Seal Beach Asswipe

As you no doubt know by now, the Asswipe of Seal Beach was in a child custody battle with his ex-wife. So, doing what enraged men occasionally do to try to resolve such a situation, he drove to her place of employment and shot her to death, along with seven other people. Then he surrendered peacefully, rather than doing the right thing and putting a round into his worthless brain.

The defense is going to argue that he was insane. As I understand it, California follows the M'Naughten Rule, which holds that a person is insane if he cannot distinguish between right and wrong or that he didn't understand the nature of his act. Good luck with that one. Asswipe wrapped himself in body armor, so it's going to be hard, in my view, to argue that he didn't know the nature of his act. And good luck arguing that he didn't understand it was wrong to walk into a beauty salon and gun down eight people. They'd have to dig up the mouldering corpse of Johnnie Motherfucking Cochran to argue that one and I don't know if even he could do it.

Second, Asswipe was under a restraining order barring him from possessing firearms. By holding onto those guns, Asswipe violated Federal and state law. They might be able to send him away for a long time based on that, alone. But that's the thing about laws, the cops can't be everywhere and if someone wants to break the law, mostly the cops are cleaning-up after the fact.

Third, the ex-wife, Michelle Fornier, expected Asswipe to try to kill her. It is impossible to say whether she would have chosen to arm herself, but the truth of the matter is that in California, that option is generally not legally available.

California has issued 33,000 concealed carry permits. Ohio has issued over a quarter-million since 2004 and has just over a third of the population of California. Connecticut, a tiny state, has issued concealed carry permits long before the modern movement to liberalize concealed carry; they number them sequentially, and they've issued close to a million of them. It'd be a fair bet that at least 100,000 or 200,000 of them are active in a state of just over two million adults. The state isn't exactly awash with rivers of blood.*

Finally, now to a point that I've seen made elsewhere and it is, to my mind, irrelevant: The political leanings of Asswipe.

In this photo, the police are searching Asswipe's truck:

This is an enlargement of the license plate frame on the truck:

It would be easy to argue that this guy exemplified the stereotypical image of a Tea partier as "an angry white male with guns", but that would be an oversimplification. When it comes to rhetoric about guns, the vast majority of the Teabaggers are blowhards. Those angry white guys are about as likely to go shoot someone as they would be to go suck off George Clooney. The Tea party has not descended into egging on murder, at least, not yet.** So, in my opinion, trying to link the Tea party to this Asswipe is a low blow.***
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* That doesn't stop the chiefs of police or the gun control advocates from issuing their dire predictions every time the issue comes up in a state that is contemplating liberalizing their gun laws.
** The difference between the Tea party and the anti-choice people is that the Tea party isn't winking at acts of violence. The anti-abortion fanatics do, by contrast, encourage their less-than-stable supporters to go commit acts of murder.
*** If the situation was reversed, you can bet good money that the Wingnuts would be trying to link Asswipe to Occupy Wall Street.