Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

News & Supplemental  

Now, About those School Yard Shootings . . .

 

COMMENT: So, anoth­er lone nut has gone off and slaugh­tered a bunch of peo­ple in cold blood. With regard to the Con­necti­cut mas­sacre of 12/14/2012, we are not in a posi­tion to say if there is any­thing more to the sto­ry than we have been told.

(There were ini­tial reports of a sec­ond shoot­er. The shooter’s mother–owner of the firearms and one of the victims–was a “prepper”–the cur­rent term for “sur­vival­ist,” a para­mil­i­tary right-winger. That does NOT mean that there nec­es­sar­i­ly was more to this than we have been told. That is cer­tain­ly a pos­si­bil­i­ty that must be explored. In this con­text, one should note that none oth­er than Mark Fuhrman was FOX News’ in-house expert called upon to debunk the report that there was more than one shoot­er. As we have seen, there is a sig­nif­i­cant body of evi­dence point­ing to Mark Fuhrman’s prob­a­ble guilt in the O.J. Simp­son case. Head of a white-suprema­cist group with­in the LAPD, Fuhrman retired to Sand­point Ida­ho, an epi­cen­ter of the neo-Nazi move­ment in this coun­try.) 

What we can say is that the entire phe­nom­e­non has not been prop­er­ly ana­lyzed. 

(Before pro­ceed­ing, we should observe that two con­cepts that have almost become obso­lete and/or irrel­e­vant here in “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” are mind-con­trol and the agent-prova­ca­teur.

With our media estab­lish­ment hav­ing giv­ing itself over to the sen­sa­tion­al and the ultra-vio­lent, with so many young peo­ple play­ing vio­lent point-and-shoot video games, with so many peo­ple on drugs and with so many exam­ples to copy, it should­n’t be too sur­pris­ing that peo­ple are going off like this. Add in improp­er­ly-vet­ted psych drugs, behav­ior-alter­ing street drugs [which are epi­dem­ic] bad food [includ­ing gmo’s] and var­i­ous forms of elec­tro­mag­net­ic radi­a­tion, there are a num­ber of vari­ables that might or can affect human behav­ior.)

We note in pass­ing that there have been a num­ber of changes in the “human psy­cho­log­i­cal ecol­o­gy” in recent years. For exam­ple, there has been a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the inci­dence of autism in this coun­try. That has not been caused by assault weapons. The point in this con­text being that there have been envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors intro­duced into Amer­i­can soci­ety that are caus­ing sig­nif­i­cant changes in human behav­ior. These must be fac­tored in as we eval­u­ate the school shoot­ings.

We also note in pass­ing that these inci­dents spawn “copy-cats” who emu­late the behav­ior of the killers.

A very impor­tant and large­ly over­looked book On Killing by Lt. Colonel Dave Gross­man (a for­mer para­troop­er and Army Ranger who taught psy­chol­o­gy at West Point) makes some impor­tant points:

  • Colonel Gross­man express­es the view that the key vari­able in the ris­ing epi­dem­ic of gun vio­lence per­pe­trat­ed by rel­a­tive­ly young peo­ple is the point-and-shoot video games and high-body-count movies and TV pro­grams.
  • Colonel Gross­man sees those as close­ly repli­cat­ing the behav­ior mod­i­fi­ca­tion pro­grams employed by the Army to get a high­er per­cent­age of sol­diers to fire their weapons.
  • He notes that youth gangs have exist­ed for decades and that they had access to drugs and alco­hol and plen­ty of firepower–sawed off, pump-action shot­guns are very dead­ly and have been around a long time. Vir­tu­al­ly as effec­tive at close range as an assault rifle.

We would note that the pres­ence of firearms–including mil­i­tary-style assault rifles– is not the key vari­able in ana­lyz­ing this coun­try’s epi­dem­ic of gun vio­lence. In both Israel and Switzer­land, mil­i­tary reservists keep their selec­tive-fire mil­i­tary weapons in their homes and those coun­tries have a low lev­el of gun vio­lence. If the pres­ence of assault rifles alone was the key vari­able, those coun­tries would be expe­ri­enc­ing the same type of epi­dem­ic and they are not.

In past dis­cus­sion, we have not­ed an intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty con­nec­tion to the gun con­trol move­ment in the Unit­ed States, as well as influ­ence of the Third Reich’s gun con­trol laws on our own. Inter­est­ing­ly and sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the para­mil­i­tary right-wing has mobi­lized around its oppo­si­tion to gun con­trol, which it views (not entire­ly incor­rect­ly) as “gov­ern­ment sup­pres­sion.” It does­n’t occur to the denizens of the para­mil­i­tary right that they may well be pawns of that very gov­ern­ment.

It is impor­tant to remem­ber that the issue of gun con­trol is yet anoth­er con­sid­er­a­tion fur­ther sow­ing divi­sion and dis­sen­sion among Americans–something of great inter­est to the Under­ground Reich.

It is very impor­tant to note that some of the sup­pos­ed­ly ran­dom shoot­ings that have plagued Amer­i­ca have been the work of Nazis and White Suprema­cists.

Almost a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry ago, we ana­lyzed the Stock­ton school yard mas­sacre per­pe­trat­ed by Patrick Edward Pur­dy, who had lit­er­a­ture from the Aryan Nations and the Moon orga­ni­za­tion in his pos­ses­sion when he per­pe­trat­ed his act.  

You can lis­ten to both halves of the show (Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M55: “Pur­dy’s Last Stand”) here: 

http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_55a.mp3

http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_55b.mp3

We’ve also ana­lyzed the Lit­tle­ton, Col­orado mas­sacre at Columbine high school . Per­pe­trat­ed on Hitler’s Birth­day (the neo-Nazis love anniver­saries) there appears to have been much more to this than meets the eye.

An excerpt of the descrip­tion for FTR #150  reads: Intro­duc­tion: Teacher Al Wilder was dis­missed from Columbine in 1996 for show­ing his senior class on debate and log­ic excerpts of the Bernar­do Bertoluc­ci film 1900, an his­tor­i­cally and soci­o­log­i­cally pen­e­trat­ing look at the rise of fas­cism in Italy. Even­tu­ally rein­stated by the school board, Wilder was told that the film was “too con­tro­ver­sial” and con­tained vio­lent and sex­u­ally explic­it con­tent. The con­tro­versy drew the atten­tion of major film direc­tors such as Mar­tin Scorcese and Milos For­man. Bertoluc­ci him­self tes­ti­fied via tele­phone on behalf of Wilder. Not­ing that a deci­sion to sus­tain Wilder’s sus­pen­sion would pro­pel the U.S. down the road to “amne­sia,” Bertoluc­ci voiced dis­may at the depar­ture from tra­di­tional Amer­i­can val­ues con­sti­tuted by Wilder’s dis­missal.

The pro­gram presents the pos­si­bil­ity that Nazi ele­ments (inside and/or out­side of gov­ern­ment) may have tar­geted Columbine High because of the con­tro­versy over 1900 (the film is anti-fas­cist). Attempts by the right to cen­sor the cur­ric­ula of schools have been increas­ing in recent years. The shoot­ing focused nation­al debate on the issues of cen­sor­ship of the media and video games (blamed for the mas­sacre by some observers), as well as gun con­trol.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: indi­ca­tions that the two gun­men may have had help; the curi­ous behav­ior of the police in the case; com­par­isons to Patrick Edward Pur­dy (see Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M55), anoth­er “school shoot­er” with Nazi incli­na­tions; the film Har­ris and Kle­bold made for a class, direct­ly fore­shad­ow­ing their killing spree (they were not able to show the film because of its vio­lent con­tent) . . .”

On the same day as the New­town shoot­ings, anoth­er, sim­i­lar inci­dent appears to have been exe­cut­ed by a mem­ber of a white suprema­cist bik­er gang–The Invaders.

“Indi­ana man Who Threat­ened to Kill Stu­dents Had 47 Guns, Police Say” by Wes­ley Low­ery; Los Ange­les Times; 12/16/2012. 

EXCERPT: Police in Indi­ana said they found a stock­pile of 47 guns hid­den through­out the home of a man who had threat­ened to set fire to his wife and then walk to a near­by ele­men­tary school and “kill as many peo­ple as he could.”

Von I. Mey­er, 60, was arrest­ed at his Cedar Lake home Sat­ur­day after­noon on sus­pi­cion of felony intim­i­da­tion, resist­ing arrest and domes­tic bat­tery.

Police in Cedar Lake, less than 100 miles from Chica­go, said they were called to the man’s home ear­ly Fri­day after he threat­ened to kill his wife and open fire at Jane Ball Ele­men­tary School, locat­ed less than 1,000 feet from his home and con­nect­ed by a series of trails through a wood­en area.

The threat came the same day 26 peo­ple, includ­ing 20 stu­dents, were shot and killed by a gun­man at an ele­men­tary school in New­town, Conn.

Police iden­ti­fied Mey­er as a mem­ber of a local motor­cy­cle gang, the Invaders, and said his arse­nal was hid­den through­out his two-sto­ry home. . . .

“The Blot­ter: August 2008” South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter; Intel­li­gence Report; Fall 2008 [Issue Num­ber  131].

EXCERPT: . . . . More than 30 mem­bers and asso­ciates of the Invaders Motor­cy­cle Club, a white suprema­cist gang found­ed in 1965 in Gary, Ind., were arrest­ed on drug traf­fick­ing charges dur­ing raids through­out North­west Indi­ana, Mis­souri and Col­orado. DEA agents seized chem­i­cals used to make metham­phet­a­mine, 35 firearms, and para­pher­na­lia bear­ing the gang’s logo — a swasti­ka with “SS” light­ning bolts. . . .

COMMENT: As incred­i­ble as it may seem to some, there are ele­ments of the Nazi and fas­cist move­ments that see these “lone-wolf” mass killings as vehi­cles for desta­bi­liz­ing soci­ety. In the Nazi tract Siege by James Mason, the efforts of some of these mass killers are laud­ed. The bold-faced excerpts in the pas­sage that fol­lows high­light the phi­los­o­phy and motive appar­ent­ly under­ly­ing the endorse­ment of such slaugh­ter.

“How Black is Black Met­al?” by Kevin Coogan; Hitlist; February/March 1999 [Vol­ume One, Num­ber One].

EXCERPT: . . . . One year lat­er, [Michael] Moyni­han was more pre­oc­cu­pied by lit­er­ary than legal mat­ters. His Den­ver-based Storm Press pub­lished Siege, a 400-page anthol­o­gy of the writ­ings of James Mason, the Nazi fan of Charles Man­son. In his acknowl­edg­ments, Moyni­han (“Michael M. Jenk­ins”) thanked (among oth­ers) both Adam Par­frey and Anton LaVey • for their help in facil­i­tat­ing Siege’s pub­li­ca­tion.

Mason argued in Siege that Nation­al Social­ism had lost its vio­lent, rev­o­lu­tion­ary edge. “We want to see crime and chaos rise to such a degree where the Sys­tem becomes no longer viable and falls apart,” he wrote. In a tract called “Smash­ing the Pig Sys­tem,” he growled: “If a bunch of Black Nation­al­ists rob a Brinks truck, if they kill some Sys­tem Pigs, WHO CARES??!!”

Siege also paid homage to white racist “lone wolf” assas­sins like Mason’s for­mer ANP col­league Joseph Franklin, who spe­cial­ized in shoot­ing inter­ra­cial cou­ples (“race trai­tors”); and James Huber­ty, who mas­sa­cred a large­ly His­pan­ic clien­tele at a McDon­ald’s restau­rant in San Diego. Mason felt that the lone wolves were mere­ly express­ing healthy “Viking berserk­er rage” against “Big Broth­er.” He espe­cial­ly liked the fact that, since they act­ed alone, these lone wolves were very dif­fi­cult to catch. Siege also glo­ri­fied Charles Man­son. Mason even cre­at­ed a Man­son-inspired suc­ces­sor group to the NSLF called the Uni­ver­sal Order in an effort to tran­scend the tra­di­tion­al “left-right spec­trum.”

In his intro­duc­tion to Siege, Moyni­han also high­light­ed Mason’s call for a uni­ty of extremes against the Sys­tem:

At this point in his­to­ry there were no such things as “inno­cent bystanders.” The degen­er­a­tion and decline of the West had long since passed the point where such ideas had any mean­ing. Now it all boiled down to whether you were work­ing “for” or “against” the Sys­tem, and any­thing which helped fur­ther aug­ment insta­bil­i­ty in soci­ety – no mat­ter what com­er it came from, or what “oppos­ing” (i.e.. Left Wing or Marx­ist) group might be respon­si­ble. The break with con­ser­vatism and “Right-Wingism” (the cat­e­gories most peo­ple invari­ably believe Nazism falls into) had now been made once and for all...Mason will reit­er­ate that he wish­es the best of luck to any­one will­ing to attack the Sys­tem head-on.

For all its crude­ness, Siege echoed Fran­co Freda’s rad­i­cal Evolan call for total social dis­rup­tion in La Dis­in­te­grazione del Sis­tema. . . .

COMMENT: Note that the pub­li­ca­tion of Siege was assist­ed by Adam Par­frey, whose Fer­al House imprint has con­sid­er­able cache in ele­ments of “alter­na­tive cul­ture.” As not­ed in FTR #437, Fer­al House pub­lish­es “counter-cul­ture fas­cist” tracts like The Lords of Chaos, in addi­tion to pro­mot­ing books of inter­est to stu­dents of para-pol­i­tics, such as Amer­i­ca’s polit­i­cal assas­si­na­tions. Fer­al House also caters to Man­son Fam­i­ly affi­ciana­dos and Satanists among oth­er sub­cul­tures. 

As we not­ed in FTR #437. . . . Anoth­er cen­tral point of dis­cus­sion is Moynihan’s long time friend, pro­fes­sional asso­ciate and polit­i­cal fel­low trav­eler Adam Par­frey, the own­er of Fer­al House and a sig­nif­i­cant pres­ence on the alter­na­tive pub­lish­ing scene. Coa­lesc­ing in the Abraxas Foun­da­tion, an alter­na­tive music/occult/fascist/Social Dar­win­ist think tank (their descrip­tion), Par­frey, Moyni­han and Boyd Rice have inter­twined musi­cal and polit­i­cal cul­tures with a coun­ter­cul­ture fas­cist ide­ol­ogy. (Rice is pic­tured at right and above, with Nazi asso­ciate Robert Heick.)

Parfrey’s sig­nif­i­cant and grow­ing pres­ence in the con­spir­acy pub­lish­ing field is worth not­ing. Fer­al House polit­i­cal books–much of their inven­tory deals with cul­tural, not polit­i­cal, subjects–tend to be uneven: many vol­umes have excel­lent mate­r­ial mixed in with dri­vel, some of the books are quite good and oth­ers ludi­crous and insane.

What is impor­tant about the use of con­spir­acy the­o­ries in the con­text of a pro­to-fas­cist polit­i­cal view is the con­fu­sion that can result for those who come to real­ize that in fact, Lee Har­vey Oswald did not kill Kennedy. This aware­ness may leave some in a rel­a­tivis­tic political/intellectual uni­verse. “Maybe the Holo­caust didn’t hap­pen!” In the era of the big lie, Par­frey and oth­ers who mar­ket some polit­i­cal truth mixed in with the vilest of fas­cist ide­olo­gies are tru­ly dan­ger­ous and are sow­ing the seeds of doom.

Although Par­frey and com­pany have deep con­nec­tions to fas­cist and Nazi ele­ments and have worked exten­sively to fur­ther some of those ele­ments’ projects, one should not be too quick to label Par­frey a fas­cist him­self. Rather, he might be termed a “fel­low trav­eler,” whose efforts on behalf of, and asso­ci­a­tion with, Nazi/fascist ele­ments may be due to Parfrey’s devo­tion to the pro­mul­ga­tion of “extreme cul­ture.”

