A shooting at a supermarket in the US state of Texas that left 20 dead could have been a hate crime, officials say.The shooting was an act of terrorism. If you are not clear on that, imagine, if you will, that the shooter had been yelling "Allahu Akbar" as he killed people.
A 21-year-old white man was arrested at the Walmart store where the attack took place in the city of El Paso, near the US-Mexico border, on Saturday.
A document, apparently posted shortly before the attack and believed to have been written by the man, espoused white nationalist and racist views.
The tract called the attack a response to "the Hispanic invasion of Texas".
This Asswipe drove from Dallas to El Paso, to a Wal-Mart that is hard by the border, to kill Hispanics. This is the second terrorist act against Hispanics in less than a week.
White nationalism is a ideology of hatred. Yet their sympathizers in Congress, in the GOP, in the DHS, and now, in the White House, do their utmost to allow violent extremists to do their bloody deeds.
The first step in changing this is to remove the Chief Racist now residing in the White House.
21 comments:
Just a note that no “good guy/girl with a gun” was present in one of the most heavily armed states in the nation, so let’s put that shit to bed...and Ohio has similar rights to carry both open and concealed, and it was the police that killed a shooter in body armor. What I am suggesting is...that given our ease of access to high-capacity rifles and pistols, the actions of our “leaders” have consequences...those that are willing to spout hatred should be scrutinized more closely and possibly have their 2nd Amendment Rights abridged...online radicalization has been present for years, especially in the Muslim world, and now its coming home to roost.
Now, the thorn in this paw is who determine what is scrutinized and what is sufficient...because, as we’ve seen, the local Sheriff or whomever is entirely too willing to deny carry permits for personal or political purposes. There has to be a way to address this in a way that protects both sides of this debate, or, if this genie is truly out of the bottle, this country is doomed to slide into anarchy.
Quibble: The Wal-Mart in El Paso is heavily used by Mexicans coming over for shopping and soldiers from Ft. Bliss. Neither carry guns. As I recall, Ohio law forbid carrying guns in bars.
The Asswipe of Allen drove 700 miles to ensure that he got to kill as many Mexicans as he could.
Satan cannot cast out Satan.
CP88, I'm not sure there weren't any armed bystanders...IIRC early reports said several people in custody. If you deploy a weapon in this circumstance, and then the door crashes open and cops come storming in, you are a stranger with a gun and you will be handcuffed...good guy/bad guy can be sorted out when the smoke clears.
There was a good guy with a gun at the wall mart. He instead of running in, grabbed as many kids as he could and got them to safety. I think his priorities are in the right place. taking on an AK wielding psychopathic piece of shit with a 9mm isn't smart unless you get extremely lucky, ie you come around the corner and his back is to you while he reloads. Otherwise get out, and get as many out as you can with you. When I carry it is to protect me and my family as a last resort. I'm not Rambo, nor do I want to be.
Comrade, granted, but the other 10-20% could have been. Bars in Texas are off limits too, with the 51% sign required to be posted.
Deadstick, exactly why the argument is specious...and dangerous to the moron carrying who thinks “can’t the cops see I’m a good guy” and turns toward the cops while holding his pistol.
Snowdog, absolutely correct. In a shooting of this sort, a pistol is a defense of last resort, not a magic totem that’ll let you be a hero by facing the shooter down.
All these points argue for finding a way to reduce this threat, while respecting rights.
I read that the search for accomplices was mostly because the cops saw other people with guns drawn, which would be a perfectly natural response to a mass murder in progress, but apparently of little actual utility.
I don't carry, but if I did, I would draw, and hope the cops didn't shoot me.
Also, apparently the Gilroy asswipe wasn't killed by the cops after all, according to the autopsy he killed himself.
We do seem to have a young, white, male, terrorist problem.
-Doug in Oakland
Word is that the Wal-Mart was in shopping center were guns were prohibited.
"This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."
--Trump's inaugural speech
Yeah, if it wasn’t gun-free that would’ve made a difference.
Not sure that’s correct, in that the Walmart Policy in Texas is that a customer may open carry in the store (no 30.07 sign) but the Staff have been instructed to ask to see the individuals LTC (CCL, which also allows open carry). The theory here is that under Texas liquor laws, the store cannot allow an unlicensed individual to carry on their property. Refusal to show the LTC can cause a felony charge. Also, the store can, under Texas law, ask you to leave for no reason, causing a trespass charge of you decline to cooperate. Walmart also doesn’t post 30.06 signs in Texas.
