http://www.king5.com/topstories/stories/NW...K.15720564.html

BREAKING NEWS: Eight injured in Tacoma Mall shooting
02:59 PM PST on Sunday, November 20, 2005

KING5.com

TACOMA - Eight people have been injured in a shooting at the Tacoma Mall and the number of injured may go up.

The gunman is believed to be holed up inside a Sam Goody music store and may have hostages.

Five people have been transported to the hospital and a total of eight were injured according to the Tacoma Fire Department.

A spokesman at Tacoma General Hospital said one person had arrived in critical condition and two more were in satisfactory condition at Allenmore Hospital, also in Tacoma. He did not say what type of injuries they were suffering from.

At the same time, people evacuated from the mall have been ushered away from the area because of a possible suspicious package

3: 01 pm.

A record store employee said he's being held hostage after gunfire erupted inside a busy shopping mall,
leaving at least six people injured.

"We're being held hostage," said Joe Hudson, who answered the phone and identified himself to The Associated Press as an employee
at a Sam Goody store inside the Tacoma Mall.

Hudson said little else, but could be heard telling someone that he was talking to the AP. Then he hung up.

2:58 p.m.

The 38th Street offramp is closed and I-5 is backed up near the mall.



12:45 p.m.

Numerous callers into KING 5 described the scene.

Shopper Dick Waldo said he saw a person running by and shooting as he ran.

“An individual had just come running through a cross section and I heard some fire so I just told everybody to drop,” Waldo said, “And then the individual started running toward the other end of the mall.”

“Chaos just happened,” Waldo said as the shots were being fired.

Waldo said he thought at least one person was hit and within an hour, police could be seen rushing a person out of the mall on a stretcher toward a waiting paramedic unit.

Mall employee Rebecca Lawson was outside the mall in the parking lot when the incident occurred shortly around 12:15 p.m. and said a colleague told her that she had heard 10 shots fired in the area outside the food court.

Other witnesses described as few as five or as many as 18 shots fired. Many described a gunman using some sort of semi-automatic style weapon.

Lawson said that police appeared to be evacuating the stores in the mall one by one.

Undoubtedly no one will believe me when I say that this type of tragedy -- and so many other types of tragedies -- would not be occurring were it not for the powermongering and dark practices of the GOP that controls us.

Very few Internet forum members seem to think I have anything of value to say lately, however I'll say it anyway.

But it would take page after page to explain what I feel I understand, and some of it is hard for me to grasp with words that make it clear so that you will understand too.

There's a wealth of psychological effects in play here that lead to such tragedies.

Our nation lives in fear and many Americans are traumatized. Many live without hope. Many see no reason to live any longer. Many have unleashed their anger and their hatred that could have stayed in check were the situation in our country not as it is. Many have lost everything -- and not just in hurricanes -- and see nothing in their future. We are becoming slaves. All of us.

And then there are the terrorists here in the USA, but BushWorld tells you they don't exist.

That's a rough outline.

But it is not too late and we can save our country.

I value your input, MushroomCloud, so I hope you won't feel so discouraged about posting here!

Anyway, I agree with some of what you say. What I found odd is the "suspicious package" report. I bet it will come out, if we follow the story, that there is no suspicious package, per se. It seems the media, as if by consensus, is throwing out the phrase "suspicious package" every chance they get. Why? Well, who really follows these stories through? Often, the "suspicious package" ends up being a suitcase left behind, toy parts, etc.

Why would the media be trying to scare us all the time? Well, that's been answered already over a hundred times on this forum!

I won't be surprised in the least if the hostage taker ends up being someone who slipped through the cracks and didn‘t get the mental health help they‘ve needed for years....and with the huge budget cuts for social services during W's administration we will probably see more of this kind of thing instead of less.

Mushroom Cloud, I think you are correct, although I might express it a little differently... Here is a post I made at another site recently (ironically in a thread about whether the police in the UK should be allowed to carry guns).

"Another element that must be looked at.. hinted at above... is the issue of fear as a mental/bodily/emotional experience... what it is, what it does, what it tells you, and how to manage it... and this is important, not just for those individuals charged with securing our society, but also for the society itself.