Defy­ing easy def­i­n­i­tion, “extreme cul­ture” could be said to be defined by any­thing that is edgy, over-the-top and, more often than not, offen­sive and/or unbe­liev­able. . . .

COMMENT: In a relat­ed con­sid­er­a­tion, Par­frey and his asso­ciate Boyd Rice helped start a web­site called Unpop Art, which caters to the “extreme cul­ture” touched on above. Sig­nif­i­cant ele­ments of that cul­ture are overt­ly or qua­si-fascis­tic, with some of them even extolling inci­dents such as the Columbine shoot­ings. The web­site and its oper­a­tors also present mate­r­i­al of inter­est to the Man­son Fam­i­ly accolytes men­tioned above.

Again, we should note that expo­nents of “extreme cul­ture,” such as the Unpop Art crowd should not nec­es­sar­i­ly be viewed as fas­cists per se. They may be moti­vat­ed by degen­er­a­cy rather than ide­ol­o­gy. Per­haps they just have “too many birds on their anten­nae.” 

Nonethe­less, the effect of this sort of thing on the grow­ing num­ber of peo­ple in this soci­ety who aren’t wrapped too tight is to be seri­ous­ly con­tem­plat­ed. If, say, an Adam Lan­za is exposed to this sort of thing, what might be the effect?

The last item for con­sid­er­a­tion here is an inci­dent that took place in Weimar Ger­many and which served to fur­ther desta­bi­lize that imper­iled soci­ety. In the ear­ly 1920’s, a case broke in the Ger­man city of Hanover that shocked and hor­ri­fied the Ger­man cit­i­zen­ry. An osten­si­bly fee­ble-mind­ed gay man named Fritz Haar­mann went on a spree in which he mur­dered more than a hun­dred boys, butcher­ing their corpses and sell­ing the flesh in meat pies. Haar­mann used Hanover police depart­ment ID and a front as a “detec­tive agency” to help per­pe­trate his hor­rors.

In addi­tion to dis­cred­it­ing the nascent gay rights move­ment in Weimar Ger­many, the Fritz Haar­mann episode dis­cred­it­ed the Weimar author­i­ties.

The slaugh­ter of so many young inno­cents inclined peo­ple to won­der how such a thing could have hap­pened and what need­ed to be done to to put things right. 

“We need order! Can’t ANYONE or ANYTHING stop this?” might be an accu­rate encap­su­la­tion of pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment at the time. 

Hav­ing chil­dren mur­dered, par­tic­u­lar­ly at Christ­mas­time no doubt affects Amer­i­cans in a sim­i­lar fash­ion.

Lis­ten to the account pre­sent­ed of the Fritz Haar­mann inci­dent (in the spring of 1987) and com­pare it with what is hap­pen­ing today.

Are some of these school mas­sacres serv­ing as a con­tem­po­rary “Fritz Haar­mann” inci­dent? Are peo­ple echo­ing the cry of the cit­i­zens of Weimar Ger­many? Will the Amer­i­can peo­ple expe­ri­ence the same fate as the Weimar cit­i­zen­ry?

We ana­lyzed the Fritz Haar­mann inci­dent in Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M13, “The Pink Tri­an­gle: Gay Rights, Repro­duc­tive Rights and the Third Reich.”

The two sides of the pro­gram con­tain­ing dis­cus­sion of the Fritz Haar­mann inci­dent are:

Side A:  http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_13a.mp3

Side B: http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_13b.mp3

Pre­sen­ta­tion of the Fritz Haar­mann episode begins around 39 min­utes into side A and con­tin­ues into side B.

M13 draws on the book The Pink Tri­an­gle: The Nazi War against Homo­sex­u­als by Richard Plant.

 

 

 

Discussion

31 comments for “Now, About those School Yard Shootings . . .”

  1. One of the more notable aspects of the cov­er­age of this event has been the degree of out­right dis­in­for­ma­tion that’s been mak­ing it’s way into the cov­er­age. And it looks like Fox is pos­si­bly lead­ing the way on a new motive. Yes­ter­day there was a big “Fox Exclu­sive” report cit­ing a fam­i­ly friend that heard that the shoot­er was aware of plans by his moth­er to have him forcibly insti­tu­tion­al­ized and that he was very angry the plans and this is what trig­gered the event. While that’s very pos­si­bly the motive there’s also a big prob­lem with this “Exclu­sive” report:

    Lohud.com
    7:06 PM, Dec 18, 2012
    New­town mas­sacre: Pas­tor refutes son’s account on Adam Lan­za­’s motive

    NEWTOWN — A Con­necti­cut pas­tor is refut­ing a Fox News report quot­ing his son as say­ing that the gun­man who mas­sa­cred 26 peo­ple at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School may have snapped because his moth­er was plan­ning to com­mit him to a psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty.
    The source, Joshua Flash­man, 25, is the son of Richard Flash­man, a pas­tor at Bea­con Hill Evan­gel­i­cal Free Church in Mon­roe, Conn., where a few of the vic­tims’ fam­i­lies attend church.
    “I’ve just spo­ken to Josh,” Richard Flash­man said in a state­ment tonight. “As the Fox News arti­cle indi­cates, the infor­ma­tion Josh spoke to them about was hearsay and not con­firmed. I sug­gest you do not run with the sto­ry. I am per­plexed why Fox would run with it in the first place.
    Fox News also cit­ed a senior law enforce­ment source con­firm­ing that Lanza’s anger at his moth­er over plans for “his future men­tal health treat­ment” is being looked at as a pos­si­ble motive for the dead­ly shoot­ing.
    The pas­tor said he was not the source of his son’s infor­ma­tion. His sec­re­tary, Eileen Bell, added, “It was noth­ing from a con­firmed source.”
    Lat­er in the evening, two state police troop­ers arrived at the church to take a state­ment; Bell would not say from whom.
    Police said Adam Lan­za, 20, shot and killed his moth­er, Nan­cy Lan­za, inside the home they shared in New­town. He then shot his way into the school and opened fire, killing 20 first-graders and six staffers before turn­ing one of the guns on him­self. It was one of the worst mass shoot­ings in the nation’s his­to­ry.
    Author­i­ties said they’ve uncov­ered “sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence” but have not revealed a motive for the shoot­ings.
    Joshua Flash­man is quot­ed by Fox News as say­ing, “From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her peti­tion­ing the court for con­ser­va­tor­ship and (her) plans to have him com­mit­ted. Adam was appar­ent­ly very upset about this. He thought she just want­ed to send him away. From what I under­stand, he was real­ly, real­ly angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”

    Now, spec­u­la­tive report­ing is some­what unavoid­able at this point giv­en the scope of the tragedy and how lit­tle infor­ma­tion is known so far. But it’s worth point­ing out that I was watch­ing the Gre­ta van Sus­tren show expand on this sto­ry last night on Fox News, adding to the sto­ry from the pas­tor’s son that the tar­get­ing of the class­rooms may have been caused by the shooter’s jeal­ousy over the time vol­un­teer time the moth­er spent in those class­es in the last year. There was NO men­tion of the refu­ta­tion of this sto­ry by the source’s father and this was a live show that run­ning at 10PM East­ern time (I saw the rerun three hours lat­er). The time­stamp on the above sto­ry is 7 PM (and I think that’s an East­ern time­zone arti­cle), so it’s like­ly that Fox would have known that this was a con­tentious report (espe­cial­ly since the father said he told Fox not to run it). Are we see­ing myth-build­ing at work?

    It’s impor­tant to note that, even 10 years after Columbine, there is still the per­sis­tent myth that the shoot­ers were out­casts intent on get­ting revenge for their out­cast sta­tus. That also turns out to be not at all true based on the vol­ume of evi­dence:

    Debunk­ing the myths of Columbine, 10 years lat­er
    COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL
    April 20, 2009|By Stephanie Chen CNN

    What do you remem­ber about April 20, 1999?

    If you recall that two unpop­u­lar teenage boys from the Trench Coat Mafia sought revenge against the jocks by shoot­ing up Columbine High School, you’re wrong.

    But you’re not alone.

    Ten years after the mas­sacre in Lit­tle­ton, Col­orado, there’s still a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of two Goth-obsessed lon­ers, Eric Har­ris and Dylan Kle­bold, who went on a shoot­ing ram­page and killed 12 of their class­mates and a teacher, injured 23 oth­ers and then turned their guns on them­selves.

    Jour­nal­ist and author Dave Cullen was one of the first to take on what he calls the myths of Columbine. He kept at it for a decade, chal­leng­ing what the media and law enforce­ment offi­cials report­ed.

    “Kids had nev­er been attacked in this kind of way until Columbine,” he recent­ly told CNN. “I just had to find out what hap­pened to those kids.”

    Cul­len’s book,“Columbine,” was released this month — just in time for today’s 10th anniver­sary of the shoot­ing at the Col­orado high school. While tack­ling pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tions, Cullen also gives a riv­et­ing account of what hap­pened that day and how the sur­vivors view the event that marked their lives for­ev­er.

    Cullen con­clud­ed that the killers weren’t part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren’t bul­lied by oth­er stu­dents and that they did­n’t tar­get pop­u­lar jocks, African-Amer­i­cans or any oth­er group. A school shoot­ing was­n’t their ini­tial intent, he said. They want­ed to bomb their school in an attack they hoped would make them more infa­mous than Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh.

    The Columbine tragedy left a last­ing mark on many Amer­i­cans, large­ly because of the medi­a’s around-the-clock cov­er­age in the days and weeks fol­low­ing the shoot­ing. Columbine was named the top news sto­ry of 1999 with near­ly 70 per­cent of Amer­i­cans say­ing they “fol­lowed [Columbine] very close­ly,” accord­ing to a Pew Research Cen­ter study.

    When media cov­er­age fad­ed, reporters and inves­ti­ga­tors soon learned that some of the ini­tial reports were wrong. Cullen writes about the mis­per­cep­tions: “Facts rush in, the fog lifts, an accu­rate pic­ture solid­i­fies. The pub­lic accepts this, but the final por­trait is the far­thest from the truth.”

    Offi­cials at the Jef­fer­son Coun­ty Sher­if­f’s office agreed that the Trench Coat Mafia, among oth­er myths, were false. Lead inves­ti­ga­tor Kate Bat­tan said the 10-year anniver­sary offers a chance to clear up the mis­con­cep­tions.

    ...

    Five months after Columbine, Cullen wrote an arti­cle pub­lished on Salon.com reveal­ing that most mem­bers of a group dubbed the Trench Coat Mafia had grad­u­at­ed years ear­li­er.

    The Trench Coat Mafia was a non­vi­o­lent school group of com­put­er gamers estab­lished a few years before the shoot­ing, Cullen said. They feud­ed with the jocks and wore black trench coats. Har­ris and Kle­bold were not mem­bers, Cullen con­clud­ed after talk­ing to stu­dents at the school and ana­lyz­ing police doc­u­ments. Nei­ther boy appeared in the Trench Coat Mafi­a’s year­book group pho­to in 1998. iReport.com: How did Columbine affect you?

    The two killers were far from nor­mal teens. Har­ris was a psy­chopath and Kle­bold bat­tled depres­sion, accord­ing to psy­chol­o­gists cit­ed in the book. Even so, they also weren’t the extreme social out­casts and lon­ers depict­ed in the ear­ly days of media cov­er­age.

    Records released lat­er by the Jef­fer­son Coun­ty Sher­if­f’s office showed that Har­ris and Kle­bold had their own cir­cle of friends. Kle­bold took a date to the prom, rid­ing with a dozen friends in a limo, just days before the shoot­ing.

    “I don’t believe bul­ly­ing caused Columbine,” Jeff Kass, who cov­ered the sto­ry for the Rocky Moun­tain News, told CNN. “My key rea­son for that is they nev­er men­tioned it in their diaries.”

    After a decade of research, includ­ing hun­dreds of inter­views and relent­less requests for evi­dence and doc­u­ments, Kass also released a book this month called “Columbine: A True Crime Sto­ry.” It pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive pro­files of the killers and their motives.

    Kass was able to get Kle­bold’s col­lege appli­ca­tion essay through pub­lic records requests. The essay indi­cat­ed he was a com­plex teen, who acknowl­edged hang­ing with the wrong crowd dur­ing his sopho­more and junior years.

    Cullen, the orig­i­nal Columbine debunker, the­o­rizes that the pub­lic was afraid to believe Har­ris and Kle­bold weren’t total out­casts. By iden­ti­fy­ing them as goth lon­ers who were “weird” or “odd­balls,” it was eas­i­er to set them apart from oth­er stu­dents and for schools to dis­tin­guish future poten­tial shoot­ers, he said.

    “The bombs were incon­sis­tent with what we remem­ber,” Cullen said. “We dropped the one that was true and kept the myth.”

    Kirsten Kreil­ing, pres­i­dent of the Columbine Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion, said she believed the ini­tial reports that the killers were in the Trench Coat Mafia and tar­get­ed jocks. So did many oth­er peo­ple in the com­mu­ni­ty. Ten years lat­er, Kreil­ing, who has dili­gent­ly kept up with news reports on Columbine, knows those ini­tial reports were false.

    She real­izes many peo­ple still accept the myths and hopes the truth of what hap­pened at Columbine will some day replace the pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tions.

    “Under­stand­ing what hap­pened can help us try to pre­vent these things from hap­pen­ing again in the future,” she said. “If you don’t under­stand his­to­ry, you are doomed to repeat it.”

    I should add that Fox’s pan­elists were con­tin­u­ing to empha­size the shooter’s appar­ent autism with­out not­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there were oth­er fac­tors com­pound­ing the shooter’s men­tal con­di­tion in the cov­er­age I saw yes­ter­day. One must assume those pan­elists don’t them­selves have any kids on the autism spec­trum (and are gen­er­al­ly just ass­holes) because if an autism/mass killer myth emerges from this event the con­se­quences could impact some of the most vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of this soci­ety.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 19, 2012, 8:27 am
  2. That “counterpsyops.com” looks like it has some down­right false infor­ma­tion on their site. Most of their posts are b.s., but their infor­ma­tion on the LIBOR scan­dal looked like it could be true.

    Don’t know if this is accu­rate or con­tributes to any deep­er under­stand­ing of this tragedy. Found a link about how the father of the New­town, CT mass mur­der­er and the father of the Auro­ra, CO the­ater shoot­ings were linked. The 2 fathers were sup­posed to be involved in a hear­ing or some­thing of that nature.

    Accord­ing to this link :http://counterpsyops.com/2012/12/17/libor-scandal-link-fathers-of-two-mass-murderers-lanza-holmes-were-to-testify/

    “Both men were to tes­ti­fy before the US Sen­tate in the ongo­ing LIBOR scan­dal. The Lon­don Inter­bank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the aver­age inter­est rate at which banks can bor­row from each oth­er. 16 inter­na­tion­al banks have been impli­cat­ed in this ongo­ing scan­dal, accused of rig­ging con­tracts worth tril­lions of dol­lars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 bil­lion and three of their low lev­el traders arrest­ed.”

    Now that link for the full arti­cle has been removed or moved some­where else. Again, I don’t know how accu­rate or legit the site is. Just sad.

    Posted by Rose | December 19, 2012, 1:26 pm
  3. @Rose:
    That site is push­ing a hoax sto­ry. And it’s just one the hoax­es and mis­re­port­ing that has already emerged.

