Who got shot at your uni today?

Or in Port Arthur I suppose.

Bloody heck. I know quite a few people who work / have classes in that building.

what is the whole story to this? i can find nothing on our side of the tasman.

There is no whole story yet. I'm at uni and the Menzies building is shut. I'm in the building next door which is still open but there's still police cars around and lots of people milling around on their mobile phone.

They say there's 2 dead and depending on the source,5, 8 or 10 injured. The gunman has been arrested and is at Glen Waverly Police Station but the police have revealed no details yet about either him or the victims other than that they and he were of Asian appearance.

Not very friendly.

not good toraneko, no.

I doubt any of my mates were at Uni on a Monday before lunchtime, so.

I was a few floors up in the same building when it happened. Really freaky stuff.

Oh shite, that must have been horrible. Did you get locked into the building? It sounds like it was all very confusing and scary.

No it was eerily undramatic actually. I was in a class on the eleventh floor, so we didn't hear the gun shots/screaming, but there were helicopters right outside our windows ten minutes later. We were making jokes that they'd stepped up the patrolling for illegal parking. Then I went to the toilet and while I was there got a call from my dad saying, "Are you okay? Apparently there's a sniper at Monash in the Menzies building." And I'm like, "Um, I'm *in* the Menzies building!" No-one had told us anything.

At the end of the class were able to leave the building (this was about twenty minutes after it happened, by which time they'd apprehended the gunman) but we couldn't get off at the sixth floor had we wanted to, and we had to give our details to police in order to get out.

The latest story seems to be that it was an unhinged 35-or-so yr old international student (most likely Malaysian, considering student demographics and physical reports) who, fed up with being laughed at for his poor English skills during an oral presentation (can you *believe* that? Then again, it was an economics class), simply opened fire with weapons he'd smuggled into the class on previous occasions. It's a pretty awful story on any number of levels. I just hope for the sake of any continued support for multiculturalism that he wasn't Islamic.

On the news they said the police were questioning his mum, which I took to imply that she lived at the same house as him in Clayton, so maybe he's not an overseas student?

But yeah, I agree, I hope he's not an Islamic Malay guy.

I thought heaps of Economics students were Asian with an accent! The guys he killed were Asian. Oh well - no point trying to find rational answer because it wasn't particularly rational behaviour.

It must have shook you up a bit when you found out.

I should add that this story might be totally BOGUS. The previous story I'd heard was that he wasn't a uni student but a religious nut, and chose that room because it was number 66 on the sixth floor. This got mixed up with rumours of it being anti-semitic because there's a Jewish reading room on the same floor.

What course do you do again Toraneko?

Dip Ed - (IT & Media Studies). I didn't know you were at Monash too. What course are you doing?

Jeez Louise -- glad to hear none of you folks were caught up in that, but ick.

I've always thought college campuses anywhere are breeding grounds for people who get so wound up they eventually go supernova. This might be why I left grad school. ;-)

i'm really glad neither of you were hurt. take care of yourselves, ilx famile...

It would have been funnier if you had all been shot dead, according to some ILXers on another thread...

story re this on NPR (liberal us public radio) this morning went like this, almost literally:

"there was a shooting at an aussie uni this morning. the shooter is asian. there are many asians in australia."

WATCH OUT AUSSIES HERE COMES MASSED ARMED ASIAN REVOLT!!! (?????)

(g. maybe you should go for a walk in the sunshine or something.)

i think i will, to bad it's lousy out.

which thread are you referring to g?

i'm also glad to hear y'all are okay.

"I didn't know you were at Monash too. What course are you doing?"

Arts/Law. Ha ha there was a Commerce/Law student who rang up ABC radio yesterday and, though he hadn't been at uni and didn't know anyone involved, talked about how he was juggling between giving up his degree out of fear of returning, or "standing up for freedom" and returning to uni (but advocation a "limitation on freedom in order to save freedom"). I hate post-September 11 bullshit-mongering.

Thanks to all the well-wishers.

yes i am glad you are ok, melbournites.

I take it that the radio station forgot to mention that the victims were Asian too?

I don't think he was suggesting that this was an attack against Australian WASPS, it was just the whole "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" meaningless patriotism way of suggesting that we should have metal detectors and security guards everywhere. Which is ridiculously impractical, but I find the idea a lot less offensive than the manner in which he expressed it.

Oops, sorry Tim, I was replying to ch.'s quote
"there was a shooting at an aussie uni this morning. the shooter is asian. there are many asians in australia."

With regard to your Commerce/Law friend, the NUS made equally bizarre statements - did you hear about them?

Well hopefully this won't turn out as bad as McGill. I don't even want to think about that.

My mistake, the University of Montreal engineering school, not McGill.

Ooh no tell me what NUS said!?!

If your NUS is anything like our NUS bizarre statements are par for the course.

Oh damn, it doesn't seem to exist anymore. On the website for either The Age or The Herald Sun yesterday there was an article with an NUS person where they went off their head blaming Howard for the Monash shooting because his govenment has made uni so stressful for so many students with them having to work 2 or 3 part-time jobs to support themselves. It was really bizaree and I'm not surprised it can't be found any more. It's not on LexisNexis either.