We have been lead to a state of hypervigilance ... We are filled with fear. We are told it is "us" against "them". We are told to expect the next wave, or attack... which generates tremendous personal stress... which generates disease and dis-ease... and we aren't well-prepared to understand it or counter it (see Herbert Benson's work on The Relaxation Response and The Break-Out Principle).

... or read The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba.

Maybe through these and other new understandings that are emerging from the cognitive sciences, spirituality, management, leadership., the arts etc., we can actually counter-act what appear to be downward-spiraling trends in social change, and get them moving back upward to a higher and self-generating level of personal, social and international harmony. Such is The Art of Possibility."



So, yes, we have disempowered millions, and don't provide adequate basic services to many... and then we flood their brains with commercials that suggest they are failures as humans, if only because they can't afford that which is being advertised... and we fill their media with nonsense .. and we make stressor agents widely available (often under the guise of entertainment), and we disingenuously and derogatorily rant about that which might actually lend help, and we fail to teach in our classrooms and our culture that which will help.

And then why wonder why someone goes off in an amygdalic-driven rage...

I agree with both of you, and thanks Magmak for adding some intelligence to my garbled ideas.

About the "suspicious package," is that suppposed to make us believe in bombs or bugs? I think bugs, due to the fact that a new smallpox and a new anthrax vaccine is in the works. I cannot (yeah, right) imagine who will get the vaccine and who will not, once they're fully available.

I think eventually the intent is to get rid of a whole lot of people that the powerhungry would rather not feed or be bothered with, leaving a diminished population whose duty is to serve and keep everything running smoothly for a pittance.

Or else I'm just paranoid.

I'd have to admit, that one sounds a little paranoid--and take it from one who is!

I may be wrong...but I'd bet
he thinks it was his wife, his job or his insurance
that sent him over the line. Assuming it
was a "him" as 99.9% of these things are.
Otherwise he'd be talking with the media now.

Women usually turn it inward.

No mention of the "suspicious package." But, it seems to have ended.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051121/ap_on_...s/mall_shooting

Suspect Arrested in Wash. State Shootings



By RACHEL LA CORTE, Associated Press Writer 10 minutes ago

TACOMA, Wash. - A gunman opened fire inside a busy shopping mall Sunday, wounding several people in the halls and taking three people hostage in a music store before police arrested him, authorities said.

Witnesses described hearing a noise and then seeing a man walking backward through the mall, firing.

At least six people were injured, one critically, as shoppers and store clerks scrambled for cover.

Tacoma Police spokesman Mark Fulghum said the suspect, arrested about four hours after the shooting began, was a young man but he had no other details about him or his possible motives.

Police were interviewing the victims and hostages, he said.

While the suspect was still inside the Sam Goody music store, employee Joe Hudson was able to pick up the phone and say he and others had been taken hostage. Hudson said little more but could be hearing telling others that he was talking to The Associated Press.

Authorities got the call about 12:15 p.m. that shots had been fired inside the Tacoma Mall. The caller said there was a gunman, "He was in the mall, walking along, firing," Fulghum said.

State Patrol and police units from nearby agencies clustered around an entrance at the south end.

Inside the mall, Stacy Wilson, 29, of Bonney Lake, heard a popping noise and turned around.

"I saw the gunman randomly shooting. I ran with a group of women to Victoria's Secret," Wilson said. She said they crouched behind a wall in the store, and when the shooting stopped, an employee ran out and closed a security gate at the front.

Wilson said she heard 15 to 20 shots.

"He was walking backward and shooting. I couldn't see his face," she said. "Everyone was running and screaming."

Betz Dejarnatt, who works at the J.C. Penney store, said workers were herded into dressing rooms and offices, then police took them outside to a parking lot.

Six people were taken to hospitals, most with minor injuries, according to Tacoma Fire Department Deputy Chief John Lendosky. One person was in critical condition at Tacoma General Hospital, spokesman Todd Kelley said.

Sounds like good police work.
Too bad there wasn't an off-duty
cop beside him when he started.

OK, Indianhead gets it! Now for the rest of you, have you ever been shot at? If you haven't WTF makes you think you can rent a vowel much less buy a clue? Your ideology doesn't mean sh*t to the shooter or the victims, it is what it is.