    It’s also worth not­ing that last night’s Gre­ta van Sus­teren show also had a seg­ment on the sus­pi­cions that the shoot­er had help. Her guest was none oth­er that Mark Fuhrman. The sec­ond shoot­er was part of the ini­tial report by a teacher at the school who there were two shoot­ers run­ning past the gym. Ear­ly CBS news reports of an eye wit­ness that describes a man wear­ing “camo pants” and a dark jack­et being tak­en into cus­tody and say­ing that “I did­n’t do it” to the par­ents as he was pass­ing by as he was escort­ed in hand­cuffs by the police. The eye­wit­ness tells the reporter that “he’s sit­ting over there in the police car right now” and points off cam­era, so there appeared to be a pret­ty unam­bigu­ous report of a man in cam­ou­flage pants and a dark jack­et that was tak­en into cus­tody and ear­ly reports of two gun­men at the school. Mem­o­ry is a com­pli­cat­ed thing, espe­cial­ly dur­ing mass casu­al­ty events. But if a sec­ond shoot­er is report­ed by a teacher dur­ing the shoot­ing and a man is marched past eye­wit­ness­es wear­ing “camo pants” and a dark jack­et and tak­en into cus­tody, it’s just irre­spon­si­ble of the media to just for­get that this hap­pened and nev­er pro­vide an expla­na­tion.

    Also, accord­ing to this recent dat­ed local CT news report(note that this is report­ed as if it was writ­ten on Fri­day, Dec 14th, but it’s also list­ed as one of the “top_stories” in the link URL and has a Decem­ber 18th online pub­li­ca­tion date and a Decem­ber 19th date in the URL — the date it was accessed by me — so the dates are screwy on this site but this also appears to be a small, local news orga­ni­za­tion so that’s not to be entire­ly unex­pect­ed), the police had yet to deter­mine if that sec­ond per­son arrest­ed was work­ing with the shoot­er or coin­ci­den­tal­ly walk­ing into the school at the same time:

    VoicesNews.com
    School Shoot­ing
    Leaves 27 Dead
    in Sandy Hook

    by Megan Spicer and Jean Dunn
    Pub­lished:
    Tues­day, Decem­ber 18, 2012 12:29 PM EST
    SANDY HOOK — Accord­ing to the New York Times, 27 peo­ple were killed today, includ­ing 20 chil­dren, Fri­day, Decem­ber 14, at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School on Dick­in­son Dri­ve.

    Sandy Hook School is an ele­men­tary school of more than 450 stu­dents, ages approx­i­mate­ly 5 through 10, in kinder­garten through fourth grade.

    Also dead is the shoot­er, iden­ti­fied as 20-year-old Adam Lan­za, who lived with his moth­er Nan­cy Lan­za in Sandy Hook.

    Mr. Lan­za also killed his moth­er in their home.

    Con­necti­cut State Police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance termed the inci­dent “a trag­ic sit­u­a­tion with a wide crime scene.”

    At a 1:42 p.m. press con­fer­ence, Lt. Vance said “the sit­u­a­tion is secure” and “the pub­lic is not in dan­ger.”

    He did not con­firm the num­ber of deaths, say­ing only that there were “sev­er­al fatal­i­ties at the scene, both stu­dents and staff,” includ­ing the school’s prin­ci­pal, Dawn Hochsprung, accord­ing to CNN.

    Lt. Vance con­firmed that just after 9:30 a.m., New­town Police received a 911 call for an emer­gency at the ele­men­tary school. New­town Police con­tact­ed the Con­necti­cut State Police, request­ing assis­tance.

    On- and off-duty troop­ers respond­ed, along with a large num­ber of first respon­ders from through­out west­ern Con­necti­cut.

    Imme­di­ate­ly upon arrival, police entered the school and began an active search for the shoot­er.

    “Our main objec­tive was to evac­u­ate the school as quick­ly and effi­cient­ly as pos­si­ble of any and all stu­dents and fac­ul­ty,” he said.

    Once the school was searched, a stag­ing area was set up behind the Sandy Hook Fire Depart­ment which is a quar­ter-mile from the school.

    Par­ents were told to pick up their chil­dren from the stag­ing area pro­vid­ed they sup­ply iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.

    The scene at the stag­ing area was one of heart­break. Many par­ents were on their cell phones.

    As they were leav­ing the stag­ing area, many of the chil­dren were wear­ing their par­ents’ coats and jack­ets because they were not allowed to go back into the school to get any­thing.

    Lt. Vance indi­cat­ed that no addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion on the fatal­i­ties will be released “until there is a com­plete and prop­er iden­ti­fi­ca­tion.”

    “The shoot­er is deceased inside the build­ing,” he said, not­ing “a great deal of law enforce­ment activ­i­ty in and out of state, cov­er­ing all bases relat­ing to that indi­vid­ual.”

    Many law enforce­ment agen­cies are work­ing togeth­er to answer ques­tions about what hap­pened, he said.

    Ear­ly on, state police advised that the shoot­er, an adult, was dead, with two hand­guns found at the scene; lat­er reports men­tioned a Glock and a rifle. Mul­ti­ple canine units were brought in to be sure there was not anoth­er shoot­er at large.

    It was even­tu­al­ly learned that he had four guns, which were legal­ly owned by his moth­er.

    That search has since been called off.

    Offi­cers believe one per­son fired the shots, but a sec­ond per­son seen leav­ing the school was tak­en into cus­tody to deter­mine if he had any role in the shoot­ing or was coin­ci­den­tal­ly walk­ing into the school when the shoot­ing began.

    CNN report­ed this morn­ing that the prin­ci­pal, vice prin­ci­pal and school psy­chol­o­gist went into a hall­way after hear­ing gun­shots. Only the vice prin­ci­pal returned to the room, shot in the foot and crawl­ing, to call 911.

    The vice prin­ci­pal said there must have been “100 rounds, at least,” accord­ing to a CNN report.

    Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma was first noti­fied of the sit­u­a­tion at 10:30 a.m. by his nation­al secu­ri­ty advi­sor and was updat­ed through­out the morn­ing.

    Accord­ing to reports, staff and stu­dents heard mul­ti­ple gun­shots over the loud speak­er dur­ing morn­ing announce­ments. Teach­ers imme­di­ate­ly locked class­room doors and cor­ralled stu­dents in the cor­ners of rooms.

    Vene­sa Bhar­al­iu, 9, told Voic­es she and some friends were walk­ing to the art room when they heard the gun­shots over the inter­com.

    “We tried to close both doors, but one didn’t lock and then we went into the office and cov­ered our­selves,” Vene­sa said.

    She added that police told the chil­dren were to close their eyes and hold hands with the peo­ple next to them while they were lead out of the school. Vene­sa, how­ev­er, was not hold­ing anyone’s hand and said she saw “police car­ry­ing big guns.”

    A reverse 911 call advised par­ents to stay home, near their phones. A sec­ond reverse 911 call told them to come to a stag­ing area behind the Sandy Hook Fire Depart­ment, where they were reunit­ed with their chil­dren.

    Tom Kelle­her of Sandy Hook was in dis­be­lief that a shoot­ing of this sever­i­ty could hap­pen in Sandy Hook. His 8‑year-old daugh­ter was safe.

    “Not here, not this school,” Mr. Kelle­her said. “This is very unusu­al.”

    Therese Lestik of Sandy Hook received the call from the school and then saw what had hap­pened on the news before get­ting into her car to reach the school and her daugh­ter, Eva, who is in kinder­garten, as soon as pos­si­ble.

    “I’m in com­plete shock, Ms. Lestik said.

    School dis­tricts in many neigh­bor­ing towns put schools on lock­down, includ­ing New­town, Mon­roe, Bethel and Brook­field.

    Lock­down at oth­er New­town schools were lift­ed at 12:30 p.m.

    Three peo­ple were tak­en to Dan­bury Hos­pi­tal, where a strong police pres­ence remained out­side the emer­gency depart­ment. One of the three peo­ple was a teacher who was wound­ed in the foot.

    The emer­gency depart­ment at Dan­bury Hos­pi­tal was put on lock­down to con­trol the flow of peo­ple, to pro­tect the con­fi­den­tial­i­ty of patients and to allow staff to work unin­ter­rupt­ed.

    In a press con­fer­ence Fri­day morn­ing, Dan­bury Hos­pi­tal Pres­i­dent and CEO John Mur­phy offered his heart­felt sym­pa­thy to all affect­ed by the tragedy.

    While con­firm­ing that three vic­tims have been brought to the hos­pi­tal, he declined to give specifics.

    Dr. Patrick Brod­er­ick, chair­man of the hospital’s emer­gency depart­ment, said the three were all eval­u­at­ed and man­aged by the hospital’s trau­ma ser­vice.

    The hos­pi­tal had been alert­ed that patients would be trans­port­ed and teams were on stand­by and ready to care for patients when they arrived.

    ...

    Giv­en the com­pli­cat­ed his­to­ry of past mass killings and how lit­tle infor­ma­tion we have avail­able about the New­town shoot­ings at this point it would be absurd to rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the shoot­er had help, espe­cial­ly of the man in cam­ou­flage pants and a dark jack­et just hap­pened to be try­ing to enter the school at the same time. Instead, on the same day of the attack the media and inves­ti­ga­tors embraced the idea of a sin­gle shoot­er with­out ever resolv­ing the unde­ni­able fact that a sec­ond per­son was tak­en into cus­tody near the area of the mass killing. Recall that the arrest of the shooter’s broth­er, the one orig­i­nal­ly iden­ti­fied as the shoot­er, sort of took over as “the sec­ond per­son in cus­tody” meme as the sto­ry unfold­ed. If there’s any fol­low up regard­ing the man tak­en into cus­tody that day I haven’t been able to find it. So, unfor­tu­nate­ly, we have to con­tin­ue con­sid­er­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty that there was more going on here than the con­sen­sus nar­ra­tive sug­gests. It’s a con­se­quence of mass media mass amne­sia.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 19, 2012, 10:15 pm
  4. Here’s a belat­ed fol­lowup on the “exclu­sive” Fox News report that was push­ing the idea that fear of being invol­un­tar­i­ly insti­tu­tion­al­ized by the shooter’s mom is what prompt­ed the event. This was sup­posed to by com­ing from some­one close to the fam­i­ly. As we saw, how­ev­er, the father of the indi­vid­ual that pro­vid­ed Fox News with this info refut­ed the idea as uncon­firmed and stat­ed that he told Fox not to run with it. They con­tin­ued to run with is last Wednes­day night(Dec 19th), with Gre­ta van Sus­teren revis­it­ing the top­ic in a brief update on the unfold­ing inves­ti­ga­tion. That brief update includ­ed only a hand­ful of items and one of them, of course, was a ref­er­ence back to the “exclu­sive” Fox News report. So it’s worth not­ing that the source of this “exclu­sive” report does­n’t appear to con­done it either:

    Heavy.com
    Joshua Flash­man: Top 10 Facts You Need to Know
    post­ed 12/18/2012 by Paul Far­rell

    Joshua Flash­man of Strat­ford, Con­necti­cut, is the source cit­ed by Fox News as pro­vid­ing a pos­si­ble motive of Sandy Hook shoot­er Adam Lan­za. Fox sug­gests that Adam learned his mom, Nan­cy, was plan­ning to put her dis­turbed, 20-year-old son in a psy­chi­atric facil­i­ty — and addi­tion­al­ly Adam was jeal­ous of the young chil­dren she vol­un­teered with.

    It’s a tidy expla­na­tion for why Adam “snapped” and why he tar­get­ed young chil­dren at Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School.

    But who is Flash­man and does he real­ly have inside knowl­edge? Did Fox over­reach with its use of his com­ments? Here’s what we know about him.
    ...

    3. He Was Not Inti­mate­ly Acquaint­ed with the Lan­za Fam­i­ly
    Flash­man was quot­ed by Fox News as say­ing:

    Adam Lan­za believed she cared more for the chil­dren than she did for him, and the rea­son he prob­a­bly thought this [was the fact that] she was peti­tion­ing for con­ser­va­tor­ship and want­ed to have him com­mit­ted. I could under­stand how he might per­ceive that — that his mom loved him less than she loved the kids, loved the school. But she did love him. But he was a trou­bled kid and she prob­a­bly just couldn’t take care of him by her­self any­more.

    But how well does Flash­man know the fam­i­ly? He offers some clar­i­ty in the com­ment sec­tion of this arti­cle:

    “I knew OF Adam Lan­za. I was aquaint­ed with his old­er broth­er Ryan grow­ing up, because he was my age and my grade. I saw the Lan­zas around town, and Adam was always just Ryan’s awk­ward lit­tle broth­er.”

    “I told the reporter about what was being said in town. Noth­ing more. Noth­ing less.”

    And on Twit­ter, after the Fox reports, he wrote:

    ...
    I told a reporter what the peo­ple in town were say­ing about Adam Lan­za­’s motive, & next thing I know, I’m
    ...
    “inti­mate­ly aquaint­ed” with the Lan­za fam­i­ly and knew Adam’s motives first hand. Fun­ny, I did­n’t know that!

    ...

    Oh, and @dailykos ... Fox approached ME and spent TWO DAYS try­ing to con­vince me to go on the record. But I just want­ed to get on tv, right?

    ...

    So if you won­der­ing whether or not this was in instance of Fox News was just being oppor­tunis­tic in run­ning with a “hot” sto­ry OR if this was an exam­ple of Fox News mak­ing up the “news”, it would appear that the lat­ter is the case.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 26, 2012, 8:57 pm
  5. I will always believe that these masac­ers are an exten­sion of the MK-ultra pro­gram. In this case it is to get the guns. Remem­ber one of the first mus­ta­chioed paper hang­er oper­a­tions is to remove the the abil­i­ty of the gen­er­al pop­u­lace to resist. This did hap­pen in Nazi Ger­many

    Posted by Harry Pecha | December 30, 2012, 6:45 pm
  6. @Harry Pecha: I’m not so sure of that myself, though. Remem­ber, the Nazi gun con­trol laws did­n’t tar­get ALL Germans....just those who weren’t “Aryans”, includ­ing & espe­cial­ly the Jews:

    http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1791/did-hitler-ban-gun-ownership

    Posted by Steven L. | January 2, 2013, 1:05 am
  7. And here’s one more close call on what appears to be a planned school attack by a white-suprema­cist stu­dent:

    Ledger-Enquir­er
    Rus­sell Coun­ty Sher­iff: Admit­ted white suprema­cist teen planned to bomb high school

    Pub­lished: Jan­u­ary 6, 2013

    By LARRY GIERER — lgierer@ledger-enquirer.com

    Rus­sell Coun­ty High School stu­dent Derek Shrout, 17, will be in court this after­noon fac­ing a felony charge of attempt­ed assault after he was arrest­ed for alleged­ly plan­ning to use home­made explo­sives in a ter­ror­ist attack on fel­low stu­dents at the school in Seale, Ala.

    Rus­sell Coun­ty Sher­iff Heath Tay­lor said Sun­day a search of Shrout’s home Fri­day found about a cou­ple dozen small tobac­co cans and two large cans, all with holes drilled in them and con­tain­ing pel­lets.

    He said oth­er ingre­di­ents to com­plete the small bombs — such as black pow­der, butane and fus­es — were not found.

    Tay­lor said the devices were just “a step or two away from being ready to explode.”

    Shrout described the bombs he was mak­ing in a jour­nal, Tay­lor said, and, if com­plet­ed the way Shrout described, the bombs would have blown up.

    ...

    Tay­lor said Shrout claimed the writ­ing in the jour­nal to be fic­ti­tious, but Shrout’s par­ents, whom Tay­lor called “very coop­er­a­tive,” allowed a search of the house and the bomb mate­ri­als were locat­ed.

    Tay­lor said the two big cans had “Fat Boy” and “Lit­tle Man” writ­ten on the side. It is a play on words. “Lit­tle Boy” was the code name giv­en the atom­ic bomb dropped on Hiroshi­ma, Japan, dur­ing World War II, and “Fat Man” was the code name for the atom­ic bomb dropped on Nagasa­ki, Japan.

