DRUG WAR: 16 bodies found in northern Mexico graves

MONTERREY, Mexico - Mexican authorities found 16 bodies in three clandestine graves on the outskirts of Monterrey, an industrial city that has seen an upsurge in drug cartel-related violence, officials said Wednesday.

David Perales, spokesman for Nuevo Leon state's investigative agency, said the burial sites were located on an abandoned ranch in the township of Juarez, the same area where 51 bodies were found in mass graves in 2010.

The is no immediate information on the victims' identities or those of their killers, but authorities said previously the 2010 burials were probably carried out by a drug gang.

Many farmers and ranchers in the region have abandoned rural properties in the face of drug gang violence; cartels frequently take over the ranches to use them as operating bases, training grounds or clandestine burial sites.

Authorities said they went to the ranch outside Monterrey Tuesday after drug gang suspects revealed the burial sites during questioning.

They found 15 human skulls and other bones. The bodies appeared to have been buried there at least 8 months ago.

Further north in the border city of Piedras Negras, many parents kept their children home from school Wednesday following a fierce hour-long battle between gunmen and police. One female officer was killed and six people were wounded.

Tuesday night's shootout left an atmosphere of fear across the city of Piedras Negras, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas.

Authorities have not identified the gunmen involved in the attack.

Prosecutors in Coahuila state said one of the wounded police officers is in serious condition.

The attackers fled following the shootout, leaving behind a large quantity of weapons, including assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and grenade launchers.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_20129101/drug-war-16-bodies-found-northern-mexico-graves

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From the Washington Times

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Colleges find ways to foil pro-gun rulings

Policies make carrying tough

by Valerie Richardson

DENVER — Courts are ruling in favor of allowing those with concealed-carry permits to bring their handguns on campus, but universities are figuring out ways to keep the guns out.

Gun rights advocates recently notched major legal victories in Colorado and Oregon, with courts in both states agreeing that university policies banning firearms on campus must defer to state laws allowing permit holders to carry concealed handguns.

In response, however, university officials in Oregon and Virginia have enacted policies allowing concealed carry on campus but not in buildings, including classrooms, dormitories, event centers and dining halls.

The result is that permit holders may do little more than walk across campus with their handguns, an outcome that circumvents the intent of the court decisions, critics say.

Kurt Mueller, chief liaison for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, said the organization is considering whether to challenge the university policies in court.

"We have enormous practical concerns about this," Mr. Mueller said. "If you're a student, as a practical matter, what this means is you have to leave your handgun in your car. And a lot of states say you can't leave a handgun in your car, which means you have to leave it at home."

The Oregon Board of Higher Education lost the battle to keep its firearms ban in September, when the state Court of Appeals ruled that the state's Concealed Carry Act took precedence over the university's ban on firearms.

At the same time, the court ruled that the board has broad control over its property. At its March 2 meeting, the board voted to enact an Internal Policy on Firearms, which prohibits handguns in university buildings as well as at sports and entertainment events.

What's more, the policy prevents anyone who enters into a business relationship with the state universities from carrying guns on campus property. That would include students, employees, contractors and visitors who buy tickets to university-sponsored events.

That leaves almost nobody eligible, except visitors with no financial connection to the system's seven state universities. The board agreed to make exceptions for campus police, students in military programs such as the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, residents in non-campus housing, and those in hunting or shooting clubs.

"This new policy recognizes the need to maintain this conducive environment for students and the campus community, while recognizing legal and other requirements at the same time," the board said in a statement.

While the strategy appears to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the concealed-carry rulings, at least one court has upheld the approach.

In January, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld George Mason University's ban on handguns in buildings and events. However, a Virginia state law, not a university policy, prohibits the concealed carrying on campus.

Under Wisconsin's 2011 law allowing concealed carry, universities may prohibit permit holders from bringing firearms into campus buildings or events.

The next front in the battle over concealed carry on campus is Colorado, where the state Supreme Court ruled Monday that the University of Colorado's policy banning guns on its four campuses violated state law.

The university's Board of Regents is expected to discuss the ruling at its meeting next week.

