I watched both videos; the station’s live broadcast as it happened, and the murderer’s mobile phone footage. In the second video, shot by the murderer, you could see him waving a gun within the eyesight of both Alison Parker and the interviewee, and yet, no one turns around or even looks at him.
A ‘disgruntled’ former employee standing next to the only three people around at 6 am waving a gun and no one looks?
I understand this was a TV interview and people mean to focus on keeping eye contact with their interlocutor, but he was clearly waving something.
Not that it would have changed much, but it could have been enough to warn the cameraman to at least try and do something.
I’m hoping that I’m just confused by the lack of a smiley and that you don’t actually believe this. Because if you do…
Obama has been in office for seven years now. In that time there have been so many gun deaths in the US that it is difficult for one to casually remember them all. I don’t have numbers handy but they are probably staggering and it would not surprise me if gun deaths in the past seven years are well in excess of the casualty count from 9/11.
Amidst this, people actually believe that somewhere in the President’s inner circle there are secret operations to cause mass casualty events which can then be blamed on America’s gun culture with an eye towards taking guns away from people who think they have a God-given right to them? Bill Clinton couldn’t get away with getting blowjobs in the Oval Office but Obama is planning and executing mass murder for political gain and no one knows about it? No one can prove this insidious socialist plot that has been in the works for seven years? You know for a fact that Obama is up to no good but even with all the guns and freedom that you still have left you can’t stop him? He’s just going to keep murdering and murdering and all you can do about it is rant on the internet? Weak. You don’t deserve your gun.
Can a mod please fix the title? The station is WDBJ, not WBDJ. I’ve no doubt it was a typo, but it’d be nice to have the correct call letters for the station.
I haven’t seen the videos and I’m not going to. But I’ve run camera for public access TV. Not only is it possible to go through a shoot without noticing something that someone off camera was doing; it’s perfectly possible to go through a shoot without a good memory of what the talent were saying.
The cameraman probably had headphones or an ear bud and could have been getting instructions from the van. He was thinking about keeping control of that square with the view in it. He was keeping focus, watching head room and lead room, controlling his pans and zooms to keep them smooth, watching the movement of the talent in a peripheral way to anticipate their future movements, and basically keeping all of his attention on one small, flat plane at one depth of field. Assuming the waving gun was within his view, it would have been outside of the plane of action and he would have learned long ago to ignore people in the background waving at the camera.
And you know how people acutally react to a gun, when they’re working, even one they see plainly? They just look at it. It’s not what they’re expecting and it takes awhile to switch mental gears. It’s completely out of context. If someone came up, quietly waving a gun, while I was typing an email, I’d say ‘hold on, I’m almost done.’ And I’d keep typing.
That’s not really a fair comparison, because 9/11 was caused by Muslims, which makes it worse, and it involved a lot of property damage, which is more important than people damage.
Ah, but those 2,996 deaths on 9/11 all happened in a single day. That’s a rate of 1,093,540 deaths per year, or 16,403,100 deaths in the 15 years since it happened!!!
With those staggering figures, why haven’t we outlawed airplanes and tall buildings yet?!?!?
The Washington Post points out here that the US is averaging more than one mass shooting a day in 2015. August 26 was the 238th day of the year, and the two mass shootings that day – WDBJ in Virginia and one in Minneapolis – brought the total to 247 year-to-date.
Getting back to the OP from the politicized derail, another reason they may not have recognized the shooter is that he was fired from the station 2 1/2 years ago.