Orlando Office Shooting: Jason Rodriquez Arrested for Shooting Six People

Just a day after the worst mass shooting on an American military base in history occurred at Fort Hood, Texas, Jason Rodriguez allegedly walked into the downtown Orlando offices of Reynolds Smith & Hills, an architecture/engineering firm where he once was employed, and opened fire, killing one and wounding at least five others. Orlando Police Chief Val Demings later told reporters that Jason Rodriguez had targeted the firm's offices on the eighth floor of the Gateway Center then fled to his mother's house, where he was apprehended by authorities. Demings said all those who were shot were employees of the firm.

Demings noted that Jason Rodriguez was arrested without incident. As he was being led away by officers, a reporter asked why he'd committed the shootings. Jason Rodriguez said, "They left me to rot."

Jason Rodriguez was dismissed from Reynolds Smith & Hills two years ago, a spokesman for the company told CNN, because of "performance issues."

Jason Rodriguez' office shooting spree occurred just a day after Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan walked into the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Center with two handguns blazing, killing 12 people at the time and wounding 31. Although the gunman was shot four times by a civilian policewoman, Sgt. Kimberly Munley, he survived and remains under heavy military guard. A psychiatrist specializing in combat stress, Nidal Malik Hasan was about to be deployed to Afghanistan and had voiced his concern with having to go to battle against fellow Muslims. The number of dead also rose to 13 as one of the severely wounded succumbed to their injuries.

One report indicates that a civilian passed Nidal Malik Hasan on his way into the Fort Hood Soldier Readiness Center and Hasan told them that he was not going to kill civilians.

Do the two incidents occurring a day apart signify anything of moment? Was the Fort Hood shootings a "tipping point," a point where something seems to catch on and grow proportionally or occur with more regularity? Such sociological phenomena does occur, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his book, The Tipping Point. It is where fads are born, where there seems to be a sudden flurry of airplanes crashing, where a sudden rash of multiple murders occurs in relatively short span. The phenomenon is characterized by the strange coincidence of timing, of like parameters, and of public awareness to the phenomenon.

The last mass shooting in the United States occurred on April 3, when 41-year-old Jiverly Wong walked into an immigration center and killed 11 people before shooting himself. There did not seem to be a tipping point effect in play before or after that incident (except there was a multiple police shooting in Pittsburgh the following day) but in the ensuing months, there seems to have been a disproportionate number of multiple killings. These seem to be mostly due to the current stressors of the economy, job situations, political unrest, and the added burden of being at war.

As a society, we can only hope that the Fort Hood shootings were not a tipping point, giving those whose stress points are near to a psychological break the impetus or the determination to act to find some form of balance through violence. We can hope that these two tragic incidents, coming as they did so close together, will remain isolated.

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Source:

CNN.com