What’d I Say?

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I wrote yesterday that the Interwebs already were concocting a story about Christians being shot in the head in Oregon yesterday, and that we could expect to see persecution complexes on steroids today. Sure enough, today the New York Post is reporting that the gunman of yesterday’s Oregon shooting singled out Christians for execution. This is based on the testimony of two people who are relatives of people they claimed were in the school who may or may not have been witnesses.  But the people repeating this story were not in the school themselves.

Note that people who actually were there are saying the gunman asked people about their religion — he did not specify Christianity — but then shot indiscriminately.

Again, this takes us back to the famous Cassie Bernall story, who allegedly was shot and killed at Columbine because she acknowledged believing in God. Bernall was shot and killed, but more careful investigation revealed that Cassie Bernall didn’t say bleep; it was another young woman who said she believed in God, and that girl survived. Even so, most right-wing Christians still believe the Cassie Bernall story. And some Freepers are blaming President Obama for inciting the killings with his hostility to Christianity.

Barring further corroborating testimony, odds are there was no singling out of Christians for execution; this is a story that emerged from hysteria.

Media outlets pushing the “Christian martyrdom” story are painting the perpetrator, Chris Harper-Mercer, as “hating religion.” But wait … Pam Geller believes the deceased Harper-Mercer was a jihadi. He was asking his victims about their religion so he could killed non-Muslims.  (Steve M has links; I’m not linking to Geller here.) Another right-wing whackjob has confirmed that Harper-Mercer was a jihadi.

On the other hand, several reports say that Harper-Mercer was obsessed with the Irish Republican Army. Yeah, IRA, ISIS, hard to tell the difference.

The portrait of Harper-Mercer emerging on sites like Raw Story and We Hunted the Mammoth is of another Elliot Rodger, the guy full of rage at women. We don’t yet know anything about the victims, however. We do know that Harper-Mercer was white, conservative, and liked to hang out on websites frequented by isolated and badly socialized men who fantasize about sex, death and glory.

Oh, and while pro-unlimited firearm freedom types are outraged that anyone would politicize this tragedy to talk about gun control, they didn’t hesitate to call for looser gun laws that would eliminate so-called “gun free zones.”

However, Umpqua Community College was not a gun-free zone, a little detail I don’t expect to see, ever, on right-wing media.

So what else is not new?

14 thoughts on “What’d I Say?”

  1. Well, Reuters quotes from his alleged online dating profile:

    He described himself on the site as a 26-year-old, mixed-race “man looking for a woman.” He said he was “not religious, but spiritual,” and was a “teetotaler” living with his parents and a conservative Republican. Socially, he said, he was “shy at first” and “better in small groups.” He described himself as “always dieting” and looking for “the yin to my yang.”

    If his name was Moustaffa Islamabomb and if he described himself as a liberal Democrat, Fox News would tell us all about it. What have they done so far with this information?

  2. It’s still very early yet, but I’m detecting echoes of Adam Lanza. Pistol-packin’ single mom thinks guns make a great hobby for her emotionally-disturbed son. (Has law enforcement checked on Mom, btw?)

    The local super-pro-gun sheriff refusing to release the shooter’s name is a lame attempt to shut down our understanding of events, and in particular who has easy access to guns. Since the shooter’s name is all over the place anyway, there is no other reason for law enforcement to keep it secret.

    And every time one of these shooters commits suicide or is killed by cops, we lose an opportunity to really understand wtf just happened. That’s good for the most extreme pro-gun crowd, imo.

  3. “The local super-pro-gun sheriff”

    It’s astounding when cops– who absolutely should NOT be trusted with deadly weapons on a day-to-day basis, as we have seen– are revealed as pro-gun nuts. It feels like cops and psychos and “oath keepers”, and separatist/supremacist sociopaths are all part of the same sick “club”. Violence junkies. Like heroin addicts. It’s very unsettlingly.

    I heard BBC worldwide interview an ex police chief about– maybe the Eric Garner case— one of the shooting-unarmed-citizen cases. He was ranting like an insane person about how “Black Lives Matter” was all Obama’s fault– not the police’s fault, not society’s fault. One can only imagine what the Brit interviewer must have been thinking.

    Big segments of our society seem to believe the solution to all life’s problems is rapidly moving steel-tipped bullets.

  4. I read an infuriating story on HuffPo a week or so ago, how the parents of a young woman murdered by James Holmes in the Aurora massacre sued for injunctive relief against the unregulated retail website where Holmes bought 4,000 rounds of military-grade ammo, his body armor, smoke grenades and other gear used in the crime. The parents were NOT seeking monetary damages, but they wanted to shut down the website so that anonymous buyers, as Holmes was, no longer could purchase these items without any regulation for public safety.

    Apparently Colorado now has insane, “super-pro-gun” laws that forbid citizens from taking legal action against free-flowing guns and ammo, so the judge threw out the case and then ordered the plaintiff parents to pay the website $203,000 in “attorney fees.” (So far, the parents have refused to pay.) The owners of the website gleefully brag that they will donate the money to the NRA. And so it goes.