    The sher­iff said it is believed the bomb-mak­ing infor­ma­tion was found on the Inter­net.

    Shrout, cur­rent­ly being held in the Rus­sell Coun­ty Jail, admit­ted to being a white suprema­cist, accord­ing to author­i­ties.

    “He has a lot of pent up anger toward blacks,” Tay­lor said.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 7, 2013, 7:41 am
  8. Ladies and gen­tle­men! Behold, Glenn Beck jump­ing Alex Jones jump­ing the shark! The dou­ble shark jump is quite a sight to see.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 9, 2013, 11:03 am
  9. And now on the heels of the Alex Jones CNN freak­out we have sto­ries of Sandy Hook “Trutherism” which appears to be most­ly fix­at­ed on the the­o­ry that it was all an elab­o­rate gov­ern­ment false flag hoax using actors and no one actu­al­ly died...includ­ing the shoot­er. And all of this is cou­pled with grow­ing rhetoric from politi­cians and media out­lets push­ing the “Oba­ma is a dic­ta­tor like Hitler and Stal­in because he wants to go on a power/gun grab­bing Exec­u­tive Order spree” memes. So we can be pret­ty sure that the Sandy Hook False flag “the gov­ern­ment did it to grab your guns” the­o­ries should be infect­ing the main­stream right-wing soon­er or lat­er and that means it’s only a mat­ter of time before we start hear­ing the “get ready for civ­il war” rhetoric.

    And 3...2...1...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 10, 2013, 3:38 pm
  10. And now, a look back at Wayne LaPier­re’s “thoughts” on the slip­pery slope jagged cliff of gun con­trol:

    Media Mat­ters for Amer­i­ca

    NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Used Right-Wing Medi­a’s Nazi Com­par­i­son To Warn Of “Mass Exe­cu­tions Of Gun Own­ers”
    Blog ››› Jan­u­ary 11, 2013 4:12 PM EST ››› TIMOTHY JOHNSON

    Con­ser­v­a­tives in media have been quick to draw com­par­isons between the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion’s report­ed pro­pos­als to crack down on gun vio­lence and the actions of Adolf Hitler to sug­gest that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma will engage in firearm con­fis­ca­tion. These his­tor­i­cal­ly inac­cu­rate com­par­isons owe part of their gen­e­sis to the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion, which has com­pared pro­pos­als to reg­u­late firearms to orders dur­ing the Holo­caust.

    In his book, Amer­i­ca Dis­armed: Inside the U.N. & Oba­ma’s Scheme to Destroy the Sec­ond Amend­ment, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre likened the Unit­ed Nations Small Arms and Light Weapons Destruc­tion Day, held on July 9, 2001, to Nazi pro­pa­gan­dist Joseph Goebbels’ order that books authored by Jews be pub­licly burned.

    LaPierre then sug­gest­ed that the burn­ing of guns could “help set the stage for mass exe­cu­tions of gun own­ers” just as Goebbels’ order pre­cip­i­tat­ed the mass killing of Jews.

    July 9 was not the first time bon­fires were lit to destroy resis­tance to the pow­er of the gov­ern­ment. Nazi “Ger­many’s Josef Goebbels ordered all Jew­ish books to be burned in pub­lic in May 10, 1933. Uni­ver­si­ty towns were cen­ters of Jew­ish Books Destruc­tion Day.” As the Völkisch­er Beobachter (Pop­ulist Observ­er) report­ed on May 12, 1933, “The Ger­man stu­dent body of the Berlin uni­ver­si­ties assem­bled yes­ter­day for a torch­light pro­ces­sion on Hegel Platz. They formed up, accom­pa­nied by a truck­load of 25,000 books and writ­ings harm­ful to the peo­ple. The pro­ces­sion end­ed at Opera Platz where as a sym­bol­ic act, these un-Ger­man writ­ings were set aflame on a pile of logs.”

    The burn­ing of Jew­ish and un-Ger­man books was fol­lowed with­in a few years by the burn­ing of Jews and oth­er sup­pos­ed­ly un-Ger­man peo­ple. Jew­ish Books Destruc­tion Day helped change pop­u­lar con­scious­ness so as to pave the way for geno­cide. Like­wise paving the way for geno­cide was the sys­tem­at­ic dis­ar­ma­ment of Jews and all oth­er oppo­si­tion ele­ments, in Nazi Ger­man itself and in con­quered ter­ri­to­ries.

    How long until a U.N.-declared offi­cial day of hate is cel­e­brat­ed with gov­ern­ments actu­al­ly killing peo­ple? [Amer­i­ca Dis­armed: Inside the U.N. and Oba­ma’s Scheme to Destroy the Sec­ond Amend­ment, Pages 106–107]

    LaPierre con­clud­ed by ask­ing, “Will the mass burn­ing of firearms help set the stage for mass exe­cu­tions of gun own­ers?” [Page 108]

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 15, 2013, 8:18 am
  11. Glenn Beck thinks a civ­il war is com­ing. He warns his base not to form anti-gov­ern­ment com­pounds and then states that Waco and Ruby Ridge were pri­ma­ry there fault of the gov­ern­ment.

    So we’ve now entered the “I’m warn­ing you all not to do this! *even though you would be justified*”-phase of the far-right’s rhetor­i­cal push towards a vio­lent insur­rec­tion.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 16, 2013, 9:25 am
  12. Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 16, 2013, 10:04 am
  13. If you thought this was scary, you prob­a­bly don’t want to read the ‘update’ here. Let’s just say that the use of code words is start­ing to become option­al.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 17, 2013, 9:15 am
  14. Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 19, 2013, 1:57 pm
  15. Posted by Pterrafractyl | January 21, 2013, 3:51 pm
  16. It’s kind of fas­ci­nat­ing how the NRA has adopt­ed a strat­e­gy of say­ing you can’t trust the White House­’s gun con­trol pro­pos­als because Oba­ma secret­ly wants to take your guns away. It is this lack of ‘trust’ that caused the NRA to reverse their long-stand­ing advo­ca­cy of uni­ver­sal back­ground checks, fear­ing that it will become a gun-own­er data­base that will allow for future gun con­fis­ca­tions. But, Wayne LaPierre recent­ly remind­ed us, the NRA would sup­port a uni­ver­sal back­ground check sys­tem as long as it includes a weak­en­ing of men­tal health pri­va­cy laws so we can cre­ate a fed­er­al reg­istry of the men­tal­ly ill. He also seems to want to police the abil­i­ty to pick up peo­ple off the street they deem to be men­tal­ly ill and forcibly insti­tu­tion­al­ized and some sort of mas­sive sweep of the inner cities by fed­er­al agents to round up and jail any­one thought to be a gang mem­ber. Yep, the NRA won’t trust the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment with the pow­ers asso­ci­at­ed with the cre­ation of a nation­al gun-own­er data­base unless that pow­er also comes with the dra­mat­i­cal­ly enhanced fed­er­al abil­i­ties to track the offi­cial men­tal health sta­tus of cit­i­zens and enhanced police pow­ers to forcibly com­mit peo­ple and pre­emp­tive­ly jail those thought to be part of a crim­i­nal gang. Yep, those are the solu­tions he’s ped­dling to an audi­ence that is increas­ing­ly con­cerned about an oppres­sive fed­er­al gov­ern­ment:

    Fox News Sun­day
    Capt. Mark Kel­ly, Wayne LaPierre on chances for com­pro­mise in gun con­trol debate

    Writ­ten by Chris Wal­lace / Pub­lished Feb­ru­ary 03, 2013 / Fox News Sun­day

    Spe­cial Guests: Capt. Mark Kel­ly, Wayne LaPierre

    The fol­low­ing is a rush tran­script of the Feb­ru­ary 3, 2013, edi­tion of “Fox News Sun­day With Chris Wal­lace.” This copy may not be in its final form and may be updat­ed.

    CHRIS WALLACE, HOST: I’m Chris Wal­lace.

    The debate over guns gets even more intense.

    ...

    LAPIERRE: So, let’s talk about the rest of it. You fix the men­tal health sys­tem. Every police offi­cer knows peo­ple on the streets that should be insti­tu­tion­al­ized because after they’re insti­tu­tion­al­ized, they are out there walk­ing around in the street. We need to change our civ­il com­mit­ment laws. We need to change the men­tal health sys­tem, fund it and make it work. Get these peo­ple, inter­dict them and get them into treat­ment. We’re not doing that.

    I still would like to see men­tal health records com­put­er­ized, but we can’t get that done. I’ve got a tran­script here with Sen­a­tor Schumer, from 20 years ago, on “Face the Nation,” where I begged him to help us do it, and they still haven’t done it. And, the NRA has been fight­ing to get it done.

    WALLACE: All right. You oppose gun con­trol as a form of gov­ern­ment tyran­ny. But in the Sen­ate hear­ings, this week, you offered a dif­fer­ent rea­son for it. Let’s take a look.

    LAPIERRE: Right.

    (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

    LAPIERRE: What peo­ple all over the coun­try fear today, is being aban­doned by their gov­ern­ment. If a tor­na­do hits, if a hur­ri­cane hits, if a riot occurs, that they’re going to be out there alone, and the only way they will pro­tect them­selves, in the cold, in the dark, when they are vul­ner­a­ble, is with a firearm.

    (END VIDEO CLIP)

    WALLACE: Do you real­ly think that that is a more seri­ous threat, maraud­ing bands of Amer­i­cans dur­ing a hur­ri­cane or a tor­na­do, do you think that’s a more seri­ous threat to the aver­age Amer­i­can than the steady drum beat of gun vio­lence and some­times mass gun vio­lence?

    LAPIERRE: We want to stop gun vio­lence, that’s what we’re try­ing to do. So here’s the threat. There are 25 vio­lent crimes a week in this coun­try. We need to take a city like Chica­go and nobody wants to do it but the Amer­i­can pub­lic will get it when I say it. Chica­go, 89 of 90 in the coun­try in terms of enforc­ing the rea­son­able fed­er­al gun laws NRA sup­ports on the books against felons and drug deal­ers and gangs with guns, the peo­ple doing the killing.

    We are all obsessed with the Tal­iban and we ought to be. What about the gangs? They are ruin­ing neigh­bor­hoods all over the coun­try? We need a fed­er­al task force, if it takes 500 agents, if it takes a thou­sand agents, go into Chica­go.

    I know, Eric Hold­er does­n’t want to it. He says it’s a cook­ie cut­ter approach.

    I know Rahm Emanuel does­n’t want to do it. He sent peo­ple up on the hill when a Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion was there, say­ing they are gup­pies and they can’t be con­cerned with drug deal­ers with guns.

    Every gang mem­ber on the street of Chica­go, start­ing tomor­row morn­ing, let’s pick ’em up, we’ve got a fed­er­al law to get them off the street and put them in prison, and that would cut crime and we’re not doing it.

    ...

    Now, the issue of how to han­dle a fail­ing men­tal health sys­tem and top­ics like forcible insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion are gen­uine­ly dif­fi­cult top­ics that need to be addressed. Not that fix­ing prob­lems with the men­tal health sys­tem will actu­al­ly do much to pre­vent gun vio­lence but they should still be dealt with just in prin­ci­ple. But you have to won­der about the men­tal health sta­tus of NRA sup­port­ers that are super para­noid about being put on a gun reg­istry because they fear the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is secret­ly plot­ting to con­fis­cate their guns (and then impose some sort of Kenyan Mus­lim Social­ist com­mu­nist dic­ta­tor­ship) unless this same feared fed­er­al gov­ern­ment as enhanced abil­i­ties to declare you insane and forcibly insti­tu­tion­al­ize you. You also have to won­der if Wayne LaPierre meant to include all the gangs out there or just the inner city ones.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 5, 2013, 12:21 pm
  17. Accord­ing to unnamed sources (so don’t be too sur­prised if this turns out to be inac­cu­rate), the New­town shoot­er was obsessed with far-right Olso killer Anders Breivik:

    Feb­ru­ary 18, 2013 6:32 PM
    CBS News
    New­town shoot­er moti­vat­ed by Nor­way mas­sacre, sources say

    By
    Bob Orr, Pat Mil­ton

    Law enforce­ment sources say Adam Lan­za was moti­vat­ed by vio­lent video games and a strong desire to kill more peo­ple than anoth­er infa­mous mass mur­der­er.

    Sources say Lan­za saw him­self as being in direct com­pe­ti­tion with Anders Breivik, a Nor­we­gian man who killed 77 peo­ple in July 2011.

    Breivik killed eight with a bomb­ing in down­town Oslo. He then moved to a near­by island where hunt­ed down and fatal­ly shot 69 peo­ple, most­ly teenagers attend­ing a sum­mer camp.

    Two offi­cials who have been briefed on the New­town, Conn., inves­ti­ga­tion say Lan­za want­ed to top Breivik’s death toll and tar­get­ed near­by Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School because it was the “eas­i­est tar­get” with the “largest clus­ter of peo­ple.”

    Evi­dence shows that his mind, sources say, Lan­za was also like­ly act­ing out the fan­tasies of a video game as he killed 20 first graders and six adults at the school. For Lan­za, the deaths appar­ent­ly amount­ed to some kind of “score.”

    But Lan­za end­ed his killing spree soon­er than he intend­ed. Unlike Breivik, who sur­ren­dered, Lan­za killed him­self as police closed in. Just before his sui­cide, Lan­za fired some shots at police in the school’s park­ing lot.

    Offi­cials have not pub­licly revealed what led them to the motive, but sources say inves­ti­ga­tors have found evi­dence Lan­za was obsessed wilth Breivik.

    They’ve also recov­ered what they called a “trove” of video games from the base­ment of Lan­za­’s home. Sources say Lan­za spent count­less hours there alone, in a pri­vate gam­ing room with the win­dows blacked out, hon­ing his com­put­er shoot­ing skills.

    Lan­za also made mul­ti­ple vis­its to near­by gun ranges with his moth­er, Nan­cy Lan­za, where they prac­ticed togeth­er with actu­al weapons. Three guns, all reg­is­tered to Nan­cy Lan­za, were used in the Sandy Hook mas­sacre. Lan­za used a fourth weapon to kill his moth­er before his attack on the school.

    EDITOR’S NOTE: In response to this piece, Lt. J. Paul Vance of the Con­necti­cut State Police told CBS News that the inves­ti­ga­tion into the motive for the New­town shoot­ing has not been com­plet­ed and there­fore any state­ments about the shooter’s intent is mere spec­u­la­tion

    It’s unclear just whether or not the shoot­er was obsessed with sim­ply “out scor­ing” Breivik with the num­ber of deaths or if it includ­ed an obses­sion with Breivik’s far-right pol­i­tics. He’s been described as “polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive” by fam­i­ly and friends and the “prep­per” move­ment cer­tain­ly has its share of far-right mem­bers but up until this report there did­n’t appear to be any­thing that strong­ly sug­gest­ed he was a Breivik-league far-right nutjob. Note that, at the end of the report there’s state­ment by the inves­ti­ga­tion’s spokesper­son Paul Vance that the inves­ti­ga­tion into the motive is ongo­ing and any state­ments about intent are spec­u­la­tive. So who knows at this point how strong the Breivik-obses­sion evi­dence real­ly is but it sure sounds like the inves­ti­ga­tors found quite a bit of Breivik-relat­ed con­tent.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 18, 2013, 7:44 pm
  18. @Pterrafractyl–

    Good find! It will be inter­est­ing to see where this goes.

