Shoot

I suppose at some point some of you expect me to blog about this. For those that know me in real life, you know why I might be inclined to write about this. And for those of you that don't, I'm going to try to make this short and to the point. I don't have a lot to say. I was less than 10 minutes away from the University at the moment the mass murders occurred. The following is what I have to say about this whole thing. Any facts that I get wrong, are purely accidental.



In 1986, Amy Bishop, a 19-year-old Massachusetts radical feminist, hardcore leftist and daughter of a woman on the police policy review board, flew into a rage, grabbed the family shotgun and fired it into the ceiling, then the wall, and then into the chest of her younger brother, killing him. After murdering her violinist brother in cold blood, she ran down the street aiming the shotgun at passing cars and demanding that they stop. No one did, so she ran into a car dealership, aimed the gun at the mechanics working there and lied, "I'm running from my abusive husband. He's going to kill me. Give me a car or I'll kill you." The mechanics stood in shock, not responding, so she rifled through the cabinet where the keys were kept, grabbed some keys, and ran out onto the lot to find a car. The police arrived, took the gun from her and arrested her.

That night, the chief of police, a business associate of Amy Bishop's politically connected and socially 'progressive' mother, called the station and ordered that Amy be released without being charged. No satisfactory explanation was ever given for why this was done.

11 days later, nearly 2 weeks after the murder, police went to the Bishop home to ask for an explanation as to what happened. They were told Amy fired the shotgun "by accident" and did not mean to kill her young, quiet, very talented violinist-playing brother. Nothing more was ever asked and no charges were ever filed.

A few years later, while Amy was at Harvard working on her doctorate, a Jewish professor who had been particularly critical of Amy's work received a fully functional bomb in the mail. He only partially opened the deadly package before realizing what it was and calling the police. The bomb did not explode and was disarmed by the police. No one was ever charged, but Amy Bishop and her husband were suspects and were both questioned about the bombing.

While still in Massachusetts, during the period Amy was working on her doctorate, Amy entered an International House of Pancakes with her husband and child. She demanded a booster seat for her child, but was told that a woman had just taken the last one. The waitress pointed to the woman as she said this. Amy stormed over to the woman, whose child was sitting in the seat, screamed and cursed at her, "I'm Amy Bishop from Harvard!" Then she punched the woman in the head.

The woman filed charges against the apparently insane and raving Amy Bishop, but the judge refused to punish Amy for reasons never explained. Amy was let go and her record expunged after only 6 months, a relatively unheard of action considering the violent and unprovoked nature of her offense.



I'm Amy Bishop, bitch!
Amy Bishop was hired to teach biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a well-known research-focused college with close ties to NASA and U.S. Army Missile Command. Amy was not a very popular professor, nor considered overly talented by most of her students. The one thing students most noted about her was how often she bragged that she had attended Harvard. It was almost as if she couldn't teach an entire class period without reminding everyone of this fact. Nevertheless, it did nothing to improve her teaching, which was apparently not especially good.

Amy applied for tenure, but was denied. She appealed, and was again denied. She responded to the second denial by pulling out a handgun and shooting Gopi K. Podila, chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, in the head. She then coldly and without emotion went down the length of the conference table shooting professors Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson in the head. After shooting 6 professors she pointed the gun at a 7th and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed.

Harvard-educated Amy Bishop had bought a cheap, shitty gun.

Before she could clear the jam and continue the massacre, the woman she had been trying to shoot, along with the other still uninjured professors, shoved Amy out the conference room door and slammed it shut. All of the professors then began jamming furniture up against the door to prevent Amy from shooting her way back inside.

Amy, meanwhile, went downstairs to the ladies bathroom, hid the gun, and then casually telephoned her husband to come and pick her up from work, just like she did everyday.

When her husband arrived, he says Amy very calmly got into the car and acted perfectly normal, as if nothing at all had happened. He drove her home, where the police surrounded them and grabbed them both. Amy was taken to jail and her husband was questioned to determine what, if any, involvement he'd had in the murders. It was determined that he knew nothing about anything that his wife had done, and so he was released.

If Amy is convicted of the murders she committed and doesn't get off with some variation of the "I'm a victim, too" excuse, she could possibly be sentenced to death. This seems unlikely in light of the plethora of abuse excuses available to her and her attorneys, but for now it remains to be seen what sort of political hijinks and bullshit is going to affect in her trial. Already her lawyers have claimed that Amy can't remember the shooting, a typical bullshit claim made to reduce the severity of the charges. 

And that's all I have to say about that.

For now.


I'm Amy Bishop from Harvard, dammit!

So there you have it.