I haven't been shot, but I've had a loaded gun pointed 2 inches from my face before. Does that count?

Yes. Violence like this has been happening seemingly randomly for some time, my point was trying to politicize it is not only counterproductive it's an insult to the victims.

The Emotional Virus Behind Hatred and Youth Violence (copyright 2005)

by Peter Michaelson ( http://www.petermichaelson.com/ )

High-school shootings and other forms of hatred and violence are due in part to self-hatred, a psychological condition that has been difficult for authorities to understand and accept. The teenage gunman Jeff Weise, who shoot and killed classmates and then himself in Red Lake, MN, in early 2005, revealed his emotional problem with hatred and self-hatred in his explorations and interest in Nazi websites.

From childhood all of us absorb some of our natural aggression, and this aggression is directed back at ourselves as inner aggression. In milder forms, it is experienced as self-doubt and self-criticism. In more self-defeating forms, it intensifies to self-negation, self-condemnation, self-rejection, or self-hatred.

A violent person isn't likely to be aware of the antagonistic relationship he has with himself. He convinces himself that somehow his targets are deserving of his hatred. But he is projecting his self-rejection and self-hatred on to others. To cover up his own self-hatred, he hates others for allegedly rejecting and hating him, or he simply hates them because his projected hatred is reflected off of them back to him.

Few people understand how this works. Most Americans, even the most educated among us, don't understand basic tenets of psychology such as projection, transference, resistance, and narcissism. When we don't see the behavioral and emotional consequences of these psychological dynamics in ourselves, we can't understand a social phenomenon such as random killings.

In the case of high-school shootings, students who have personality disorders can have a particularly difficult time regulating or moderating their negative reactions to feelings of being rejected or bullied by others. The negativity they feel coming at them from others fuels their own self-hatred, causing a more intense projection of that hatred outward to others.

Negativity runs high in young people with personality disorders or borderline personality disorders. A psychologist may need several hours of talk and testing with a child or adult to determine whether such a disorder exists. The behaviors of people afflicted with such disorders cannot be predicted with any certainty. Improved teaching of psychology in our schools would greatly help young people to manage their lives. Both emotionally stable and unstable students can benefit from a better understanding of psychology.

Our children need to be taught that bullying and hatred are reflections of one's own relationship with oneself. In hating others, a person is revealing the hatred or rejection he feels for himself. If a student begins to look inward with this understanding, he is in a position to recognize the ways in which he doesn't like himself, to understand that this dislike is irrational and emotional, based on unresolved emotional attachments and on his identification with a limited and painful sense of who he is. With the right knowledge he can start to break free from this condition.

In this process, we see the fallacy of blaming others for our emotional reactions and we are less likely to act out antagonistically or violently toward others.

Cliques are a fact of life in the nation's schools. Students use the clique's acceptance and validation to override their inner doubt and conflict. The left-out "losers" get to feel more intensely their non-acceptance, their self-rejection, and their perceived insignificance and worthlessness. The same dynamics are at work in students who become members of gangs or students who succumb to peer pressure to begin smoking.

It appears that our schools could do a better job of teaching kids how to get along with each other. When psychology classes are taught, the course material is simplistic and homogenized, and does not penetrate into the emotional plight of students trying desperately to come into harmony with themselves and others.

Confusion arises because many mental-health professionals, in not having penetrated their own inner depths, discount the influence of subconscious forces and describe violence as learned behavior. But how do we account for the fact that many abused children become respected citizens? Or that respected citizens can produce anti-social children? A violent society or violent parents can certainly have a negative influence on young people--but where does this violence originate?

When we are brave enough to face ourselves, we see our capacity for evil and violence in our human nature. As an example of our instinct to deny this, Luke Skywalker, in fright and disavowal, attacked the evil image of himself that he saw reflected as Darth Vader in the cave where Yoda sent him. Unless we take responsibility for this part of ourselves, we remain in denial, susceptible to its covert and dangerous impulses.

The dark side of our nature was previously kept more in check by influences such as religion, kinship, and a slower pace of life. Modern influences such as the availability and lethal power of firearms are thrusting upon us a need for greater self-understanding.