We can debate it back and forth, point and counter-pointing. Certainly, your story is as plausible as mine.
Agreed, those Capital Police did yeoman duty, standing in the line of fire, in the highest tradition of police everywhere.
So, this is just a straight up gun control thread now? Or is that just for the gun fetishist side?
Has there been any update on the condition of those shot? Last I heard Scalise was in critical condition, and I don’t know the condition of any of the others. Have they even been identified? One was an aide, I thought, and another a member of the security detail?
The "grand gesture’ theory ties in with my thinking the guy was crazy. “I’m going to go to that field and shoot up a bunch of GOPers without any thought to how the world will react”* is crazy and it was crazily executed.
*I’ve seen people say ‘I hope the GOPers will now enact more gun laws’…HAHAHAHAHA…are you kidding? Especially if Scalise survives. Or not. He dies and every GOPer can call him a martyr. “Live free or die”. They’ll double down and say they’re willing to die for their beliefs.
And if several GOPers had been killed??? God help us all. The outrage would have been beyond off the charts. The left would have put tin hat stock through the roof with false flag theories, and the right…you ever see a guy laugh and laugh and laugh until he gets popped in the nose and it stings like fuck and he goes to 11 in a second?
Maybe i’m exaggerating and it would take more, but the difference between unlawful and not is simply a matter of will and who is willing to follow orders. The only powers judges have is that which the enforcing powers give them.
LA Times has the two law enforcement wounded in “good condition” as of 4:29 PM. Presumably that’s Pacific time zone so it’s pretty recent. No mention of the conditions of the other two wounded.
As someone who’s left wing (not liberal) I would probably call this a terrorist incident, but I’m not sure. Labour MP Jo Cox was killed by a right winger for political reasons and sometimes that’s called a terrorist incident, sometimes a politically motivated murder, and they’re not precisely the same thing, so I’m not sure. I wouldn’t strongly argue against someone who called it terrorist, though.
Hope this isn’t considered continuing a political jab hijack.
I can sort of understand the motivation of the shooter, tbh, because sometimes the actions of politicians make you so angry, but before you all misunderstand me I could never do it. Killing people is wrong, and that’s the end of it.
Even if I didn’t think that I know that making a martyr out of politicians always accomplishes the opposite of what you intend. Especially at a practice for a charity baseball game, FFS. That’s a good thing for them to be doing!
I really hope everyone who was injured recovers well.
Good to hear about those two, anyway.
I call politically motivated murders of political figures “assassination”, and whether or not this is assassination to me depends on whether this target was known to the shooter. If he just hoped to murder a lot of right-leaning people, then I’d lean toward simple terrorism.
I apologize for neglecting to cite this. I heard it just as I was leaving for work. I know I had MSNBC on the TV, but now I can’t remember who actually said it.
Occam’s Razor.
He was a nut case that was unhappy with Trump and Republicans. He thought he could kill a bunch of Republican Congressmen and change the course of the USA.
Even disregarding the political rhetoric, this has to be the most incompetent mass shooter in history. He was firing off countless shots and missed almost all of them. The ones that he did hit were just because of volume and luck. Don’t get me wrong, that is a very good thing and we should be so lucky with all mass shooters but that isn’t generally the case. In the end, he was the only one that died even though he had every advantage. It is pathetic just as he was.
It is just my own suspicion, but he was such an extreme left-winger that I think he was trying to make a statement about gun control among many other things. It didn’t work because he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn partially because he picked piece of shit rifles like the SKS with a very leftist lineage and had absolutely no marksmanship competence (again, a very good thing). I have owned them myself and you can make them work if you actually know what you are doing but he obviously didn’t. Spray and Pray doesn’t work except in dense crowds.
I had the privilege of seeing the comments come in on his Facebook page before it was shut down. He was a real piece of work and was denounced by virtually everyone. I wish he was still badly injured but still alive to see that he unified a lot of people.
I was just thinking that, unlike the killings of terrorists like in the London Bridge attack, I’m always a bit disappointed that th e killers died because then they can’t give any information about who they were working with (I don’t think killing in self-defence is wrong). So I wasn’t that sorry about this man dying. But you have a great point about him missing out on seeing the results.
Hopefully anyone considering similar will be dissuaded by seeing them though.
I’m not sure if its a hijack to report how other politicians, elected officials, and advisers are reacting.
I know that the Newt Gingrich reaction is chilling in its spin that this is some pattern that exists only on the Left, based on honest political disagreements about governmental change in America.
Its wrong, its untrue, and it seems a pretty cheap dig for political gain at a time when most other politicians are trying to unite people.
Statement that some odd guy was asking whether there were mostly Republicans or Democrats at the practice, was made by Representative Rob DeSantis, on Fox News, roughly one hour after the shooting. At the time, Representative DeSantis was leaving the practice to go to work. Here’s a relevant quote from the Orlando Sentinel’s article:
Long quote, but I think it’s all necessary for the timeline of who said what, when.
Newt Gingrich is as nasty and vile a sonofabitch as they come. It’s been a while since I was doing government affairs work but I seem to recall that he was the Ted Cruz of his day, just such an off-the-charts prick that even people who had the same worldview couldn’t stand him. Unlike Cruz, Gingrich has always had a penchant for political strategy and ideological coalition building. He has found ways to fuck up the coalitions that he builds because like I said, he’s an off-the-charts asshole and even other assholes take notice sometimes.
Although Scalise does carry a lot of the water for today’s more extreme GOP, from what I can tell, he’s not the worst of their characters. He does some extreme shit that wins elections in Louisiana – shit that wouldn’t go down well in other parts of the country but kinda, sorta needs to be done in order to win elections in the Bayou (I’ll let you fill in the blank spaces). But at his core, I think there’s some decency there.
In any case, as I warned some of my cranky conservative friends when they were going apeshit last year on FB, this kind of toxic rhetoric that passes for “discourse” in American politics these days has a price. Violence begins with an idea. When people start feeling comfortable sharing feelings of enmity, then things like this happen. I’m not just talking about the Trump train, either. Bernie Bros need to take heed as well. When you scream incoherently at people that “the system’s rigged” and you utter profanities at everyone who wears a MAGA hat because you assume they’re scum, then you’re also adding kerosene to the fire.
O.K. Are we doing or not doing political observations in this thread?
Is this going to be a ‘just the facts’ thread or not? I mean, I can do either, but I’d rather not catch a warning because I didn’t know the rules.
Back in 1985 or 1986, I think, there was a shooting at a mall in Coral Springs, Florida. It happened during daylight hours. The shooter had several weapons including auto and/or semi-auto. Hundreds of rounds were fired. IIRC he hit 3 people. He was soon killed by police.
I remember thinking the same thing: “Wow! Good thing he was a terrible shot!”
My understanding from the last time we had a discussion about this in ATMB is that the event thread is for details/information about the thread and political observations or other non-event details/conversation/debate is to go into a different thread.
Although political observations aren’t specifically jabs and probably won’t cause an instant warning it does seem to be derailing the thread. This is still a developing story albeit at a slower rate now so I hope this stays as a factual thread. Political rhetoric and political implications stemming from this event seems to be a large enough topic to warrant its own thread.
The rule for MPSIMS breaking news threads is unchanged.
Some of us may be occupied (I am at a stoplight) rest assured all will review the thread when we are able and act accordingly.
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