    Best,

    Dave Emory

    Posted by Dave Emory | February 18, 2013, 9:43 pm
  19. @Dave: It looks like the inves­ti­ga­tors are con­tin­u­ing to down­play the Breivik the­o­ry so it’s real­ly unclear how accu­rate it is. Paul Vance even described the report as ‘hideous’. It also sounds like there’s been some lim­it­ed suc­cess in extract­ing info from one of the com­put­er hard dri­ves lead­ing to sub­poe­nas for com­put­ers of indi­vid­u­als in con­tact with him through online gam­ing. In addi­tion, the shooter’s mom had recent­ly met a new boyfriend and the guy would some­times stay at the house, so there could be an eye­wit­ness to the home life that’s been miss­ing up to this point but there’s almost no info on this indi­vid­ual. So there are some sig­nif­i­cant new devel­op­ments but noth­ing con­firmed :

    Sources: Lan­za want­ed to eclipse Nor­we­gian mass mur­der­er
    Hearst Con­necti­cut News­pa­pers | Feb­ru­ary 18, 2013 | Updat­ed: Feb­ru­ary 18, 2013 10:12pm

    NEWTOWN, Conn. — When Adam Lan­za blast­ed his way into Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School, his goal was to kill more than the 77 peo­ple slaugh­tered by the Nor­we­gian mass mur­der­er in his 2011 ram­page, two sources famil­iar with the shoot­ings inves­ti­ga­tion have told Hearst Con­necti­cut News­pa­pers.

    After he had gunned down 20 first-graders and six teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors, Lan­za was thwart­ed when police arrived swift­ly at the ele­men­tary school, prompt­ing him to take his own life.

    The 20-year-old shooter’s desire to eclipse the death toll amassed by Anders Breivik in his July 22, 2011, bomb attack and gun ram­page in Nor­way was first report­ed Mon­day by CBS News, which cit­ed two uniden­ti­fied sources in its account.

    The accounts were strong­ly dis­put­ed by State Police spokesman Lt. J. Paul Vance. “The whole sto­ry is inac­cu­rate,” Vance said. “The motive has not been deter­mined. This is all com­ing from unnamed sources. It’s all spec­u­la­tion. It’s hideous.”

    None of the sources detailed how author­i­ties learned of Lan­za­’s inten­tions, but in recent weeks inves­ti­ga­tors have made sub­stan­tial strides. Hearst Con­necti­cut News­pa­pers report­ed Sun­day that tech­ni­cians were able to restore one hard dri­ve to a com­put­er Lan­za used. That suc­cess, in turn, unlocked infor­ma­tion that led them to obtain sub­poe­nas for com­put­ers used by indi­vid­u­als believed to be in con­tact with Lan­za through online gam­ing activ­i­ties.

    Anoth­er smashed hard dri­ve has proven more chal­leng­ing to rebuild. It is still being recon­struct­ed by fed­er­al Defense Depart­ment tech­ni­cians.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 19, 2013, 3:07 pm
  20. @ PTERRAFRACTYL

    It remains to be seen if these reports are true, but there is the def­i­nite oppor­tu­ni­ty for Nazi fel­low trav­el­ers to recruit sus­cep­ti­ble indi­vid­u­als through these web con­nect­ed ‘point and shoot’ video games. Not just the sim­u­lat­ed killing, but the ever more expand­ing and ever more intri­cate vir­tu­al uni­vers­es begin to dis­place the real world. Add to that the con­nec­tiv­i­ty of these games which pro­vide great recruit­ment poten­tial, and you’ve got niche sec­tor for Nazi net­work­ing and mobi­liza­tion.

    A good fic­tion­al­iza­tion of this poten­tial is a sub­plot in the nov­el Dae­mon by Daniel Suarez.

    Posted by GrumpusRex | February 21, 2013, 9:58 am
  21. @Grumpus: I sus­pect the reports on Breivik came from some­one work­ing in the FBI giv­en that the leak/speculation from “law enforce­ment offi­cials” hap­pened after inves­ti­ga­tors head­ed to DC to brief uniden­ti­fied author­i­ties. Plus and the inves­ti­ga­tors appear to be rather livid over the whole thing. And who knows how to inter­pret it if it real­ly was the FBI involved in the leak. The evi­dence giv­en by the sources appeared to be based on the pres­ence of some news clip­pings about Breivik at the shooter’s home so it sounds like inves­ti­ga­tors prob­a­bly weren’t exag­ger­at­ing when they char­ac­ter­ized the report as “spec­u­la­tive”.

    And in the spir­it of spec­u­la­tion, and regard­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using online gam­ing for far-right recruit­ment, you have to won­der just how much infor­ma­tion is poten­tial­ly avail­able on an indi­vid­ual if the only infor­ma­tion you have about them is their IP address (which might be pro­vid­ed in the game). And you have lot’s of mon­ey. With online mar­ket­ing tech­nolo­gies, laws, and the sheer vol­ume of already-col­lect­ed data get­ting to the point where entire brows­ing pro­files asso­ci­at­ed with an IP can be sold to any­one will­ing to pay and with min­i­mal reg­u­la­tions it’s not incon­ceiv­able that we’ll have a future (or present) where some­one could poten­tial­ly buy a rea­son­ably accu­rate mini-psy­cho­log­i­cal pro­file of you just by match­ing your IP address with the col­lec­tion of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing pro­files held by a grow­ing num­ber of pri­vate com­pa­nies. And if indi­rect pro­fil­ing of our activ­i­ties ever gets too pre­dic­tive — good enough to pre­dict “this per­son might be ide­o­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven to be capa­ble of vio­lence and/or just kind of nuts and manip­u­la­ble” — not only will soci­ety be faced with anoth­er temp­ta­tion to engage in “pre­cog” sur­veil­lance of itself, but it will become that much eas­i­er for groups to find and recruit vul­ner­a­ble psy­ches. Dou­ble ugh.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 25, 2013, 9:11 pm
  22. Just FYI, Oba­ma is rais­ing a pri­vate black army and he’s com­ing for you and every­thing you hold dear:

    Alter­net
    Para­noid Gun Nuts Claim Oba­ma is Rais­ing a Pri­vate Black Army to Mas­sacre Whiten Amer­i­cans
    Radio big­ot says, “they will claim any­one resist­ing the black force they are doing it because they are racist.”

    Feb­ru­ary 25, 2013 |
    By Bri­an Tash­man

    Gun Own­ers of Amer­i­ca pres­i­dent Lar­ry Pratt appeared Tues­day on the Talk to Solomon Show along­side con­ser­v­a­tive blog­ger Greg W. Howard, of Twit­ter­gate fame, for anoth­er chance to spew anti-Oba­ma con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.

    Pratt pre­dict­ed that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma may begin con­fis­cat­ing guns in order to pro­voke a vio­lent response to jus­ti­fy fur­ther oppres­sion, which host Stan Solomon feared would lead to the impris­on­ment of hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple.

    Pratt once again insist­ed that Oba­ma is act­ing like King George III, a sen­ti­ment with which Solomon con­curred, say­ing, “That will hap­pen quick­ly and they will wipe those peo­ple out to set an exam­ple.”

    But Solomon wasn’t fin­ished: “I believe they will put togeth­er a racial force to go against an oppo­site race resis­tance, basi­cal­ly a black force to go against a white resis­tance, and then they will claim any­one resist­ing the black force they are doing it because they are racist.”

    Howard agreed: “You may be right because he has been sow­ing the seeds of racial hatred; we were heal­ing quite well as a nation on racial issues until Oba­ma came along and now we have a lot of racial dis­cord.”

    After argu­ing that Oba­ma is “not Amer­i­can” and not a nat­ur­al born cit­i­zen, Howard main­tained that Oba­ma may begin “wip­ing out a few hun­dred peo­ple who own guns, pull a large scale Waco or a Ruby Ridge type inci­dent” and have it “tinged it with racial over­tones.” But just in case Oba­ma goes through with his plans to “take down” the Inter­net, “peo­ple are set­ting up phone-trees all over the place” to stop Oba­ma in his tracks.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 26, 2013, 8:36 am
  23. A new round of media updates from anony­mous sources “close to the inves­ti­ga­tion” has been hit­ting the news. It looks like the shoot­er had been col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on all sorts of mass mur­der­ers, not just Anders Breivik. It also sounds like the 2nd hard dri­ve could take 6 months to 2 years to recov­er, so we can prob­a­bly for­get about any of that dri­ve’s info get­ting used for the even­tu­al final report. They also have had some suc­cess track­ing his past move­ments using cell phone data and found that he made a num­ber of trips to a mall in April and May that are char­ac­ter­ized as atyp­i­cal for some­one that nev­er leaves the house (which has led to spec­u­la­tion that he may have been cas­ing the mall for an attack). More drip drip drip from anony­mous sources:

    The Stam­ford Advo­cate
    Source: Lan­za stud­ied pre­vi­ous mass killings
    John Pir­ro
    Updat­ed 10:51 pm, Wednes­day, March 13, 2013

    NEWTOWN — Anders Behring Breivik was not the only mass mur­der­er with whom Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School shoot­er Adam Lan­za was obsessed, accord­ing to a law enforce­ment source.

    State Police inves­ti­ga­tors who exe­cut­ed search war­rants at the Yoganan­da Street home where the 20-year-old Lan­za lived recov­ered reams of doc­u­ments relat­ed to “vir­tu­al­ly every mass mur­der” in the Unit­ed States and abroad, the source said.

    Lan­za exhib­it­ed par­tic­u­lar inter­est in the Octo­ber 2006 shoot­ing at a one-room Amish school­house in Lan­cast­er Coun­ty, Pa., in which gun­man Charles Carl Robert IV took hostages and shot 10 school girls, five of them fatal­ly, before killing him­self.

    “There was a lot of mate­r­i­al on the Amish case,” the source said.

    Hearst Con­necti­cut News­pa­pers pre­vi­ous­ly report­ed that police had uncov­ered evi­dence lead­ing them to believe Lan­za was attempt­ing to sur­pass the Nor­we­gian killer’s total.

    Breivik mur­dered a total of 77 peo­ple, eight of them by set­ting off bombs in down­town Oslo before he shot and killed 69 oth­ers, many of them teenagers, at a sum­mer camp on Utoya island in July 2011.

    The lat­est dis­clo­sure, cou­pled with evi­dence of how Lan­za expert­ly deployed his AR-15 Bush­mas­ter rifle in mur­der­ing 20 first-graders and six adults at the school after ear­li­er attempt­ing to destroy his com­put­er hard dri­ves, lends cre­dence to the belief that he had been plan­ning the dead­ly Dec. 14 assault for some time.

    ...

    The source also said inves­ti­ga­tors have had some suc­cess in trac­ing Lan­za­’s move­ments pri­or to the shoot­ing by using cell phone tech­nol­o­gy. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est, the source said, was a num­ber of trips he made to the Dan­bury Fair mall the pre­vi­ous April and May.

    “For some­one who almost nev­er left his house, it was real­ly out of char­ac­ter,” the source said.

    Inves­ti­ga­tors had been hand­i­capped in deter­min­ing a pos­si­ble motive for Lan­za­’s ram­page because he destroyed the hard dri­ves of the two com­put­ers he used before dri­ving to the school. Anoth­er source famil­iar with the probe told Hearst last month that FBI tech­ni­cians were able to glean some data from one hard dri­ve but that recon­struct­ing the oth­er hard dri­ve may take anoth­er six months to two years.

    Mean­while, Dan­bury State’s Attor­ney Stephen Seden­sky III said he is hop­ing to have a report on the shoot­ings by June.

    Also note that the courts sealed the search war­rants and police records, so anony­mous sources might be the only sources for a lot of the details of this case for the fore­see­able future:

    Search War­rants for Adam Lan­za­’s House, Car Still Sealed; Police Records Too

    Pub­lished: Tues­day, March 05, 2013

    By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN
    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — There is no doubt who is respon­si­ble for the New­town school mas­sacre. The shoot­er is dead and the pros­e­cu­tor han­dling the case has said he does not expect any charges.

    Yet author­i­ties are con­tin­u­ing to keep search war­rants and police records secret. Media out­lets have pressed for the release of more records, which could shed light on a crime that has revived the nation­al debate over gun con­trol and could change the way guns are reg­u­lat­ed.

    ...

    Pros­e­cu­tor Stephen Seden­sky III suc­cess­ful­ly argued in Decem­ber to keep search war­rant affi­davits and appli­ca­tions relat­ed to Lan­za­’s house and the car he drove to the school sealed for 90 days, say­ing dis­clo­sure would jeop­ar­dize an ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion. He said at the time no arrests were antic­i­pat­ed but had not been ruled out.

    News media advo­cates say the records should be unsealed, argu­ing the pub­lic has a right to see such records, which include what was found in the house and car. They say records may be sealed only when an inves­ti­ga­tion would be hurt by dis­clo­sure.

    “There seems to be absolute­ly no rea­son that they would need to. It’s not going to jeop­ar­dize the case in any way,” said Lin­da Petersen, chair­woman of the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Com­mit­tee of the Soci­ety of Pro­fes­sion­al Jour­nal­ists.

    William Fish, an attor­ney who has rep­re­sent­ed the news media in high-pro­file cas­es that were sealed in Con­necti­cut, also said the seal­ing does not appear jus­ti­fied since no pros­e­cu­tion is like­ly. He con­ced­ed, how­ev­er, that “it’s not a sur­prise to me that a court has in fact sealed the records just because it’s so hor­ri­ble.”

    New­town police denied requests by The Asso­ci­at­ed Press for 911 calls and any police reports involv­ing Lan­za or his fam­i­ly. State police also declined to release records, cit­ing the pend­ing inves­ti­ga­tion.

    ...

    Seden­sky, the pros­e­cu­tor, not­ed that author­i­ties have dis­closed details about the weapons used in the shoot­ing: a Bush­mas­ter semi-auto­mat­ic rifle was used to kill the chil­dren and edu­ca­tors and a hand­gun to kill him­self. He said he advised New­town offi­cials not to dis­close the 911 calls.

    Dan­bury Supe­ri­or Court Judge John F. Blaw­ie on Dec. 27 grant­ed the 90-day seal on search war­rant affi­davits and appli­ca­tions after con­clud­ing that the state’s “inter­est in con­tin­u­ing nondis­clo­sure sub­stan­tial­ly out­weighs any right to pub­lic dis­clo­sure at this time.”

    Seden­sky said he has not decid­ed yet whether to seek an exten­sion of the seal­ing. A police report on the probe may not be ready until the sum­mer, he said.

    In deny­ing a request by the AP for police reports and 911 calls, the New­town Police Depart­ment said releas­ing the doc­u­ments was pro­hib­it­ed by state law “as infor­ma­tion to be used in a prospec­tive law enforce­ment action.” AP’s request sought all police calls for ser­vice to the Lan­za house and to Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary School, 911 calls and any police reports involv­ing Lan­za and his fam­i­ly.

    Police Chief Michael Kehoe has said there were only two calls to the Lan­za house sev­er­al years before the shoot­ing. One was in 2006 in which Lan­za­’s moth­er Nan­cy report­ed some­one rang the door­bell and ran off and the oth­er was to report a lar­ce­ny in 2003 that turned out to be in anoth­er juris­dic­tion, Kehoe said.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 15, 2013, 1:48 pm
  24. There was a recent arti­cle in Rupert Mur­doch’s New York Post about a 7‑foot-by-4-foot “spread­sheet” of past mass killers found in the New­town shooter’s pos­ses­sion as well as con­clu­sions by the CT police that he had spent years plan­ning this attack . The anony­mous law enforce­ment source also strong­ly implies that inves­ti­ga­tors think that the shoot­er was employ­ing some sort of “vio­lent video gamer” ratio­nal in his actions. As this arti­cle from The Atlantic points out, it’s one of those news reports that makes it pret­ty clear that young avid video game play­ers are going to be increas­ing­ly por­trayed as “mass shoot­ers wait­ing to hap­pen and in need of men­tal health inter­ven­tions” with­in the NRA/­GOP-ori­ent­ed wing of the US polit­i­cal spec­trum in com­ing years:

    The Atlantic Wire
    Since When Is the NRA Writ­ing the Defin­i­tive His­to­ry of Adam Lan­za?