    At some point, honest to dog, the sheer number of grieving loved ones has to reach critical mass in this country, so there are more heartbroken, dedicated commonsense-regulation activists than there are brain-dead super-pro-gun activists. But like the man said, “How many deaths will it take til we’ve learned?” A few hundred thousand more, at least.

  5. “However, Umpqua Community College was not a gun-free zone, a little detail I don’t expect to see, ever, on right-wing media”

    Well then see if someone went to school without a gun it is their own fault if they got shot, see how that works simple. I heard Huckabuck blame the school administrators, according to the huckster they made the decision a couple years ago not to arm the security guards that work on campus, so see its the schools fault. Like I said the only person who was properly prepared that day was the shooter!

  6. “they made the decision a couple years ago not to arm the security guards that work on campus, ”

    Campus police are typically NOT armed and they shouldn’t be. There was a case THIS year where a CP shot a student.

  7. I am thinking of buying a gun and carrying it on me at all times to protect myself from all the gun nuts out there. It doesn’t make sense to do so, but it doesn’t make sense NOT to, either. Now what???

  9. Cinemas, schools and churches can be desecrated by violence because these are not sufficiently sacred spaces in America. Now, if someone were to shoot up a stock exchange, then you’d see some big changes real quick.

  10. Congressional committee over legitimate use of fetal tissue and they won’t lift a little finger to help living people.

  11. I was watching old westerns the other day, from the 50’s-60’s, and it struck me as to how MUCH of a gun culture we really are…we are “steeped in it from birth”…Growing up, the thought of guns being bad never crossed my mind…it was never even discussed, as the three of us boys tore through the house in Cowboys and Indians…I was always the “Indian”…bow and arrows for me…but, back to my epiphany….there were shoot outs in the streets of Hollywood Towns all the time…there were sheriffs who were always trying to disarm the unruly cowboys, so they couldn’t shoot up the town…we called this the Wild West…Watching these shows brought to me the reason why, that way back when, they were disarming the general population, for the benefit of the general population….Now, of course there were always some kind of “varmint” shooting, and there was always the competition shooting, of which the USofA had a long string of successes in the long range shooting contests…Breaking through these “incredibly strong bonds” to their/our guns is not an easy task…I, for one, likes target shooting, and because of where I live, I started gun education with my kids at an early age…All or most of my friends own guns, and I wanted to be sure that my kids knew about SAFE gun handling and to be smart if and when one of their friends’ kids does something stupid…I think gun safety is more the issue than trying to change anyone’s mind about gun ownership…I know there is a segment of our nation who have gone off the deep end, but don’t condemn all gun owners, as being irresponsible…

  12. When I was a kid, Sheriff Andy Taylor recognized he had an idiot for a deputy. Barney was issued one bullet, and was required to keep it in his pocket. Several times Barney violated the rule, and things went south.
    Perhaps there’s a lesson here. Everybody yearns for “the good old days” Mayberry is utopia. Ironic how Andy is a classic liberal, and Barney the classic conservative.

  13. I think gun safety is a major part of the issue. As I have written before, the thing that scares me most is how familiar and lax people become about handling guns. I think one of the best remedies for this is very stiff fines for brandishing or inadvertently pointing a gun at someone. Accidental discharges and other similar events should immediately result in the loss of the right to carry as well as a heavy fine.

    I only recall seeing one citizen of our little town exercising his right to carry, and I found it unnerving. For me the message is that a person who is armed with a deadly weapon believes that he has the ability and insight to act with deadly force and to judge when deadly force is necessary. Without the presence of a badge, I can only see this as a delusion. Delusions and guns are a bad mix. But, then guns make a bad mix with a lot of things.

    On top of that, open carry supporters often talk about the desire to make guns such a familiar sight that people will see them as beneficial and not threatening. Yet, when someone “stands their ground” and kills someone, the phrase “I thought he had a gun,” always seems to come up. I’m getting double messages.

    I saw an interesting video of the police in the same state, handling “open carry” events. The first was a sidewalk commando type, who spouted his knowledge of the Constitution. The policeman talked with him calmly and somewhat sympathetically. This was contrasted with an African American doing the same thing. The events were staged and the African American man responded in a very similar manner to the sidewalk commando. You will never guess what happened.

    Fortunately, the second man was not shot. but, he soon found himself surrounded by squad cars and officers with their own guns drawn. He was handcuffed and taken into custody.

    This sort of thing reminds me of the young man who was arrested with a digital clock that he brought to school. The talking heads on the right, blamed him for not being forthcoming with information. They evidently believe that if he had simply said, “It’s not a bomb,” everything would have ended without incident. I would invite them to try this. Can you imagine what would happen if a TSA agent or police officer asked you about some “suspicious” object and you answered, It’s not a bomb?” What planet do these talking heads liove on?

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