Sam Thomas, a history professor at UAH, where Amy Bishop taught (he, like a number of people on that campus, knew her to be violently unstable before she began shooting), corrects one of the several destructive misintepretations of this event:
…[B]y linking Amy Bishop’s insanity to workplace frustration, [people] are implicitly pathologizing all women. If the shooting were simply an extreme reaction to a common frustration (as opposed to the most deadly spasm of violence from a severely unbalanced individual), the logical conclusion is that all women are capable of (or even prone to) this kind of violence. Given that, why in God’s name would I ever hire so unbalanced a creature as a woman?
February 25th, 2010 at 3:45PM
Let’s keep that logical corrective in mind the next time a pundit makes a generalization about male propensities to violence.
February 25th, 2010 at 7:06PM
I guess the non-sexist version is “Why would I ever hire a human, given their violent propensities.” And if your reaction is “Hmmm…”, you’ve missed the point.