    Alexan­der Abad-San­tos 3,606 Views Mar 18, 2013

    The biggest non-exclu­sive exclu­sive in Mon­day’s news cycle was New York Dai­ly News sports colum­nist Mike Lupi­ca’s one-source arti­cle blam­ing the Sandy Hook Ele­men­tary mas­sacre on video games and Adam Lan­za­’s sev­en-foot-long spread­sheet of death. The sto­ry is thin­ly-sourced tabloid fod­der at its worst, and, worse than that, it paints an unsub­stan­ti­at­ed por­trait of Lan­za as “a deranged gamer like this lit­tle bas­tard,” just when the men­tal-health com­mu­ni­ty and Con­gress are seek­ing answers on Lan­za, video games, and truth in the face of NRA talk­ing points and the bad news­pa­per sto­ries that seem based on them.

    Lupi­ca describes his anony­mous law-enforce­ment source as “a tough career cop who did not wish to see his name in the news­pa­per” but did attend a meet­ing of the Inter­na­tion­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Police Chiefs and Colonels in New Orleans last week, where a Con­necti­cut State Police colonel appar­ent­ly spoke and revealed that Lan­za had a 7‑foot-by-4-foot spread­sheet doc­u­ment­ing body counts and attempt­ed killings from oth­er mass mur­der­ers through­out his­to­ry. To be sure, the state police inves­ti­ga­tion has been shroud­ed in secre­cy — out of respect for the vic­tims and a state of con­stant mis­in­for­ma­tion after the Decem­ber shoot­ings as anony­mous law enforce­ment offi­cials spoke to the news media, Lt. Paul Vance does­n’t plan to release his team’s full report in June. But stok­ing the fear fac­tor isn’t help­ing a fren­zy that has forced Vance to debunk rumors start­ed on morn­ing shows — espe­cial­ly when it comes to video games and men­tal ill­ness, espe­cial­ly still when you com­bine all those with guns and dead lit­tle chil­dren.

    Lupi­ca’s source does­n’t just pro­vide the selec­tive news detail that the spread­sheet is out there; he actu­al­ly does most of the news analy­sis for the paper, all while using the word “gamer” to ID Lan­za the way a news­pa­per would iden­ti­fy some­one’s occu­pa­tion:

    They don’t believe this was just a spread­sheet. They believe it was a score sheet ... This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an ele­men­tary school because he felt it was a point of least resis­tance, where he could rack up the great­est num­ber of kills. That’s what (the Con­necti­cut police) believe.

    And the source, in insist­ing that Lan­za did not plan to get shot by police, ascribes the killer’s plot as some­thing straight out of the “code of the gamer”:

    They believe that (Lan­za) believed that it was the way to pick up the eas­i­est points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforce­ment. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this lit­tle bas­tard, if some­body else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed him­self.

    The source also com­pares gun and “gamers” with porn and rapists:

    In the end, it was just a per­fect storm: These guns, one of them an AR-15, in the hands of a vio­lent, insane gamer. It was like porn to a rapist. They feed on it until they go out and say, enough of the video screen. Now I’m actu­al­ly going to be a hunter.

    And Lupi­ca’s source is pret­ty con­fi­dent that Lan­za learned all about a “tac­ti­cal reload” through his pen­chant for video games (even though videos of a “tac­ti­cal reload” show up all over YouTube):

    They believe he learned the prin­ci­ples of this — the tac­ti­cal reload — from his game. Reload before you’re com­plete­ly out. Keep going. When the strap broke on his first weapon (the AR-15), he went to his hand­gun at the end. Clas­sic police train­ing. Or some­thing you learn play­ing kill games.

    Just for the record, “dis­turbed” and “men­tal­ly ill” did not appear in the dig­i­tal ver­sion of Lupi­ca’s 1,075-word arti­cle or in any of his source’s quotes, although “insane” popped up once once, “deranged” once, and “game” or “gamer” was in there 12 times. Also for the record: The sto­ry does­n’t men­tion any efforts to con­firm any­thing with Con­necti­cut State Police, or the spe­cif­ic con­nec­tions between vio­lence and video games. While we’re on that top­ic: There is no spe­cif­ic con­nec­tion between vio­lence and video games. The sci­en­tif­ic record is thread­bare. Adam Lan­za did not shoot up that school just because he played video games. And when you plot gun-relat­ed deaths and video-game con­sump­tion on a graph, it looks like this — a down­ward slope, and a whole lot of gun vio­lence in Amer­i­ca:
    [see graph­ic]

    Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s task force has tried not to make judg­ments on the gam­ing indus­try, even as its lead­ers face a moun­tain of threats from the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion. And the NRA loves to say that video games turn peo­ple into killers almost as much as it likes to say Adam Lan­za­’s name: “There exists in this coun­try a cal­lous, cor­rupt and cor­rupt­ing shad­ow indus­try that sells, and sows, vio­lence against its own peo­ple. Through vicious, vio­lent video games with names like Bul­let­storm, Grand Theft Auto, Mor­tal Kom­bat and Splat­ter­house,” Wayne LaPierre said in his odd, unnerv­ing, and gam­ing-obliv­i­ous speech after the Decem­ber shoot­ings in New­town, Con­necti­cut. (The NRA, it should be not­ed, has its own video gamesjust not for preschool­ers any­more.) And the gun lob­by has con­tin­ues its famil­iar mes­sag­ing, even as LaPierre has­n’t actu­al­ly vis­it­ed New­town or looked to fund more sci­en­tif­ic research, as the White House is call­ing on Con­gress to do. The NRA is too busy call­ing on Con­gress to fund more teach­ers with guns at the schools it says need them across Amer­i­ca.

    At his speech at CPAC over the week­end, LaPierre said that the admin­is­tra­tion’s plan to address gun vio­lence includ­ed a con­tin­ued effort to “pre­vent men­tal health records from being added to the check sys­tem” — the very back­ground-check sys­tem the NRA may have just suc­cess­ful­ly lob­bied to death, even as the lob­by has very pub­licly endorsed one ver­sion of leg­is­la­tion that address­es men­tal health and the checks. For the NRA, men­tal health isn’t an issue — it’s some­thing to be lumped in with video games and back­ground checks as a weapon. Indeed, as we learn more about Lan­za­’s actu­al men­tal health, Con­gress is learn­ing from par­ents and experts at offi­cial hear­ings that cops and more guns aren’t going to help fig­ure out how to con­front men­tal ill­ness as it does and does not relate to gun vio­lence. And yet this is what LaPierre said at CPAC: “It is trou­bling and sad­den­ing how quick­ly this debate has dete­ri­o­rat­ed from what would tru­ly help make peo­ple safer to what has proven to be the decades-old agen­da of those bent on destroy­ing the Sec­ond Amend­ment.”
    ...

    The role that vio­lent video could might play in trig­ger­ing vio­lent actions in that tiny sub­set of the tru­ly men­tal­ly vul­ner­a­ble is going to one of those issues that real­ly nev­er goes away, espe­cial­ly as gam­ing tech­nol­o­gy becomes more advanced and immer­sive. It’s an emerg­ing tech­nol­o­gy that’s going to become even more immer­sive over time (imag­ine when graph­ics become indis­tin­guish­able from the real world) so we should expect this debate to even­tu­al­ly morph into a larg­er debate over what impact vir­tu­al real­i­ty-like tech­nolo­gies might have on human psy­ches in the future. It’s sort of like a pre­de­ces­sor to the upcom­ing tran­shu­man­ism debates that future tech­nolo­gies are like­ly to unleash and like the cur­rent debate over video games and vio­lence, we should prob­a­bly expect future debates over immer­sive tech­nolo­gies, men­tal health, and vio­lence to be filled with sim­i­lar kinds of mind­less and dam­ag­ing rhetoric like we see com­ing from that NY Post arti­cle and folks like LaPierre. The debate over the potent for vio­lence emerg­ing from video games is also some­what anal­o­gous the debates sur­round­ing the Drug War and whether or not ille­gal drug use will lead to vio­lent crimes and the gen­er­al down­fall of civ­i­liza­tion.

    If his­to­ry is our guide, Amer­i­cans should prob­a­bly expect a pro­tract­ed, decades-long peri­od where the gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to blun­der though one pub­lic pol­i­cy fail­ure over anoth­er while nev­er real­ly doing any­thing mean­ing­ful to reduce gun vio­lence and gen­er­at­ing enor­mous prof­its for pow­er­ful indus­tries. It’s one of those things the US excels at. His­to­ry may be a pret­ty accu­rate guide, but it’s usu­al­ly does­n’t take you where you want to go.

    Today’s vio­lent video games clear­ly aren’t a large risk for the vast major­i­ty of “gamers” because the US would have already descend­ed into some sort of Mad Max hellscape by now giv­en the num­ber of gamers already play­ing them. But the ques­tion of whether or not video games now, or in the future, tru­ly do pose a real risk for a tiny num­ber of men­tal­ly vul­ner­a­ble indi­vid­u­als isn’t going away because, like any tech­nol­o­gy, ques­tions of its impact on soci­ety are sort of ever-present. Any robust civ­i­liza­tion needs to be self-aware, to some extent, and that involves try­ing to under­stand how what we do and what we build impacts our­selves and oth­ers. It’s one of the many rea­son’s human­i­ty’s appar­ent col­lec­tive inabil­i­ty to crit­i­cal­ly self-exam­ine itself is so per­ilous as we pro­ceed for­ward. Even when we ask the right ques­tions, human­i­ty’s track record on pro­vid­ing sane answers seems to chron­i­cal­ly involve decades or cen­turies of per­pet­u­al blun­der­ing until a gen­er­a­tion comes along that say “ok, this is dumb, let’s try some­thing else”.

    Progress can hap­pen, though, so at some point we should expect the debate over gun vio­lence, men­tal health, and video games to move past its cur­rent LaPierre-iza­tion. For instance, it’s pret­ty much a giv­en at this point that the last few decades of Repub­li­can Par­ty hys­te­ria over a vari­ety of social issues has seri­ous­ly erod­ed the future of appeal of that par­ty to Amer­i­cans under the age of 30. To a large extent, the embrace of extreme social con­ser­vatism that his­tor­i­cal­ly was the norm (oppo­si­tion to gay rights and abor­tion, advo­ca­cy of cre­ation­ism and oth­er forms of Bib­li­cal fun­da­men­tal­ism in schools, etc.) did­n’t just fail at appeal­ing to the bulk of the US youth vote, it active­ly pushed away a large num­ber of poten­tial vot­ers that might have oth­er­wise been recep­tive to the GOP’s sig­na­ture form of socioe­co­nom­ic-Dar­win­ism (anoth­er area human­i­ty seems doomed to blun­der on for decades to come). We’ve final­ly hit that gen­er­a­tion that said “this is dumb, let’s try some­thing else” on a whole host of issues that played well, polit­i­cal­ly, through­out the 90’s and 00’s. Main­tain­ing those pol­i­cy posi­tions will come at an enor­mous long-term costs for the GOP and this is why the GOP needs a seri­ous “rebrand­ing” and soon.

    So you have to won­der about future atti­tudes towards gun con­trol on this nation in the upcom­ing gen­er­a­tions. Recent stud­ies have sug­gest­ed that a sur­pris­ing­ly high num­ber of youths (high school or col­lege aged), plan to own a gun at some point, so it might seem like a safe long-term move by the GOP to main­tain an amped-up gun fetish as part of their offi­cial par­ty “brand” going for­ward. But the effec­tive­ness of that strat­e­gy over the long haul kind of depends on the real world impact that the GOP’s “brand name” poli­cies are going to have on the lives of the next gen­er­a­tion. We real­ly don’t know what the kids of the future are going to think about hav­ing mil­i­ta­rized schools, espe­cial­ly when they get old­er and learn that the rea­son they had to be frisked and probed and prod­ded grow­ing up was so crazy Uncle Wayne could keep his pow­er­ful toys in order to more ful­ly immerse him­self in his week­end “Armed Insur­rec­tion” games. The kids might not actu­al­ly appre­ci­ate that. Sim­il­iar­ly, it’s very unclear how young males, espe­cial­ly social­ly awk­ward nerdy young males that are maybe a lit­tle depressed (i.e. most teenage males), are going to enjoy being rou­tine­ly “checked” by the future “men­tal health bud­dies” that the NRA desires so that robust men­tal health records can be record­ed, shared, and mined and that future law enforce­ment agen­cies can pick out those deemed to be per­haps some­what “at risk” for ran­dom, unprece­dent­ed vio­lence. Sure, those deemed “at risk”, won’t be imme­di­ate­ly sent to coun­sel­ing or anything...they’ll just be qui­et­ly tracked in the men­tal health sys­tem and qui­et­ly observed in order to ensure they don’t exhib­it any more imme­di­ate “warn­ing signs”. And those indi­vid­u­als being tracked will qui­et­ly know this as it will be pret­ty obvi­ous to every­one who is con­sid­ered “at risk”. And, increas­ing, kids will know a friend that gets “flagged” and tagged as “at risk”. You have to won­der which party/social move­ment those future young vot­ers will want to thank for that?

    And don’t for­get, guns are only one type of poten­tial­ly destruc­tive tech­nol­o­gy plat­form that future “deranged gamers” could con­ceiv­ably use to car­ry out a mass killing. What about “at risk” youth/young adults that take an inter­est in com­put­er pro­gram­mer and secu­ri­ty. They might be able to take down an entire pow­er-grid. Should they be tracked too? Tracked qui­et­ly, of course, but done nonetheless...you know, just in case.

    Tomor­row’s youth is the demo­graph­ic that’s pret­ty much guar­an­teed to be the pri­ma­ry focus of any new “men­tal health”/video game vio­lence screen­ing regimes that we should expect to emerge over the next few decades. Yes, many of the mass killers of late have been old­er adults, but old­er adults that don’t cur­rent­ly have men­tal health records indi­cat­ing a risk aren’t like­ly to be the tar­gets of any new screen­ing regimes. Kid’s, on the oth­er hand, are just a much more nat­ur­al cohort to keep rou­tine records on as they devel­op. And the prof­it poten­tial for such regimes track­ing kids is just too large for our cur­rent polit­i­cal sys­tem to resist. The writ­ing is on the wall with respect to the pol­i­tics and pol­i­cy incli­na­tions of today’s politi­cians. Today’s adults can fight back polit­i­cal­ly against hav­ing their own pri­va­cy invad­ed in the name of pub­lic safe­ty. Kids and teens can’t hire lob­by or threat­en to vote for the oth­er par­ty and they are an enor­mous poten­tial rev­enue gen­er­a­tor. Some sort of new screen­ing of Amer­i­ca’s youth is more or less guar­an­teed at this point.

    His­to­ry pret­ty much demand that we do so...otherwise how would be com­plete the cycle of one prof­itable pol­i­cy blun­der after anoth­er until a new gen­er­a­tion says “ok, this is dumb, let’s try some­thing else”? At least one gen­er­a­tion of kids is going to have to grow up under such a sys­tem before they can vote for some­thing dif­fer­ent. This is how we progress. Sad­ly. And since these new “men­tal health” screen­ing regimes with an ori­en­ta­tion toward video game-play­ing social­ly awk­ward males are also like­ly to be part of the new NRA/GOP “brand” in the minds of today’s and tomor­row’s youth, you have to won­der if we aren’t see­ing the GOP once again embrace tem­porar­i­ly expe­di­ent pol­i­tics that will allow the par­ty to con­tin­ue appeal­ing to a still polit­i­cal­ly-sig­nif­i­cant but shrink­ing old­er polit­i­cal demo­graph­ic at the cost of turn­ing the par­ty into an even big­ger youth pari­ah in the future. Espe­cial­ly if the black heli­copters nev­er arrive:

    TPM
    Ter­ry Moran To Karl Rove: ‘You’re Scar­ing Peo­ple’ On Gun Issue

    Pema Levy 10:35 AM EDT, Sun­day March 24, 2013

    ABC News anchor Ter­ry Moran argued Sun­day that Repub­li­can strate­gist Karl Rove is unnec­es­sar­i­ly “scar­ing” peo­ple when it comes to the gun con­trol debate by talk­ing about gun reg­istries.