Additionally, they cannot not prohibit the carriage of a firearm into the parking lot, because of Texas laws and signage requirements. The mall likely had the 30.06 (no concealed carry) and 30.07 (no open carry) posted signs at their entrances (all or it’s invalid), but that only applies to the physical interior property of the mall, not the parking lot.
I believe that in both Texas and Ohio, the police were on scene within 1 minute. So it pretty much negates the argument of the good guy with a gun in both cases.
Centerpuke88, I don't understand how someone spewing hate filled rhetoric, which is a right that is codified by the 1st amendment, can disqualify them from having the human right to self defense, as codified by the 2nd amendment. When I see people so cavalierly speak of taking away rights that we possess, and that the constitution even goes as far as to recognize, it causes me to look at the person trying to take away the rights of others with suspicion. It should only be after due process, in a court of law, and with a chance to rebut, that a person could ever be stripped of their rights that are possessed by all people.
We do have a problem with white hate against other races. But it is not a mainstream white problem. I think that you will find that even among those who support Trump, most of them are not supporters of bigotry and anti religious speech and actions. I am not actually what you could call a Trump supporter, but I am a conservative. I am also a white person and a Christian. I am neither a bigot not anti gay, or anti Muslim or other religion, other than perhaps anti Satanism, simply because that is a " religion" that is anti Christian. I do realize that I may be more accepting of other points of view than many who claim to be non judgemental, white, Christian, etc. But that is on them, and not me. I take what the Bible says seriously, and when I am told to be non judgemental, I believe it. It is too bad that many don't.
Putting more restrictions on those who are innocent will not affect the actions of those who are guilty.
My guess is that half the people in that Walmart, or around 1,000 people, were native Texans rather than Mexicans. 6.5% of Texans have concealed weapons permits. That implies that there was at least 65 people with a concealed weapon in that Walmart. Not a single one of them engaged the shooter, because running towards gunfire to engage someone who has a high-capacity semi-automatic rifle when you're armed with a typical concealed weapon pop-gun simply isn't something an untrained person does. Any reasonable person runs like hell when someone like that starts shooting.
So no, I don't buy the notion that this was a "soft" target by any means. What it does show is that people with handguns aren't the solution to mass shooters armed with high velocity high magazine capacity semi-automatic rifles unless they have a *lot* of training. Like cops have. And even that's not 100% foolproof, as the poor kids at Parkland found out when their school resource officer, a Sheriff's deputy, failed to engage the school shooter and instead blithered outside the building where kids were being slaughtered.
Back to the subject of your post, right wingers keep whining "mental health! Mental health!" No. Mental health in the United States is no worse today than it’s ever been. Yet spree murders continue to rise, to the point where we had two spree killings this weekend alone.
We don’t have a mental health crisis causing spree killings. What we have is a Nazi crisis. We have a problem with young white men being radicalized with white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies in much the same way that the Middle East has a problem with young Arab men being radicalized in Islamist ideologies, with the same result — they commit terrorist acts.
And it starts at the top.... In May, Trump said we are being “invaded” by immigrants. The El Paso shooter said he wanted to stop the “invasion.”
Trump asked his rally crowd: "How do you stop these people" from crossing the border?
"Shoot them!" Someone screamed.
He laughed. Then the crowd laughed.
We don't have a mental health problem. We have a Nazi problem. And it starts at the top.
Pigpen51, did you even read what I said? I very carefully mentioned exactly those concerns on my first post, second paragraph. As for their 1st Amendment Rights, recall that the 1st Amendment allows the speech, but doesn’t prohibit results to that speech. The most common limit is discussed as not allowing the right to yell fire in a crowded theatre.
I have said here before that, demographically, the 2nd Amendment is doomed, and that the hardline posed by the current NRA is likely moving that inflection point forward.
"The Constitution is not a suicide pact."
Thomas Jefferson never heard of Goebbels, or of Facebook and YouTube.
The hate sites and hate videos simply must be censored, and if the Dweeb Lords of Tech are not willing to do it, then the government must do it.
>Like cops have.
BadTux, I don't know which LEOs you are talking to, but the ones I know get little firearms training. And less practice.
Centerpuke88,
The idea of yelling fire in a crowded theater is that it incites violence. But in a more recent case, things were changed, quite a bit.
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case, interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[1] The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[2][3]:702 Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.
