The guy was from Powell, a little town north of Knoxville where my best friends live. I assume he was planning to kill himself as the police closed in; too bad he didn’t eat the shotgun as Step One.
They never do. :mad:
Some probably do, but how are we to know?
It should be. Terrorists or insane idiots come in every ideological stripe. They should all be eradicated. I honestly don’t see the problem with that.
Honestly folks, does it really matter what some addled insane dude’s political affiliations are? Can’t we all agree that there are people of this ilk that ride the political spectrum and will commit these crimes no matter whom the President is, whether or not Rush Limbaugh or Keith Olbermann says something about someone they like?
Og, get a fucking grip, the guy was insane, don’t try to paint him in my corner because our politics vary slightly.
Man, your friend is one cool hand. Major props to her, not only for acting quickly and coolly under fire to get her kids to safety, but also for her calm mastery of the situation overall. It must take some serious cojones to casually chat about how you broke your own kneecap in half while fleeing from death so soon after the fact. :eek:
Tell me about it.
She also said that this incident confirmed what she has always known about herself, that she is no hero. She says she never considered tackling and subduing the man as others did and seems a little embaressed about it.
I think that she did JUST FINE.
Yeah, in a situation like that, nobody could possibly fault her for putting her duty to her kids (and by extension, herself) first. I doubt I’d be much more of a hero if pitted unarmed against a crazed gunman either, even if I were alone. :o
What’s any parent’s first, most basic, primal instinct going to be when bad shit starts up and the kids are in range of it? "Get them out of here NOW!"
she did just fine. Tackling the gunman was better left to the people that were closer to the shooter and thus had more to gain and less to lose.
It certainly doesn’t diminish what your friend did, though. If i were attacked in such a way while I was unarmed with my children present, we’d have been crawling too, with our heads down.
The whole thing is just sad.
I am inclined to be glad the police got him and he didn’t get a chance to off himself first. I am tired of these gunmen (have there been females since Laurie Dan?) killing others and then killing themselves. They need to be alive to see what they have done–insane or sane; ideological zealots or just fucked up assholes. If they hate X group so much etc, why not just kill themselves–why take out innocent people? :mad:
It’d be nice if we could find ways to help prevent stuff like this, but that’s never going to happen.
I am amazed at your friend’s actions, autz. I hope her kids are ok emotionally. The 3 year old may not have too much trouble, but the 6 year old–I hope they do all right. Hell, I hope she’s all right after her knee surgery etc. 
You know what? No. At least not here in the US. I’m sorry, but I usually watch Keith Olbermann, and while he mocks the right wing, and sometimes says things like ‘shame on you’ or ‘there ought to be law suits,’ he is not inflammatory. He and other MSNBC political programs generally present conservative viewpoints as a counterwieght to their own. They don’t say things like ‘you never seem to have a gun when you need one’ or stuff like that. They don’t incite violence, or even mob mentality. I think it’s time we start trying to pretend like there’s an equivalence here. Fox News and some of the even more right wing media outlets are far more rabid than the left wing, except for a tiny leftist minority that gets virtually no air time or press whatsoever.
I agree that there are people out there who are just waiting for a match to light their fuse, and that if it’s not one thing it will be another. But I do think that the extreme right wing media eggs this on, and clothes these folks with an air of self-righteousness that might just be the tipping point.
Perhaps by today’s weird standards a case could be made for describing it as an anti Christian hate crime.
In the final analysis, it looks more like a crime committed by a nut case who was simply motivated by hate. I see no need to stick ‘atheist’ or any other tag in front of his name in an attempt to explain a motive for that lunatic.
But UU isn’t Christian. It doesn’t exclude Christians, but it doesn’t officially adhere (or object) to Christian doctrine.
Are Unitarians even Christian? (Not an insult, but I always thought they were pretty much non-denominational, almost a secular church; I know for a fact that you don’t have to be Christian or theist to attend their services as I’ve known Hindus, atheists, and Buddhists who’ve attended.) If you have to call it a hate crime, it could well be said to be against non-Christians (though “lone nut” is the consensus and I think the 2 unprovoked murders and several attempted murders are quite sufficient to try him for without having to tack on baggage).
I’m not going to agree. The more influential people will spread hate and lies, the more likely it is that somebody will act accordingly. People who do that bear responsibility. I’m sure there are people who will go postal regardless, but there are also people who wouldn’t go on a killing spree or detonate themselves in a bus on their own accord, but will do so once they’ve been fed with enough propaganda, enough lies, enough hate.
You can’t publicly state “Kill those bastards over there” in a major media and then act all innocent when someone listens to the message and actually kill the bastards over there.
Tell her that keeping her cool and getting the kids out safely was heroic, too.
Amen.
Well, I am going to agree with you- that way it all evens out.
You can talk all day about how evil liberals are, but telling someone to kill them is incitement to violence and is a crime. I think a class action lawsuit by the surviving church members against the right-wing hatemongers would not go amiss.
Sometimes:
46.1% Humanist. This is the most common belief system.
19% identify themselves as Nature or Earth centered religion (e.g. Wiccan, Druid or other Neopagan tradition.
13% describe themselves simply as Theist.
9.3% self-identify as Christian.
6.2% are mystic.
3.6% are Buddhist.
Other perspectives listed are Jewish at 1.3%, Hindu at 0.4%, Muslim at 0.1% and other at 13.3%
Some congregations are VERY Christian, some are very Humanist.
(1996 survey of UUs - since that time I suspect the Humanists have actually gone down a bit in the Unitarian Church as we’ve been working to emphasize the spiritual a little more than we did at that time.)
Ah, but think how much faster he’d have been incapacitated had he targeted a conservative church, where everyone from the pastor to the guy carrying the offering plate wears a shoulder holster.
Fewer unused shells afterward, sure… but the kind of sermon John Woo can only dream about.
I know you’re just joking around here, but this is so illustrative. The liberals are wimps; the conservatives have guns and aren’t afraid to use them. They’ll shoot you just as soon as look at you. We don’t just disagree with you, we think you should be dead.
Obviously, very few people would actually carry out the threats, but it seems like it’s becoming more and more acceptable to spout this crap.