I really would like you to read the post below (New York Times Hates Women, Part II) right after reading this one, to get the flavor of Roiphe's arguments the way I got them, having followed this story:
The gunman who killed five people during a shooting rampage in Finland apparently chose his victims, police said Friday.
Chief investigator Esa Gronlund of the National Bureau of Investigation told reporters that a preliminary investigation has indicated that Ibrahim Shkupolli's method of shooting the five Finns, most of them at a shopping mall in the town of Espoo, suggest that he had planned Thursday's slayings, though the investigator declined to provide details.
The 43-year-old Shkupolli, an ethnic Albanian immigrant from Kosovo, committed suicide after his attack.
Investigator Henrik Niklander said police are examining the relationship between Shkupolli and the people he gunned down in Espoo, which is a few miles (kilometers) outside the Finnish capital, Helsinki.
"The fact all victims were employees of the (same) Prisma store seems to indicate that we're not dealing with a coincidence," Niklander told The Associated Press.
Previously police had been reluctant to speculate whether the killer fired his handgun randomly in the Sello mall in Espoo, Finland's second biggest city, or if he had chosen his victims.
Four of those slain - three men and one woman - were working in the Prisma grocery store when they were shot. The fifth victim - Shkupolli's former Finnish girlfriend - had been an employee at the same store, though she was found dead in a nearby apartment. She had won a restraining order against Shkupolli, who allegedly had stalked her for years.
Then you get the fear of more xenophobia, as a consequence of this crime (which started with the slaying of the girlfriend/wife (sources differ on this):
Driton Nushi, a Kosovar Albanian community leader in Finland, said he hoped the public won't misunderstand the crime.
"Do they take it as an individual case or do they think wrongly - as some of them already do - that all the foreigners are behind this?" Nushi said in an interview with Associated Press Television.
"It's only an individual, a family case, a crime of passion. Nothing else, nothing more," Nushi said.
Nushi's point about xenophobia is valid, but his point about a crime of passion??? It's sorta all right to kill women and the people who had supported them against the stalker? Or at least quite understandable?
Let's have a closer look at that crime of passion:
Some media sites are now reporting that Shkupolli first killed his former girlfriend, a 42-year-old Finnish woman.
She is also believed to be the gunman's principal target and the turbulent relationship between Shkupolli and the woman is thought to be the key to the carnage that took place at the large Sello shopping mall on the morning of New Year's Eve.
...
Also unconfirmed are the claims from the Nelonen TV-channel that the ex-girlfriend was stabbed to death, although police did concur that the killing was carried out with great brutality.
Emphases mine. Note how we move from a passive depiction of the relationship as "turbulent" to a guy killing five people, one with "great brutality"?
But at least it wasn't terrorism! So we can all sigh with relief, right?