    “You wan­na get some­thing done, then stop scar­ing peo­ple, don’t say we’re gonna keep a reg­istry of all these guns,” Rove said dur­ing a round­table dis­cus­sion on ABC’s “This Week” Sun­day.

    “Stop scar­ing peo­ple,” Moran inter­ject­ed. “If you’re scar­ing peo­ple with this Orwellian sense that black heli­copters and the gov­ern­ment if we reg­is­ter guns are gonna con­fis­cate Amer­i­cans’ guns. That kind of para­noia fuels –”

    “With all due respect, it is not para­noia,” Rove said, cut­ting off Moran.

    “Who’s going to con­fis­cate all the guns in Amer­i­ca?” Moran said.

    “Peo­ple have a fear of this. Why do it? Why do you need it?” Rove said.

    At issue is whether a new back­ground check law would require licensed U.S. gun deal­ers keep paper records of pri­vate gun sales. Gun deal­ers have already been keep­ing sales records since 1968. Cre­at­ing a nation­al reg­istry is pro­hib­it­ed by fed­er­al law.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 24, 2013, 2:35 pm
  25. A cor­rec­tion: The awful arti­cle about those dan­ger­ous “gamers” dis­cussed above was from Mort Zuck­er­man’s New York Dai­ly News, not Mur­doch’s New York Post. My bad! The video games made me do it.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 25, 2013, 9:01 am
  26. Anoth­er cor­rec­tion: Remem­ber how the orig­i­nal report­ing said the shoot­er was wear­ing a bul­let-proof vest but then inves­ti­ga­tors lat­er said that, no, it was just a util­i­ty vest? We now have an expla­na­tion for that report­ing dis­crep­an­cy: It looks like the bul­let-proof vest emerged from the first respon­der reports. There were also three class­rooms ini­tial­ly report­ed attacked, but that was lat­er revised to two. It’s a reminder that in such an extreme sit­u­a­tion major revi­sions of what was encoun­tered might take place. The vest and class­room count dis­crep­an­cies are amongst the most under­stand­able instances of mis­re­port­ing that’s tak­en place in this entire tragedy. Every­one respond­ing to it would be imme­di­ate­ly trau­ma­tized.

    Less under­stand­able is how the vast major­i­ty of the news arti­cles in the last week cov­er­ing the March 28 release of doc­u­ments by State’s Attor­ney Stephen J. Seden­sky (war­rants, etc.) and all report­ed that the shoot­er had a bul­let-proof vest. The new­ly released doc­u­ments said it was a bul­let-proof vest but they were also the new­ly released ini­tial first respon­der reports. This is a minor detail but one worth clar­i­fy­ing because it was rather con­fus­ing how it was sud­den­ly report­ed again in the last week that the shoot­er was wear­ing a bul­let-proof vest. It was also a fun mass amne­sia moment.

    So any­ways, it was a util­i­ty-vest:

    Bloomberg
    New­town School Shoot­er Lanza’s Rifle Had 14 Rounds Left
    By Phil Mil­ford & Chris Dol­metsch — Mar 28, 2013 12:14 PM CT

    The man who shot and killed 26 peo­ple, includ­ing 20 chil­dren, at a Con­necti­cut ele­men­tary school in Decem­ber spent less than five min­utes in the build­ing before tak­ing his own life, leav­ing 14 unspent rounds in the mag­a­zine of his rifle, state author­i­ties said.

    ...

    Seden­sky released more infor­ma­tion today on the killings at Sandy Hook, which led to nation­wide calls from gun-con­trol advo­cates seek­ing tougher firearms laws. An inves­ti­ga­tion into the inci­dent is con­tin­u­ing and no deci­sions have been made as to whether to pros­e­cute any­one for relat­ed crimes, Seden­sky said.

    “This is an active, ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion,” Seden­sky said. “No con­clu­sions have been reached and no final deter­mi­na­tions have been made. The esti­ma­tion of com­ple­tion in the sum­mer remains.”
    Governor’s Com­ment

    ...

    In a search war­rant descrip­tion from state police detec­tive James McG­lynn, the school and the home of Nan­cy Lan­za pre­sent­ed hor­rif­ic scenes when police arrived.

    As offi­cers entered the school, “numer­ous school chil­dren and school per­son­nel were locat­ed deceased from appar­ent gun­shot wounds in the first three class­rooms” and the shoot­er was found dead on the floor of the mid­dle class­room “dressed in mil­i­tary style cloth­ing, wear­ing a bul­let-proof vest.”

    At Nan­cy Lanza’s house they found “a deceased mid­dle-aged white female lying in a supine posi­tion on a bed in the 2nd floor mas­ter bed­room” with “an appar­ent gun­shot wound to her fore­head” and a rifle on the floor near­by.
    Two Class­rooms

    Sub­se­quent inves­ti­ga­tion showed there were shoot­ings in only two class­rooms and Lan­za was not wear­ing a bul­let­proof vest, Seden­sky, the pros­e­cu­tor, said in today’s state­ment.

    ...

    Also seized were “writ­ten doc­u­ments” by Adam Lan­za, includ­ing “per­son­al notes, mem­oirs and thoughts” lat­er turned over to the Fed­er­al Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion for analy­sis.

    War­rant-return inven­to­ries include a paper­back book enti­tled “Train Your Brain to get Hap­py,” and a New York Times arti­cle from Feb. 18, 2008, on a school shoot­ing at North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty.

    Police also found an “Adam Lan­za Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion Cer­tifi­cate.”

    Here’s that Feb. 18, 2008, New York TImes arti­cle about the North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty (NIU) shoot­er. The 2008 North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty shoot­er, Steve Kazmier­czek, was orig­i­nal­ly por­trayed as a shy lon­er but it lat­er came out that he he had been insti­tu­tion­al­ized in high-school for his obses­sion with white-pow­er and Satanism. As an adult grad stu­dent he appar­ent­ly had an obses­sion with grue­some hor­ror movies (as was James Holmes) and was cov­ered with tat­toos of the Saw Movie guy and oth­er things of that nature. That all came out much lat­er. There were those reports about the class­mate that said the New­town shoot­er had a web­site ded­i­cat­ed to Satan. I don’t think those reports were ever con­firmed, but giv­en that the New­town shoot­er had a real fas­ci­na­tion with the 2008 NIU shoot­er and Brievik (who was also a far-right nut-job) and the “prep­per” back­ground, it will be inter­est­ing to see if any inter­est in far-right ide­olo­gies emerge in the New­town shooter’s back­ground in the final report that’s sup­posed to be out some time this sum­mer.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 2, 2013, 11:16 pm
  27. It seems Con­gress is dis­cov­er­ing that cre­at­ing a nation­al data­base of those deemed to be “too crazy” to own a gun is a hor­rif­i­cal­ly com­plex issue because it inevitably involves “draw­ing a line” on what is a legal­ly accept­able state of mind. That can be a supris­ling soul-wrench­ing top­ic. It’s also a top­ic that’s like­ly to remind us that are some phe­nom­e­na that are hard­er to find the hard­er you look:

    Gun Con­trol Debate Clouds Def­i­n­i­tion of Men­tal­ly Ill
    The Sen­ate will soon con­sid­er leg­is­la­tion to keep the men­tal­ly ill away from guns, yet some states already set their own para­me­ters

    By Eliz­a­beth Flock
    April 3, 2013

    Who among the men­tal­ly ill should not be allowed to have a gun?

    That was the ques­tion debat­ed by men­tal health experts, mem­bers of law enforce­ment, gun con­trol advo­cates and gun vio­lence researchers in a con­fer­ence at Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty in Bal­ti­more last month. “There are men­tal ill­ness diag­noses that do increase your risk of vio­lence,” says Josh Hor­witz, who orga­nized the event and is exec­u­tive direc­tor of the gun con­trol group Coali­tion to Stop Gun Vio­lence. “But iden­ti­fy­ing which [diag­noses] those are and who those peo­ple are is going to be dif­fi­cult.”

    The con­se­quences for try­ing to link a diag­no­sis to vio­lent behav­ior became clear after it was revealed that New­town shoot­er Adam Lan­za was pos­si­bly autis­tic. The autism com­mu­ni­ty came out in full force to debunk any report that tried to draw such a link. And recent research shows the risk of vio­lent acts com­mit­ted by those with men­tal health diag­noses as part of the total pop­u­la­tion was just 3–5 per­cent.

    And yet the same ques­tion of gun access for the men­tal­ly ill will be posed to mem­bers of the Sen­ate when they come back from recess Mon­day and con­sid­er leg­is­la­tion that asks for tougher gun back­ground checks for those deemed men­tal­ly incom­pe­tent.

    Few in the gun con­trol debate agree on the answer to the ques­tion, but most say the cur­rent sys­tem isn’t work­ing.

    Cur­rent fed­er­al law says any per­son who has been for­mal­ly com­mit­ted to a men­tal insti­tu­tion, such as by court order, or who has been adju­di­cat­ed as a so-called “men­tal defec­tive,” can­not get access to a gun.

    Those stan­dards aren’t con­doned by men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als, who say the term “men­tal defec­tive” is deeply offen­sive, as well as not clear­ly defined. Gun con­trol groups, mean­while, say the law does­n’t do near­ly enough to keep guns away from peo­ple who should­n’t have them. And even gun rights groups have prob­lems with the cur­rent sys­tem, with the NRA say­ing recent­ly that states need­ed to do a bet­ter job at sub­mit­ting names of the men­tal­ly ill to the Nation­al Instant Crim­i­nal Back­ground Sys­tem (NICS). The NRA is right that states haven’t been great at com­pli­ance – almost 20 states sub­mit­ted few­er than 100 men­tal health records to the data­base as of Octo­ber 2012, accord­ing to research from the gun con­trol group May­ors Against Ille­gal Guns.

    ...

    It’s worth not­ing, in the NRA’s defense, that they did warn us all about a new dan­ger that might arise if and when the US Fed­er­al gov­ern­ment imple­ments the much more “inclu­sive” list of peo­ple with any sort of men­tal “issues” into a sin­gle nation­al data­base: Hack­ers. A robust­ly pop­u­lat­ed sin­gle nation­al data­base of that nature could be quite a tempt­ing tar­get. And just last month the NRA warned us all about this hack­ing pos­si­bil­i­ty...in their own spe­cial way.

    Con­tin­ue...

    ...
    So while there are prob­lems with the cur­rent sys­tem, most groups involved in the debate dis­agree about how to fix them. And nowhere is that fight play­ing out more vig­or­ous­ly than at the state lev­el.

    For exam­ple, in Mary­land, a state-cre­at­ed task force on guns recent­ly released a report that rec­om­mend­ed men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als be required to report patients who are sui­ci­dal to local law enforce­ment. But as The Bal­ti­more Sun reports, that rec­om­men­da­tion did­n’t sit well with med­ical pro­fes­sion­als, who wor­ried the require­ment would vio­late doc­tor-patient pri­va­cy priv­i­leges.

    The same con­cerns are play­ing out in New York, where leg­is­la­tion with a sim­i­lar bent recent­ly went into effect. The New York Safe Act of 2013 requires men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als to report a patient to coun­ty gov­ern­ments if they believe he or she is “like­ly to engage in con­duct that would result in seri­ous harm to self or oth­ers.”

    ...

    Hon­berg says he also believes the leg­is­la­tion is “one more fac­tor that could make peo­ple reluc­tant to seek help.”

    Some states had already instat­ed tough gun con­trol poli­cies for the men­tal­ly ill before New York.

    In Cal­i­for­nia, if a per­son is placed on a 72-hour psy­chi­atric hold in a facil­i­ty, then that per­son can’t pur­chase firearms for five years after they were admit­ted. That per­son is also report­ed to the NICS data­base.

    In Geor­gia and Mis­sis­sip­pi, gun rights are restrict­ed not only for those invol­un­tar­i­ly com­mit­ted to a men­tal health facil­i­ty, but also for peo­ple who brought them­selves to the hos­pi­tal.

    ...

    While this fight con­tin­ues to play out at the local lev­el, the Sen­ate will return from recess to leg­is­la­tion pro­posed by Sen. Lind­sey Gra­ham, R‑S.C., that would require bet­ter report­ing of those con­sid­ered men­tal­ly ill to the nation­al data­base. Specif­i­cal­ly, that includes peo­ple who have been crim­i­nal­ly charged and found not com­pe­tent to stand tri­al, peo­ple crim­i­nal­ly charged and found not guilty due to insan­i­ty, and peo­ple com­mit­ted to a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal.

    “[The leg­is­la­tion] makes an effort for clar­i­ty for states about who they’re sup­posed to report,” says Hon­berg, who sup­ports the bill. But per­haps more impor­tant­ly, he says, “it’s effort to try to link report­ing to dan­ger­ous­ness, as opposed to gen­er­al­ized stereo­typ­i­cal assump­tions about men­tal ill­ness.” Hon­berg is keen to point out that research shows men­tal­ly ill peo­ple are not vio­lent.

    That’s a point many gun con­trol groups can agree on. Hor­witz sug­gests that this debate could move for­ward if the focus was shift­ed away from men­tal ill­ness and onto oth­er fac­tors that research has shown to direct­ly cor­re­late to vio­lence.

    Why don’t we focus on peo­ple with vio­lent mis­de­meanors, who are at much high­er risk of recidi­vism? Or...alcohol prob­lems, sub­stance abuse?” he says. “No one is say­ing if you have schiz­o­phre­nia then you should­n’t have a gun... There are just too many unchecked guns.”

    Oh dear. It’s not a good sign when the orga­niz­er of the nation­al con­fer­ence set up to dis­cuss these issues wants us to expand the search for the “too crazy to own a gun” cat­e­go­ry beyond the men­tal health realm and into the areas of alco­hol and sub­stance abuse. Because why set up laws that reduce peo­ple’s incen­tives to get men­tal health treat­ment alone when you can also reduce the incen­tives to get drug and alco­hol treat­ment? We could just legal­ize drugs, treat it as a health issue, and watch drug-war-relat­ed gun-crimes plum­met while mak­ing it far more like­ly for some­one to seek treat­ment, but that would be too sane an approach to reduc­ing gun-vio­lence. Instead, we have seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion of the NRA’s “armed guards in schools (and even­tu­al­ly oth­er pub­lic spaces)”-solu­tion.

    We could also, you know, remind our­selves that one of the best tools we could pos­si­bly imag­ine for pre­vent­ing “men­tal ill­ness” is not some­thing specif­i­cal­ly direct­ed at men­tal health at all. That amaz­ing “anti-crazy” tool at our dis­pos­al hap­pens to be the “robust socioe­co­nom­ic safe­ty-net func­tion­ing in a soci­ety that lacks the grotesque socioe­co­nom­ic inequal­i­ty we see in the US today”-tool. Three decades of stag­nant wages and increas­ing­ly strained social ser­vices can cre­ate the kinds of unre­lent­ing chron­ic stress­es that can turn an oth­er­wise sane indi­vid­ual into some­one that just might “too crazy to own a gun”. Odds are decades of chron­ic, wors­en­ing stress will just make some­one real­ly real­ly unhap­py and the vast vast major­i­ty of peo­ple that endure the chron­ic stress­es cre­at­ed by our stu­pid econ­o­my do not become prone towards vio­lence. But if we’re real­ly seri­ous about pre­vent­ing peo­ple with­out a his­to­ry of men­tal health issues from “snap­ping” and going on a shoot­ing spree, it should be wide­ly acknowl­edged that stress is gen­er­al­ly harm­ful for humans and the US cul­ture encour­ages chron­ic stress, chron­ic stress­es make peo­ple unhap­py, and being chron­i­cal­ly unhap­py appears to be one of the near-uni­ver­sal expe­ri­ences that these spree-killers tend to have. There are indeed some peo­ple that are born with a strong genet­ic pre­dis­po­si­tion that makes them very like­ly to devel­op a seri­ous men­tal ill­ness but we have to keep in mind that quite a few cas­es of men­tal ill­ness are cir­cum­stan­tial. When you have an absurd econ­o­my root­ed in a “race to the bottom”/“drug war” cru­el­ty you should expect above-base­line lev­els of insan­i­ty to emerge.

