A bloody school rampage. Swat teams on campus. Lockdown. Dozens of ambulances. Shocked students, many crying. Questions of why and how come. A suspect taken into custody and clear indications of mental illness following shortly.
What was missing, however, in this terrible scene?
Following an attack on Tuesday against his fellow students by Dylan Quick, a 20-year old at Lone Star College in Texas, the two missing things from an otherwise all-too-familiar tragedy were these: a gun and, at least according to most reports Wednesday morning, a funeral announcement.
All of Quick's victims, despite a range of injuries not yet clear, will live.
As ABC News reports:
A 20-year-old college student who is accused of going on a stabbing spree at a Texas campus that left 14 people injured, allegedly told police he'd "had fantasies of stabbing people to death since he was in elementary school."
Dylan Andrew Quick, 20, faces three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and was ordered held on $100,000 bond on each charge.
"According to the statement the suspect voluntarily gave investigators, he has had fantasies of stabbing people to death since he was in elementary school. He also indicated that he has been planning this incident for some time," the Harris County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.
The stabbing frenzy was at Lone Star Community College System's Cy-Fair campus in Cypress, Texas, which is about 30 miles northwest of Houston.
Twelve of the injured people were taken to the hospital and two refused treatment. Of the dozen in the hospital, two are in critical condition and four are in fair condition, according to Harris County Sheriff Adrian Garcia.
The indications of Quick's mental illness may help explain his actions, but they also stress a point made in the ongoing debate about the role of gun violence in the U.S.
As was also made plain when a knife attack in China left 20 children injured but none dead on the same day that Adam Lanza killed a classroom full of children in Connecticut with a pair of semi-automatic guns last year, the role of the weapon employed makes an intrinsic difference to the amount of carnage a single person can accomplish within a short period of time.
In Texas on Tuesday, reports indicate that Quick was ultimately subdued by students and faculty who tackled him to the ground. No one was killed. No gun was found at the scene.
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