"This is one of the discussions that I think they would have," university spokesman Ken McConnellogue said. "We have a ruling, now what does this mean for our campuses?"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/8/colleges-find-ways-to-foil-pro-gun-rulings/print/

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From Google News

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Gunman dead after killing 1, wounding others at Pittsburgh psychiatric clinic

A man armed with two semiautomatic handguns entered the lobby of a psychiatric clinic at the University of Pittsburgh on Thursday and opened fire, killing one person and wounding several others before he was shot dead, apparently by campus police, the mayor said.

Six people were wounded by the man's gunfire, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl said. A seventh suffered unspecified injuries but wasn't shot, officials said.

The mayor stopped short of confirming the gunman was fatally shot by at least one University of Pittsburgh police officer who responded. But he confirmed "police acted admirably and did engage in gunfire."

"There's no doubt that their swift response saved lives today," Ravenstahl said.

Shooting witness Gregory Brant said he was in a waiting room on the first floor of the clinic building when pandemonium broke out Thursday afternoon.

"We heard a bunch of yelling, some shooting, people yelling, `Hide! Hide!" he said. "Everyone's yelling, `Stay down!"'

Brant, 53, and six other people, including a young girl and her parents, barricaded themselves inside the waiting room. But he said they did not feel safe because there were doors with windows along adjacent walls.

"The way the room was arranged, if he (the gunman) had gone to either window and would have seen us in there, he could have done whatever he wanted," Brant said.

The group crouched in a corner, hoping the gunman wouldn't see them as he went past, Brant said. The men in the group decided on the spot that if the gunman entered the room, they would rush him.

"We were kind of sitting ducks," Brant said. "Luckily, he didn't see us in there, and we didn't make eye contact with him."

Brant estimated the ordeal lasted 15 or 20 minutes.

One of the injured was a police officer who the mayor said was grazed by a bullet. Officials didn't say if that officer shot the gunman, whose identity and relationship to the clinic, if any, weren't disclosed. The injured people included employees and a visitor, said Dr. Donald Yealy, chair of emergency medicine at the university's medical school.

A SWAT team was on the scene shortly after the shooting. A street was blocked off, and the area thronged with police. Most students are on spring break, though offices and buildings have been open.

Neighboring buildings were placed on lockdown for hours after the shooting, police said.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center spokesman Paul Wood said initial reports about a possible second gunman and a hostage situation at the clinic or at nearby UPMC Presbyterian hospital were unfounded.

UPMC and law enforcement officials declined to speculate on a motive for the shooting and said authorities were still sorting out which bullets from which guns inflicted which wounds.

The medical center said it was treating five patients, including two who had undergone surgery. Two others were treated and released. All were expected to survive.

The clinic, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, is located in the city's Oakland neighborhood, a couple of miles east of downtown, and is affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of several affiliated hospitals adjacent to the university campus. Other schools are nearby, including Carnegie Mellon, Carlow and Chatham universities.

Pete Finelli, who lives two blocks from the clinic and once worked there as a student nursing assistant, said security guards are always at the part of the building where it the shooting is believed to have occurred, on the ground floor.

Patient rooms are on the upper floors, he said, but anyone on the first floor would have to be someone being either admitted or discharged.

"The only place a person would be on the first floor is the emergency room," he said.

Pitt sent out email and text alerts shortly after 2 p.m. to warn people of the shooting.

"An active shooter has been identified at Western Psychiatric Institute. Several injured," the alert said. "Possible second actor in Western Psych. Lockdown recommended until further notice. If safe to do so, tell others of this message."

Lawton Snyder, executive director of Pitt's Eye and Ear Foundation, said he and two other staffers were locked down about a block away, in a building that connects to the clinic. He said it was unnerving.

"Obviously I'm terribly sad for those injured. We're just hoping everybody's OK and things are resolved quickly and that they can apprehend those who are responsible," he said.

Patient Kevin Bonner, who was staying on the building's ninth floor, several floors above the shooting scene, said there was a normal atmosphere there, with patients in the common room listening to music, watching TV, drinking and eating snacks. Bonner said no one at the hospital had told them what was going on.

He said he had been napping and awoke to hear an announcement on the intercom: "Bronze Alert on the first floor."

