomas would not be as devastating a loss to society as the profs at UAH. Backward reasoning is called "backward" for a reason.

It can be taken even further. Such a pattern is clearly grounds for segregating this individual from society. Think of the children, for God's sake!

The media has already stirred up enough nonsense in this case that I'll allow only a 50% chance that she'll get the needle, even though it's in Alabama, and it's what her actions merit. A judgment of non compos mentis or some other mental disability, hauled from the turgid pages of DSMV-IV-TR, is much more likely. Then the blame can always be placed on some shrink for not diagnosing her, or for her not going to a shrink in the first place.....