In other words, I can be a white KKK guy, who talks down various other races, to the point of encouraging their demise. But unless I am actively and in the moment standing there directly pushing such action, like an officer or whatever, I can say pretty much whatever I want, and think for sure whatever I want.
Does that mean that someone else might punch me out, or hit me with a police baton or such, or even try and burn my house down? Maybe, but then they would be in the wrong.
And you also must remember that all of these mass shooting events did not start in January of 2017. They have been going on for a long time, and Trump did not usher in an era of gun play, it was there under several other presidents as well.
I might go so far as to say that murder and wickedness dates back to Biblical times when Cain slew Abel.
Pigpen51, you have again missed the nexus between a gun and such speech. Making such a speech may indeed be bombast, but when the individual threatening has a weapon, or immediate access to one, the question of threat and intent become a bit more unclear. We have seen movement to requiring certain individuals to surrender firearms for certain periods, mainly centered around domestic violence. I suggest to you that these and other example show the veil is not as strong as you posit.
Remember, even Scalia in District of Columbia vs Heller noted that “...Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
There can be strong arguments made about the mental state of most recent mass killers, and the courts will likely look favorably on measured and robust actions to address this threat. Again, my point is that as we become less rural and more packed together, the demographic support for the 2nd is weakened, so drawing a line in the sand is likely a losing position.
Ivory Bill: The hate sites and hate videos simply must be censored, and if the Dweeb Lords of Tech are not willing to do it, then the government must do it.
And if they do, then within hours or days all that stuff will be back up on sites hosted in jurisdictions immune from pressure from the United States, or hosted so that it's impossible to even tell where in the world they're located. Same with the online information about how to build guns at home from parts made on 3D printers.
If the government ever somehow vaporizes the First Amendment and gets the legal authority to ban expression of opinion it disapproves of, you know exactly what kind of websites they'll come after next -- especially with the Trump gang in charge. I loathe Nazi ideology as much as anyone, but the power to regulate expression of opinion is a power that no government, of any ideological stripe, can be trusted with.
Fortunately the ultimate defenses of free speech are technological, not legal.
Centerpuke88,
The measured and robust actions that the courts might take would include so called red flag laws. Which are also clearly against the constitution, if anyone cares about the 4th amendment. A person having one of their human rights taken away from them, a right protected by the constitution, without giving them the chance to have their day in court. Even when a spouse seeks a domestic violence protection order, the person it is issued against has a right to fight it in front of a judge.
I can see it now, when a divorce is going bad, like a friend of mine went through, instead of the old claim that daddy was touching the little girls in an inappropriate way, causing my friend to spend time in jail and huge amounts of money, to prove his innocence, the woman simply will call and say that the man is unstable, and should have his guns taken away, you know, for the safety of the community. And the man will have no recourse for that.
And now lets say, that the man has either valuable guns, or guns that his great great grandfather carried into the battle of the bulge, or whatever, and have sentimental value. I know how inefficient many major cities police departments are, when it comes to returning property. And so ex wife can stick it to the guy who was trying to fight her in court about a divorce. She might even say something in private, before making the claim, that if he didn't let her walk over his soul in the divorce, she was going to make his life a living hell. Starting with a red flag law claim. He can claim in court that she threatened that. Oh, wait, he doesn't get a day in court.
If you also remember in the Supreme Courts decisions concerning gun rights, the point was made that weapons commonly used in war were allowed, and thus semi auto rifles were considered as protected by the constitution.
I believe that the SCOTUS is one justice away from having a fairly strong majority that will follow the constitution to the letter. Then, I suspect that the 2nd amendment will take second place to the many other issues facing the country, such as abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc. Myself, I am a strong supporter of rights for any minority including LGBTQ people. And I never have been able to justify taking rights from someone just to get rights for someone else.
I do hope that you do not feel that I am disrespecting your opinions by voicing my own. It is obvious that you are a very intelligent and thoughtful man, and also well read. And I also recognize that I am not always right about things, and sometimes make mistakes. So I hope that you do not get that I am of the opinion that I am better than anyone, or smarter than anyone. I also am not a republican, but rather a conservative about some things and a liberal about other things.
No matter, I wish you well, and hope you are enjoying our back and forth, with no ill feelings.
Pigpen51, no offense taken or felt. I think you are assuming a lower level of evidence for “confiscating” firearms or such. As I note, the key is a robust protective structure, and I never said the Government had to hold the weapons. Everything is in the air here, so that presumption causes anguish and fright, which shows the need to examine more closely and consider options. Cheers.
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