February 15th, 2010
Workplace Murderer: Target or Bully?
The Feb. 12 Univ of Alabama-Huntsville campus shooting appears less likely to be the story of a revengeful target of mistreatment than it first appeared. Revelations keep coming about the history of aggression by the shooter, Amy Bishop Anderson.
When she was 21, she ended an argument with her younger brother with a fatal shotgun blast. She was not charged. Then, in 1993 when she was a researcher she feared a negative evaluation of her dissertation (which she had just submitted) by her supervisor, Paul Rosenberg. Mysteriously that supervisor received a pipe bomb in the mail shortly thereafter. She was questioned and then cleared by the ATF. Her current husband, with whom she has four children, was present in her life during the prior incidents.
She had been denied tenure and had repeatedly complained about it at department meetings prior to Feb. 12. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Dr. Setzer, the chemistry department chair, said he had heard from biology department colleagues in biology that there were concerns about her personality. In meetings, Setzer remembered, she would go off on “bizarre” rambles about topics not related to tasks at hand—”left-field kind of stuff.”
According to Boston Globe reporters, she was a freaky neighbor with a low tolerance of noise and children who frequently called the police on her neighbors.
Conclusion: as in most workplace homicides, it’s not the bullied targets who do the shooting, it’s an aggressive person with too little impulse control and access to weapons. An armed bully is a dangerous person.
Tags: Amy Bishop, homicide, shooting, UAH
This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 10:35 am and is filed under Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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