Guy had bombs / incendiary devices and a rifle. Not his first run-in with law enforcement over his political beliefs.
Terrible. I hate “suicide-by-cop”. Just glad it didn’t turn into “homicide-of-cop”.
This happened about three miles from my house as the guttersnipe flies. When I read the name in the local birdcage liner I called someone who knows him pretty well, and she said he’d been getting more and more distraught about the local (privately run) ICE detention facility. While she was a bit surprised by his actions, she thought it could well have been a “suicide by cop” to call attention to conditions there.
But by all means attribute it to an Antifa conspiracy. After all, the anarchists are so well organized.
ETA: “attribute” is a bit harsh — it was more of an inference. Mea culpa.
But fortunately, not much of a plan.
I think it’s very likely that his plan was to get himself killed, and he executed that plan well enough to be successful.
Not, however, at all likely to be successful at accomplishing any other part of his supposed goals besides getting himself killed.
Attention will now be on the attack, and attention will be taken away from conditions at the centers. This was both obnoxious and stupid. Glad at least that nobody else was killed; sorry that he was.
Are we sure that he didn’t think that it was Area 51?
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Hurticane Ditka did not mention a conspiracy, which would suggest others were involved. He simply stated that an individual made the attack.
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In the news article cited in the OP by HD, the individual’s friend of over 20 years described him as an “anarchist and anti-fascist” and stated that she thought the attack was meant to implement his political beliefs, which matched how HD described it in the OP. Do you have reason to believe his friend was in error?
I like how the word “Antifa” magically appears right in the title even though it’s never mentioned anywhere in the article. The implication of an organized ideology, combined with how that word has been manipulated by the right into an inextricable relationship with the Democratic Party, would seem to casually suggest (without actually saying it) that the driving forces here were Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden (with special thanks for the generous financial support of George Soros and Tom Steyer). :rolleyes:
While the real story here is simply that a lone nut attacked an ICE detention center because he was pissed off at the well-publicized abuses there and was apparently rather unhinged. But the real story – such as with a factual headline like the one in the actual article – "Armed man attacking Tacomas ICE detention center killed in officer-involved shooting " – doesn’t really have the desired political clout, does it?
For years, the Second Amendment fundamentalists have been arguing that we all need guns to protect ourselves against government tyranny. I guess this guy took that message to heart. He was just going for a “Second Amendment solution” to the problem of our government running fucking concentration camps.
I don’t in any way condone this person’s actions. But anyone who has a “Molon Labe” sticker or shirt in their possession or thinks Ted Nugent and Dana Loesch have some pretty good ideas has no standing to criticize this attacker. You think private gun ownership is a check on government power? Well, so did this guy. This is what it looks like. This is what you wanted.
Or, did you think guns were only for conservatives?
(“You” being Second Amendment fundamentalists, not necessarily Hurricane Ditka, whose views on the matter I’m not conversant in.)
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False. He called them a member of Antifa. Antifa is not an individual. He is proposing, from the very title, that this was part of an act by the evil entity “Antifa,” rather than the act of a loner acting on his own.
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Why would he need to be in error? Antifa isn’t just a synonym for “anti-fascist”, which describes the majority of people in the world (I would hope.) It doesn’t mean “anarchist and anti-fascist,” either. It is a term for loose confederation of anarchistic groups that are attempting to fight fascism, one not averse to using violence when they believe it necessary.
I can’t rule out that the guy in fact does identify himself with Antifa. It’s even possible they would claim him. But nothing in the article reveals this. The title is, at best, a premature accusation.
Note that the OP has expressed appproval of what Timothy McVeigh did yet thinks Antifa is too violent.
Well, to be fair, McVeigh wanted to retaliate for the Waco disaster and start a race war, so he blew up a bunch of random bureaucrats and their children. That’s easily understandable. Attacking a concentration camp in an attempt to free the prisoners there is a little more extreme.
I’ve heard that antifa people sometimes hit nazis in the head with bike locks. That’s kind of like blowing up innocent people, eh? Maybe the guy mentioned in the OP should have instead used a truck filled with ammonium nitrate.
It doesn’t casually suggest it. It plainly suggests it. There’s no manipulation of the word “Antifa”. This incident precisely fits the definition of it’s members. The connection with the Democratic Party is the manufactured immigration rhetoric driving it. This wasn’t a crisis when Democrats held the presidency and both houses.
The real story is the “well-publicized” stories weren’t headline news prior to Trump despite it being an on-going issue. It’s party fed rhetoric designed to create an emotional response. This is the 2nd attack driven by this kind of nonsense.
It wasn’t a crisis before because we weren’t holding immigrants in deplorable conditions indefinitely before. It’s a manufactured crisis because Trump manufactured it by establishing a gulag system!
Or, and I’m just throwing this out, they could protest peacefully.
It’s virtually the same system in place from the previous administration.
Cite.
So all Trump’s rhetoric about getting tough on immigrants is a lie? Or is he just phenomenally incompetent and hasn’t managed to get tough on immigrants?
The cognitive dissonance is astonishing.