“It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims”

So today in the South Carolina news, a man killed his wife and her four children while they slept, and in the national news we have this story:

A lone gunman walked into a one-room schoolhouse in a largely Amish community in southeastern Pennsylvania today and shot as many as 10 girls, killing three immediately before turning the gun on himself and dying at the scene, according to the state police.

The man, identified as Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, who lived in the area, was evidently nursing a long-ago grievance expressed in notes left for his wife and children, said Jeffrey Miller, commissioner of the state police. He said the gunman lined the girls against the blackboard, bound their feet and shot them execution-style in the head.

“He split them up, males and females,” Commissioner Miller said. “He let the males go, some of the adults go. He bound the females at the blackboard, and apparently executed them.”

Three of the girls were dead at the scene in Nickel Mines, Pa., and seven others were rushed to nearby hospitals, some of them severely wounded. An earlier Associated Press report quoted a local coroner as saying there were six people dead, but the coroner later said he was unsure, The A.P. said.

Commissioner Miller told CNN this evening that of the several victims who had been taken to hospitals, two of the girls were in”dire”condition and might not live.

“There was some issue in the past”that had left the gunman with a desire to harm female students, Commissioner Miller said. He said that the murders were premeditated and that the gunman had called his wife : without telling her he was holding hostages in a school : that he would not be coming home.

Commissioner Miller said Mr. Roberts called his wife from a cell phone, saying he was “acting out in revenge for something that happened 20 years ago.”

“It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

The gunman released about 16 boys in the class, a pregnant teacher’s aide and three women with small children before the shooting, began, Commissioner Miller said. The principal teacher escaped at that time and ran to a nearby property to call 911.

The gunman, who was not Amish, evidently chose the small, private Amish school in Lancaster County about 55 miles west of Philadelphia because the security would be lax, Commissioner Miller said. …

As Heart recently wrote at Women’s Space/The Margins:

“Unfortunately as women, we have no nation, we have no police force, we have no military and so we cannot launch any war on this terrorism which is waged against us every day, every night, and has been for millennia. More unfortunately, these acts are not even recognized as terrorism. But that is precisely what these acts are. They are acts of terrorism intended to subjugate the people of women and to keep us enslaved, intimidated, silenced.”

Heart has many more accounts of violence specifically targeted against women at her blog. And in her recent book “Are Women Human?” Catharine MacKinnon’s essay entitled Women’s September 11 points out that roughly the same number of women are murdered in the U.S. by men as the total number of people who died in the WTC on September 11, 2001, but those killings provoke little if any coordinated reaction by the government, or sustained attention by the media.

–Ann Bartow