Newsletter: Opinion: Ho hum, another college shooting in America

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, The Times’ letters editor, and it is Saturday, June 4, 2016. The first of three Copa America soccer matches at the Rose Bowl (capacity: 93,000) in Pasadena over the next several days takes place at 7 p.m., so adjust your driving plans accordingly.

Here’s a look back at the week in Opinion.

Two people — one a respected engineering professor, the other a former doctoral student who turned his gun on himself — were killed at UCLA Wednesday, prompting a massive response by law enforcement and a campus-wide lockdown out of fear that another mass shooting was unfolding.

Thankfully, that was not the case.

Thankfully — this has become our reaction in a society so numbed by gun violence that the premature deaths of two individuals (plus one in Minnesota, it would reported later) merit a collective shrug. The Times’ editorial board had this to say about the response to Wednesday’s shooting:

The call came from the UCLA campus just before 10 a.m. — someone had opened fire with a gun. “Active shooter,” and the warning went out for those on campus to shelter in place. Where was it? The Engineering 4 building.

Police arrived in waves, along with firefighters and other emergency responders. The Los Angeles Police Department went on citywide tactical alert, the better to marshal resources, as television showed students being escorted to safety, hands on their heads, by officers in tactical gear.

And then the wait. What had happened? Was there still someone with a gun? Was it still dangerous? Was this going to be another horrific scene of of violence, like that at Umpqua Community College in Oregon in October?

But there were no more bullets. No confirmed sightings of a man with a gun still at his deadly work. Something less dramatic, apparently, had occurred, something smaller in scope than the mass shootings we’ve become accustomed to.

The massive police and emergency response proved unnecessary, but there was no way the LAPD could have known that when the panicked call came in. And this is where we are — the anticipation that a shooting on a college campus was going to turn out to be a mass tragedy, and that a major city’s law enforcement response is geared up for that eventuality.

In this case, it was only two dead. Murder-suicide in a small office. And so America shrugs. Just another incident in the daily parade of gun violence that defines contemporary America. And so two families, and two circles of friends, and a community of students and faculty are left to their grief, and their confusion, and maybe a touch more fear than usual at the recognition that violence can and will strike so close to home.

» Click here to read more.

“I thought, ‘Not again,’ and, ‘Of course, again.’” Fred D’Aguiar was teaching at Virginia Tech in 2007 when a gunman killed 33 people including himself on campus; on Wednesday, he was a professor of English at UCLA when two more people were shot at killed at a university. He writes: “I found myself thinking that the university, a place of learning, should be hallowed ground, exempt from the rages and readiness of gun violence as a response to disappointment, hopelessness or psychosis. But of course it isn’t.” L.A. Times

Send your kids to study in America at their own risk. Ron Charach of Toronto, a physician and frequent letter writer, takes a dim view of a society that “elevates individual gun rights above the safety and sanctity of public spaces.” He advises Canadians and Europeans to “think twice about sending their students to campuses that are too easily impacted by the sheer ubiquity of firearms in the communities that surround them.” L.A. Times

Creating good schools is hard, even for Bill Gates. Several aborted, expensive attempts to remake public schools using novel experiments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s money haven’t worked as planned. It’s nice to see the foundation recognize that, says The Times’ editorial board. Perhaps we should stop taking the education prescriptions of the super-rich as expert advice simply because they have a lot of money. L.A. Times

Democrats abroad love Bernie Sanders. His policy proposals that strike many stateside Americans as too utopian — single-payer healthcare and free college, to name a few — are simply common sense in the countries that thousands of expatriates call home, writes Susan Neiman, who lives in Germany. L.A. Times

Metro is riding high and wants more money. It can convince voters to tax themselves more only if it assures them that their money won’t be siphoned off for non-transit projects, writes the L.A. Daily News’ editorial board. It wants Metro to include lock in language that guarantees funding for a list of specific projects in the Measure R2 sales tax initiative. L.A. Daily News

Hey, Republicans: Don’t endorse Donald Trump. Just because there’s an R after your name doesn’t oblige you (cough, Paul Ryan, cough) to endorse the manifestly unqualified Republican Party nominee for president, says The Times’ editorial board: “Deference to the voters’ wishes certainly should be the rule; but an exception is necessary when the prevailing candidate is as problematic and poisonous as Trump.” L.A. Times

College kids should play the long game and major in history. There’s a troubling decline in the percentage of undergraduates who study the humanities, including history, in favor of the more job-friendly STEM fields, writes historian James Grossman. But over the long term, the financial prospects for history graduates look good. Plus, the world needs people with sharp critical thinking and communication skills: “To think historically is to recognize that all problems, all situations, all institutions exist in contexts that must be understood before informed decisions can be made.” L.A. Times

Reach me at paul.thornton@latimes.com.