New Orleans Mother’s Day Parade Shooting
Have you noticed how little coverage there has been on the Sunday shooting at the Mother’s Day Parade in New Orleans in which 19 people were injured by an apparently lone gunman?
Is it because no one was killed?
Is it because public shootings are so common?
Or is it because the 19-year-old suspect, Akein Scott, does not appear to be a terrorist?
Kyle Nicholas Bruner
Yesterday I received the horrifying news that the son of my good high school friend Rick Bruner had been murdered. This was Rick’s message to his friends:
It is a very sad morning as I bid farewell to my son, Kyle Nicholas Bruner, 1st mate of the Yankee Clipper, age 33, sailor, poet, teacher, musician and rascal, who was shot and killed this day on a street in Nassau, Bahamas. He did the things he loved. He loved and was loved by many. He was at times exasperating and inspiring… charming and maddening. He loved the sea and it always called him back from where ever he might have seemed settled. We will miss him, but we won’t be alone in that.
Later in the day, we found out that Kyle had been shot while trying to protect two women who were being mugged.
As Rick put it, “It doesn’t make it any easier to handle, but it fits with the way he lived his life.”
Law & Disorder Book
Ever since John Douglas and I began writing Law & Disorder, we have been decrying the cognitive biases that get in the way of justice, victimizing the innocent and revictimizing survivors. The main reason Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in Italy and the West Memphis Three in Arkansas were convicted of murders they clearly did not commit, and Patricia and John Ramsey in Colorado were convicted in the high court of media and public opinion, is because of one main factor: Their “guilt” conformed to a pre-existing bias and world view that created a “better” story than what actually happened.
In Law & Disorder, we quote from Thinking Fast and Slow, the brilliant recent book by psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman: ”When people believe a conclusion to be true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.”
At an awards ceremony I attended for Dr. Kahneman last evening in Washington, D.C., my friend and colleague Dr. Gerald Kauvar introduced and lauded the honoree with a more-than-hundred-year-old citation that I immediately realized sums up our Law & Disorder thesis as well as anything I have heard.
Click to Purchase
Today is the official publication date of Amanda Knox’s memoir, Waiting to be Heard. Our readers know we devoted considerable attention and space in our current book, Law & Disorder, to analysis and interpretation of the investigation and trial of Ms. Knox in Perugia, Italy, for the brutal murder of her flatmate, British college student Meredith Kercher. Perusing the Amazon.com page on Amanda’s book, I was reminded once again why her case remains so important.
Bombs vs Bullets
New Yorker writer John Cassidy has posted a fascinating, provocative and important piece on the magazine’s website, entitled, “What If the Tsarnaevs Had Been the ‘Boston shooters’?” He posits that had the Boston Marathon bombers used assault rifles instead of homemade bombs, killing even more innocent people than they did, the law enforcement and public reaction would have been completely different. We would have considered the brothers “sociopaths and unbalanced post-adolescents” rather than “Islamic extremists.”
Mr. Cassidy goes on to sketch out how the perception of risk would have been completely different, something we have been talking about as recently as our last posting.
A serious analysis of the implications of this counterfactual premise can be enlightening.
John Douglas & Mark Olshaker
Book Signing March 2, 2013
Politics & Prose Bookstore
Washington DC
Photos by S.Hennigan