    That’s all part of why our nation­al efforts to draw a legal line spec­i­fy­ing who is “too crazy to own a gun” is so fraught with per­il: cre­at­ing more stress, espe­cial­ly finan­cial stress, is a core part of the Ayn Ran­di­an ide­ol­o­gy that dom­i­nates DC’s id. The gen­er­al “men­tal health” strat­e­gy that is like­li­est to work — one where we don’t tar­get “the men­tal­ly ill” but just try to make like bet­ter for every­one in gen­er­al — is anti­thet­i­cal to the DC men­tal­i­ty. If the pro­les aren’t liv­ing a life filled with chron­ic phys­i­cal and finan­cial stress­es then soci­ety will become weak and men­tal­ly fee­ble (plus, the pro­les might have time to orga­nize). You have to be kind of crazy in the first place to make the Sword of Damacles of Bank­rupt­cy your nation­al muse so none of this should be par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­pris­ing. But it’s still depress­ing.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 6, 2013, 6:38 pm
  28. There’s some new details out on the pro­posed new “men­tal health” pro­gram for schools. It appears to focus on train­ing teach­ers on how to iden­ti­fy ear­ly warn­ing signs of men­tal ill­ness in kids. The fel­low that chaired the DSM-IV has some thought on the pro­posed men­tal health screen­ing sys­tem for kids. He does­n’t seem to think it sounds like a healthy approach:

    The Huff­in­g­ton Poast
    The Oba­ma Plan — Spend­ing Men­tal Health Mon­ey in All the Wrong Places
    Post­ed: 04/12/2013 11:19 am
    Allen Frances

    The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion pro­pos­es invest­ing $235 mil­lion dol­lars into a new men­tal health pro­gram for our schools that is meant to increase the safe­ty of our chil­dren and pre­vent future New­towns. The mon­ey will train teach­ers and mas­ters lev­el men­tal health pro­fes­sion­als so that they may detect ear­ly signs of men­tal ill­ness in their stu­dents.

    This well-mean­ing pro­gram is a seri­ous mis­take for two rea­sons. First, it is no more than a polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect, cos­met­ic solu­tion that dis­tracts atten­tion from what real­ly needs to be done. Sec­ond, it will like­ly wind up doing much more harm than good for the kids who are iden­ti­fied as being at risk for men­tal ill­ness.

    I real­ly can’t imag­ine the con­tent of the train­ing pro­grams. There is noth­ing to teach — no proven way of detect­ing ear­ly signs of men­tal ill­ness in chil­dren and no proven way of pre­vent­ing it. Pre­dict­ing vio­lence is like pick­ing a nee­dle out of a haystack. The rar­i­ty of the event makes accu­rate iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sim­ply impos­si­ble.

    Most of the kids sin­gled out (and stig­ma­tized) by the ear­ly warn­ing sys­tem will be ‘false pos­i­tives’ — not real­ly at risk for vio­lence or men­tal ill­ness and much bet­ter left alone to mature out of their prob­lems. And most future mass mur­der­ers will be ‘false neg­a­tives’ — com­plete­ly missed by the broad­ly cast net.

    And attempts at pre­ven­tion and ear­ly treat­ment are like­ly to increase the already ram­pant overuse of inap­pro­pri­ate med­ica­tion in chil­dren. Many, if not most, of the kids iden­ti­fied will have no more than self-lim­it­ed devel­op­men­tal or indi­vid­ual dif­fer­ences. But many will get unnec­es­sary and poten­tial­ly harm­ful treat­ment.

    A large Cana­di­an study showed that the best pre­dic­tor of Atten­tion Deficit Dis­or­der in a boy is whether his birth­day is in Jan­u­ary or Decem­ber ( Jan­u­ary 1 being the cut off date for school assign­ment). The hor­ri­ble con­clu­sion — we are med­ical­iz­ing as men­tal dis­or­der being young, being imma­ture, and being male. We should let boys be boys and not have our teach­ers play ama­teur psy­chol­o­gist.

    The expe­ri­ence of pre­ven­tion screen­ing of young kids in New Zealand should be cau­tion­ing. Short­ly after its ini­ti­a­tion there was a dra­mat­ic increase in the diag­no­sis of Atten­tion Deficit Dis­or­der.

    ...

    So it sounds like the exist­ing evi­dence sug­gests this new screen­ing sys­tem won’t actu­al­ly catch any future spree-killers (or help with men­tal health issues in gen­er­al) but it will lead to an even more dra­mat­ic increase in the rates of med­icat­ing the kids. Plus, now we have a whole new cat­e­go­ry of soci­ety’s prob­lems to blame on teach­ers. Nice.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 12, 2013, 1:55 pm
  29. Gun ‘R’ US:

    TPM
    More Sen­a­tors Vote To Loosen Gun Laws Than Tight­en Them
    Sahil Kapur April 18, 2013, 11:10 AM

    Fifty-sev­en sen­a­tors vot­ed Wednes­day to dra­mat­i­cal­ly expand gun rights after the back­ground check leg­is­la­tion was scut­tled, a sign that even amid the most con­cert­ed gun con­trol push in two decades, there remains more Sen­ate sup­port for loos­en­ing gun laws than tight­en­ing them.

    The Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion-backed mea­sure, brought by Sen­ate Minor­i­ty Whip John Cornyn (R‑TX) as an amend­ment to gun leg­is­la­tion, would have made a con­cealed car­ry per­mit in one state valid in oth­er states. In oth­er words, if it passed, Cal­i­for­nia would be forced to let some­one car­ry a con­cealed weapon in pub­lic if they were per­mit­ted to do so, say, by the state of Kansas.

    The bill failed as it was sub­ject to a fil­i­buster-proof 60 vote thresh­old, like all amend­ments. But thir­teen Democ­rats joined all but one Repub­li­can (Illi­nois Sen. Mark Kirk) in vot­ing for it. It received more votes than back­ground check leg­is­la­tion, which would have mod­est­ly tight­ened the nation’s gun laws and man­aged to find 55 sup­port­ers.

    “This amend­ment would wreak hav­oc in large por­tions of Amer­i­ca — sub­ur­ban and urban areas,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D‑NY) said just before the vote on Cornyn’s amend­ment. “Because there are no res­i­den­cy require­ments, crim­i­nals from all states could go to states, Flori­da is one, get a con­cealed car­ry per­mit and legal­ly — crim­i­nals, felons — con­cealed car­ry in oth­er states.”

    “Let Wyoming do what they want to do on con­cealed car­ry, but don’t impose that on New York, and vice ver­sa,” he said.

    Cornyn said his leg­is­la­tion was “designed to pro­tect the fun­da­men­tal Sec­ond Amend­ment rights of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens who are trav­el­ing or tem­porar­i­ly away from home while they hold a con­cealed hand­gun license.” He called it “back­ground checks on steroids.”

    Pro-gun pro­po­nents love the mea­sure. Sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion was brought in 2009 by Sen. John Thune (R‑SD) and received 58 votes. Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers worked hard to ensure its defeat this time around, wor­ry­ing that its inclu­sion could poi­son and like­ly scut­tle the final leg­is­la­tion.

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | April 18, 2013, 8:35 am
  30. Accord­ing to a recent poll, 29% of reg­is­tered US vot­ers think an armed rebel­lion might be nec­es­sary in the US in the next five years:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    Poll: 29% Think Armed Rebel­lion Might Soon Be Nec­es­sary
    Sahil Kapur May 1, 2013, 3:53 PM

    Three in 10 reg­is­tered Amer­i­can vot­ers believe an armed rebel­lion might be nec­es­sary in the next few years, accord­ing to the results of a stag­ger­ing poll released Wednes­day by Fair­leigh Dick­in­son University’s Pub­lic­Mind.

    The sur­vey, aimed at mea­sur­ing pub­lic atti­tudes toward gun issues, found that 29 per­cent of Amer­i­cans agree with the state­ment, “In the next few years, an armed rev­o­lu­tion might be nec­es­sary in order to pro­tect our lib­er­ties.” An addi­tion­al five per­cent were unsure.

    Eigh­teen per­cent of Democ­rats said an armed revolt “might be nec­es­sary,” as com­pared to 27 per­cent of inde­pen­dents and 44 per­cent of Repub­li­cans. Sup­port lev­els were sim­i­lar among males and females but high­er among less edu­cat­ed vot­ers.

    The poll also found that 25 per­cent of vot­ers believe the Amer­i­can pub­lic is being lied to about the Sandy Hook ele­men­tary school shoot­ing by peo­ple seek­ing to pro­mote a polit­i­cal agen­da. An addi­tion­al 11 per­cent said they weren’t sure.

    The eye-open­ing find­ings serve as a reminder that Amer­i­cans’ deeply held beliefs about gun rights have a ten­den­cy to cross over into out­right con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about a nefar­i­ous gov­ern­ment seek­ing to tram­ple the Sec­ond Amend­ment — para­noia that pro-gun groups like the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion have at times helped stoke. The data help explain why even the most mod­est gun safe­ty laws face tremen­dous, intense oppo­si­tion.

    ...

    Now where are they get­ting these ‘Gov­ern­ment takeover’ ideas?:

    Talk­ing Points Memo
    GOP Bat­tles A Threat To Gun Rights That Even The NRA Says Doesn’t Exist
    Sahil Kapur May 1, 2013, 6:10 AM

    Repub­li­can law­mak­ers are push­ing leg­is­la­tion aimed at com­bat­ing a threat to gun rights that even the Nation­al Rifle Asso­ci­a­tion has described as pure fic­tion.

    A bill intro­duced late last week by Sen. James Inhofe (R‑OK) and Rep. Frank Lucas (R‑OK) would ban fed­er­al agen­cies, exclud­ing the Pen­ta­gon, from buy­ing more ammu­ni­tion dur­ing a six-month peri­od if it cur­rent­ly pos­sess­es more than its month­ly aver­ages dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.

    The con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that incu­bat­ed the bill is that the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion is try­ing to buy up bul­lets so ordi­nary Amer­i­cans have less access to them in the mar­ket­place.

    “Pres­i­dent Oba­ma has been adamant about curb­ing law-abid­ing Amer­i­cans’ access and oppor­tu­ni­ties to exer­cise their Sec­ond Amend­ment rights,” Inhofe said in a state­ment. “One way the Oba­ma Admin­is­tra­tion is able to do this is by lim­it­ing what’s avail­able in the mar­ket with fed­er­al agen­cies pur­chas­ing unnec­es­sary stock­piles of ammu­ni­tion.”

    Only it’s false — as no less a pro-gun orga­ni­za­tion than the NRA declared last year.

    Last fall, the NRA issued a state­ment say­ing the claim was being pushed in an “Inter­net rumor mill” and was designed to “stir up fear.” The “more incen­di­ary authors,” the group said, “sug­gest that these gov­ern­ment agen­cies are prepar­ing for a war with the Amer­i­can peo­ple.”

    “As most gun own­ers will agree, skep­ti­cism of gov­ern­ment is healthy. But today, there are more than enough actu­al threats to the Sec­ond Amend­ment to keep gun own­ers busy,” the NRA said. “[T]here is no need to invent addi­tion­al threats to our rights.”

    The GOP-led House over­sight com­mit­tee flirt­ed with the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry in March when it asked the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty to explain its deci­sions regard­ing the pro­cure­ment of ammu­ni­tion. Repub­li­cans described it as an effort to “ensure that U.S. tax­pay­er funds are being spent effec­tive­ly.”

    ...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 1, 2013, 2:29 pm
  31. Well isn’t that spe­cial: The NRA just chose a new president/cul­ture war­rior to replace David Keene at its annu­al con­fer­ence in Hous­ton. Meet Jim Porter:

    The New York Times
    Meet the New N.R.A. Pres­i­dent
    By JULIET LAPIDOS

    At the White House Cor­re­spon­dents’ Din­ner, Conan O’Brien not­ed that Wayne LaPierre, the Nation­al Rifle Association’s front man, is mere­ly its exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, “which begs the ques­tion, how freak­ing crazy do you have to be to be the actu­al pres­i­dent of the N.R.A.?”

    That’s not what begs the ques­tion means; the N.R.A.’s exec­u­tive V.P. func­tions as a sort of chief exec­u­tive offi­cer; and it’s an easy joke. But as it hap­pens the N.R.A. has just elect­ed a new pres­i­dent, an Alaba­ma lawyer named Jim Porter, and he’s, if not freak­ing crazy, cer­tain­ly aggres­sive­ly provoca­tive.

    Among the less inflam­ma­to­ry state­ments he’s made in the last few years is that the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion “wants to take us …to a Euro­pean, social­is­tic, bureau­crat­ic type of gov­ern­ment” and that the Democ­rats have made “a run on our rights, our indi­vid­ual rights.” That’s hum­drum by con­tem­po­rary stan­dards.

    Less hum­drum, and cur­rent­ly mak­ing the rounds on the Inter­net is a speech he deliv­ered at the New York Rifle and Pis­tol Association’s annu­al meet­ing in June, 2012. At that speech he called Mr. Oba­ma a “fake pres­i­dent” and Attor­ney Gen­er­al Eric Hold­er “rabid­ly un-Amer­i­can.” He claimed that Mr. Hold­er and then-Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton were “try­ing to kill the Sec­ond Amend­ment at the Unit­ed Nations.” (For what it’s worth, he was refer­ring to a pro­posed treaty reg­u­lat­ing glob­al trade in con­ven­tion­al weapons sup­port­ed by every sin­gle mem­ber state except­ing Syr­ia, Iran and North Korea.) And he gave a short les­son in ter­mi­nol­o­gy to the assem­bled Yan­kees, “Now y’all might call it the Civ­il War, but we call it the ‘War of North­ern Aggres­sion’ down South.”

    For Mr. Porter, shoot­ing = free­dom. At the same annu­al meet­ing, he said, “Every time you take your nephew to the gun club, every time you take your daugh­ter skeet shoot­ing, every time you take your grand­chil­dren out, we’re pass­ing on the lega­cy of free­dom.”

    Out­go­ing pres­i­dent David Keene said Mr. Porter was a “per­fect match” for the job. “As we are like­ly to win most of the leg­isla­tive bat­tles in Con­gress,” he told The Wash­ing­ton Times, “we will have to move to courts to undo the restric­tions placed on gun own­ers’ rights in New York, Con­necti­cut, Mary­land and Col­orado.” State by state, Mr. Porter will pass on the lega­cy of shoot­ing free­dom.

    In a tan­gen­tial­ly-relat­ed sto­ry, there was an appar­ent “sui­cide by cop” inci­dent at the Bush Inter­na­tion­al Air­port in Hous­ton yes­ter­day when a man pulled out an AR-15 and fired two shots into the ceil­ing. The cause is unclear although men­tal-health issues appear to be a fac­tor but Glenn thinks it might be an Oba­ma-orches­trat­ed Reich­stag fire.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 3, 2013, 9:18 am

Post a comment