"I didn't think I was hearing my ears right until I looked out the window" and saw police cars and a sniper, he said.

The alert and lockdown ended Thursday evening, but the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center asked that people avoid the clinic while the investigation into the shooting continued. People were free to go when and where they pleased at the two network hospitals nearest the clinic, UPMC Presbyterian and UPMC Shadyside, which also had been locked down earlier in the day.

UPMC chief executive Jeffrey Romoff said the health network was "deeply, deeply saddened by today's events" and expressed "deepest sympathy to the victims and their families."

JOSEPH REISERT: Community, culture important in affecting individual behavior

by Joseph R. Reisert

James Q. Wilson, one of America's greatest social scientists, died on March 2. Though he was not well known to the general public, Wilson was at once an exemplary scholar and an extraordinary citizen, who both advanced our understanding of social problems and contributed mightily to their solution.

Wilson's most famous work is a 1982 article, co-authored with George Kelling and published in The Atlantic, titled "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety."

In that article, Wilson, a Harvard government professor, reports on the results of an experiment, conducted in Newark, N.J., to determine whether assigning more police officers to foot patrol duty would reduce the incidence of crime.

It didn't. Whether officers walked the streets or patrolled in their cars, crime rates during the studied period were about the same.

Wilson, however, noted that, though crime rates were immediately unchanged, the people in the neighborhoods where the police patrolled on foot felt much safer, and they reported much higher satisfaction with the police. What the neighborhood police presence established, Wilson saw, was a communal sense of public order.

In an unruly neighborhood, one has reason to fear being harassed by groups of delinquent teenagers, or by aggressive panhandlers, or drunks, addicts and vagrants. From the confines of an automobile, a police officer has only a limited ability to establish personal relationships with people in the community. And, though officers in squad cars can respond quickly to individual crimes, a vehicular police presence does little to promote public order.

When the police walk a beat, they learn who the residents and business owners are; they get to know which teens are going to school and which ones are likely to cause trouble. When the police are integrated within the community, they can prevent the social disorders that cause respectable citizens to fear going outside, and their visible presence also empowers the law-abiding to work cooperatively to sustain the social norms that promote public order in the community.

Wilson conjectured that, over the long run, the preservation of public order would drive down the rates of serious crime. It was, he wrote, well known that "if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." The unrepaired window sends a signal that no one cares about the property, which even otherwise respectable people can take as permission to keep breaking windows.

Likewise, other manifestations of unchecked social disorder express a kind of implicit permission to engage in bad behavior and seem to invite more serious criminal activity.

That conjecture has since been thoroughly tested, and community policing has proven extraordinarily successful.

As a result, crime rates in the United States have fallen sharply since the early 1980s, and our major cities have enjoyed a cultural and demographic revivial.

The key insight of Wilson's "Broken Windows" article -- "that the police ought to protct communities as well as individuals" -- echoes one of the principal themes in his whole body of work, namely that social scientists need to look beyond simple models that focus narrowly on the behavior of individuals, without taking into account contextual factors, such as social norms and community values.

It probably sounds obvious to argue, as Wilson has, that the most successful schools are those that foster a culture that values academic achievement and where the teachers seek to instill in their students the virtues of self-discipline and persistence by assigning regular homework and consistently praising those students who do well and correcting those who do not.

When Wilson's academic career began, however, scholars sought to understand human behavior with the same intellectual tools that have proved so effective in the natural sciences. They assumed people could be understood as little machines, individually responding to material incentives.

It eventually became clear that such a narrow focus on individual-level behavior made it impossible for scholars to solve the problems they were trying to solve.

Whether he was investigating the ways society might reduce the incidence of crime, or how to understand the operation of governmental bureaucracies, or how to improve school achievement, the hallmark of Wilson's approach was an open-minded, modest attention to the evidence. And that evidence led him to perceive the enduring significance of community and culture.

He also insisted, modestly and wisely, on how much more we still have to learn about politics and society. And his career reminds us how much we can learn from those who discover the right tools to study them.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American constitutional law and chairman of the department of government at Colby College in Waterville.

http://www.kjonline.com/opinion/columnists/community-culture-important-in-affecting-individual-behavior_2012-03-08.html

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