A depressed misogynist walks into an LA Fitness gym outside Pittsburgh, makes his was to the aerobics room, where they’re holding a “Latin Impact” class, fusses with his gym bag, pulls out some handguns, turns off the lights, and proceeds to shoot the helpless women.
My condolences go out to the victims.
As always, I find the reporting about these events… odd:
A gunman made “test runs” earlier in the day before he opened fire at a huge health club with as many as 100 people inside, killing three of them — including himself — and wounding several more on Tuesday night.
Wouldn’t anyone outside the journalist community say that he killed two women, wounded several more, and then killed himself? Including the killer in the count seems like an especially forced attempt at “objectivity”. (If the reporter isn’t including the killer in the count, then that sentence is terribly ambiguous.) Also, “several” seems vague.
The AP story is more specific; it says that he killed three women, wounded nine more, and then committed suicide. Police apparently collected 52 casings, implying that the whole situation could have been much, much more lethal.
Going back to the first story, it’s hard to trust any of the details when reporters clearly know nothing about guns:
Police said Sodini , 48, of Scott Township, used three guns with fully loaded clips to carry out what appeared to be a long-planned mission at LA Fitness in the Great Southern Shopping Center on Route 50/Washington Pike.Sodini walked in with the guns — two 9 mm semiautomatics and a .45-caliber revolver — hidden in his gym bag shortly before 8 p.m., then made his way to an aerobics room where at least 20 people were working out in a Latin Dance class, police said.
Witnesses told police that Sodini turned off the lights in the class, and the next thing they heard were gunshots. Three women were killed and nine were wounded with the two 9mm weapons before Sodini used the .45 to commit suicide, Moffatt said.
I suppose it’s pedantic to complain about clips — the correct term here is magazines — but why call out that they’re fully loaded? Wouldn’t any reasonable person assume that much? And, returning to the use of clips, the third gun was a revolver. I’m pretty sure it had no clip or magazine, fully loaded or otherwise.