Piece Of Art

A bus dispatcher in northern China killed nine people and injured 11 others when he hijacked a company vehicle after a feud with his boss. The man, surnamed Zhang, got into a fight with his boss and injured him with a dagger before stealing the bus and driving away into the streets of the city of Tianjin, the official Xinhua news agency said. The 40-year-old motored through the streets, ramming into people and killing nine bystanders, the report said. Police dispatched dozens of police cars to the scene, and Zhang ran into three of them, injuring four policemen, before finally being caught. Authorities were investigating the case, the report said. Source: Monday, February 1, 2010, Geelong Advertiser , Australia.

The number of shooting incidents has increased dramatically in the USA since the Fort Hood incident. Whether the reasons are the copycat effect, behavior contagion, media reporting increase, or coincidence doesn't matter. It is happening and we are in the midst of a major cluster. Another shooting has occurred. On Tuesday, January 19, 2010, a gunman went on a "rampage" (as the media is terming it) in the Virginia, killing eight people and shooting a police helicopter taking part in a hunt for him, officials said. A 39-year-old man was believed to be surrounded early Wednesday after the shootings in a rural district near Appomattox (where the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee took place, ending the Civil War) in southern Virginia. Police confirmed that there were eight dead. The suspect, named as Christopher Speight, shot a helicopter that was called to the scene at least four times, forcing it to make an emergency landing, officials said. [Some of the first s...

Saipan will forever be remembered as the site of one of World War II's deadliest suicidal melodramas. Now a new incident has unfolded on the island, beginning and ending near those past cliffs of suicide. Saipan is often recalled as the setting where thousands of Japanese soldiers and local civilians jumped to their deaths from the island's cliffs as the American assault drew to a close in July 1944. As the battle of Saipan reached its final days, Japanese soldiers and panicked civilians made their way north to the cliffs. The civilians and soldiers leapt from the island's Marpi Point and other cliffs, dying on the rocks or drowning in the sea. Now a shooting spree that began near one of those points has ended in suicide near another of those same cliffs. A gunman went on a rampage on the Pacific resort island of Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on Friday, November 20, 2009, killing four people and wounding six others before fatally shooting himself, officials said. Publ...

I predicted an increasing build-up in copycat activity as the calendar ticks off days moving towards April 20, 2009, the tenth anniversary of Columbine. Here's the week that just was (click on the dates for full details): Saturday, March 27. A 23-year-old beheads his younger sister Bianca, 5, and kills Samantha Revelus, 17, at their home in Milton, Massachusetts. The killer is killed by police officers. Sunday, March 29. Seven patients and a nurse were killed during a Sunday morning shooting at a Carthage, North Carolina, nursing home. The 45-year-old man accused of carrying out the attack was shot by a police officer, and his condition "is currently unknown." Friday, April 3. A 41-year-old gunman barricaded the back door of a community center with his car and then opened fire on a room full of immigrants taking a citizenship class Friday, killing 13 people before dying by suicide, in Binghamton, New York. Saturday, April 4. The bodies of five children between the ages o...

Three incidents in eight months have involved a Palestinian construction worker using a heavy construction vehicle to go on a "rampage-style" attack in Israel. All three mirror the infamous Killdozer incident that occurred in Colorado in 2004. Two of the Israeli incidents occurred in July of 2008. On July 2, 2008, a Palestinian construction worker, Hussam Taysir Duwait, used a Caterpillar 966 front-end loader (incorrectly called a "bulldozer" in early media reports) in a deadly rampage in central Jerusalem on Jaffa Street. He used the construction vehicle to crush several cars and ram into buses and pedestrians, killing three people and injuring 45, before he was shot and killed by Israeli police. The identity of the man who shot the driver is an intriguing detail of the incident. At the point when the vehicle had stopped for the first time, three men had climbed up to the cabin: A 20-year old off-duty soldier from Jerusalem who had recently enlisted as an elite ...