Tag: shooting
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Two Killed and Seven, Including Suspect, Injured in FSU Shooting
One suspect has been taken into custody after a shooting that left two victims dead and six injured at Florida State University’s student union on Thursday, law enforcement officials said in a press briefing.
The suspect, who was identified as Phoenix Ikner, a 20-year-old FSU student and the son of a school resource deputy with the Leon County Sheriff’s Department, has also been hospitalized. He was shot by police after he “did not comply with commands,” according to Tallahassee Police Department chief Lawrence E. Revell.
The two deceased victims were not students, Revell said, but he couldn’t share any other information about the victims’ identities.
FSU president Richard McCullough called this a “tragic day for Florida State University” at the briefing.
“We’re working to support the victims, the families and everyone affected,” he said.
FSU students and employees received an emergency notification at 12:02 p.m. to shelter in place due to an active shooter near the campus’s student union. According to Revell, FSU campus police arrived on the scene “almost immediately” after the shooting began just before noon. Other local law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Jacksonville field office and its Tallahassee suboffice, were involved in the response to the shooting. The Tallahassee police will lead the investigation.
Over three hours later, police notified the campus that they had “neutralized the threat” but asked the public to continue avoiding the student union and the surrounding area. Students were advised to remain indoors except to walk to their dorms or the designated reunification point.
Revell said the handgun Ikner used was his mother’s former service weapon. The suspect also had a shotgun with him, Revell said, but it was unclear if he had used it. Revell said the police did not yet know of any motive for the shooting and that Ikner had invoked his right not to speak with police.
At the press briefing, McCullough said he had just returned from visiting the victims in the hospital.
“Right now our top priority is safety and well-being for all the people on our campus,” he said.
One FSU junior, McKenzie Heeter, told NBC that the assailant shot at her with what she thought was a rifle as she was exiting the student union with her lunch just before noon, but he missed. He then returned to his car and retrieved a handgun and shot another individual, at which point Heeter began running away from the student union and back to her apartment.
“It was just me and like three other people that noticed at first, but we were walking in the opposite direction away from the union, so we started running. I just told everybody that I could see, stay away from campus,” she told NBC.
Another group of about 40 individuals avoided the shooter by locking themselves in a bowling alley in the student union’s basement, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Classes at FSU are canceled through Friday, and athletic events are canceled through the end of the weekend.
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Law professor challenges university after campus ‘shooting’ hypothetical changed in lesson plan
Those concerned that law schools are shying away from teaching some areas of law to avoid controversy just got more reasons to worry, this time courtesy of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and its absurd treatment of law professor Kenneth Lawson.
Lawson, an accomplished faculty member at UH, used a simple hypothetical to teach the idea of “transferred intent,” a legal concept invoked when a defendant intends to harm one person, but ends up harming a second person instead. As is common in law school, Lawson offered a hypothetical to convey this idea: Imagine if a dean at his institution tried to shoot another dean, missed, and hit Lawson instead.
Here’s a screenshot from part of his lesson:
Those who have been to law school will understand that using campus figures to illustrate hypotheticals is not at all unusual, and is intended to add a bit of levity and grounding to what can be pretty esoteric topics.
But when an anonymous student filed a complaint, calling the hypothetical “extremely disturbing” and citing the context of some shootings near the university’s campus, administrators summoned Lawson to a meeting near the end of last semester. Though they acknowledged he had not violated any university policy, they nevertheless mandated that he remove the thought experiment from a posted video of the class — or they would change it for him.
The ability of administrators to forcibly alter course materials is positively ripe for abuse.
Lawson hadn’t thought twice about including the example, and had been using the example for years, not simply because it wasn’t unusual but because the protections of academic freedom give faculty wide latitude in determining how to approach controversial or potentially difficult material. When Lawson refused to alter the video of his presentation, given that he had not violated any policy, and using the hypothetical was well within his academic freedom rights, administrators just went on the school’s online curriculum system, where faculty submit presentations, to make the changes themselves.
Remember: these changes were being made because, supposedly, some found a hypothetical of campus figures being shot to be disturbing. So this is what the administration came up with.
You will note that there is still a campus figure on that slide, and it’s the person who was (hypothetically) shot: Professor Lawson. Only the deans have been removed. It seems that at UH, some hypothetical victims are more equal than others.
There’s no denying that this is silly, and many will be tempted to chalk it up as just more campus craziness. But there’s a disturbing wrinkle here, which is that the ability of administrators to forcibly alter course materials is positively ripe for abuse. The university’s administrators have granted themselves unilateral authority to interfere with faculty teaching decisions, despite the fact that UH is a public institution bound by the First Amendment, which views academic freedom, which protects that right, as a “special concern.” If administrators can “memory hole” bits and pieces of curricula they don’t like, even when it violates no rule, where does it stop?
UH still has an opportunity to do the right thing. It’s easy, too — all it has to do is step back and let faculty teach, and save the video editing for film class.
FIRE wrote the university on Dec. 13, urging it to reverse course and restore Lawson’s original hypothetical. The university responded in early January, declining to substantively engage with our concerns or detail specific issues with our argument. Lawson, and all UH students, deserve better. As our second letter states:
FIRE’s concerns are only amplified by the fact that this alleged capitulation to sensitivity is occurring in a law school. To receive a proper education in the law, students will inevitably encounter difficult topics like sexual assault, homicide, physical assault, domestic violence, and may be faced in school and in their careers with descriptions of personal injuries far more graphic than those in Lawson’s hypothetical. Where do UH administrators draw the line regarding their interference in faculty instruction if they feel free to operate under a nebulous standard of protecting students from “disturbing and harmful” material?
Lawson has submitted a grievance about the situation, so UH still has an opportunity to do the right thing. It’s easy, too — all it has to do is step back and let faculty teach, and save the video editing for film class.
