Have you considered letting an editor read your material? Perhaps at least run it through spell check? Fact check would be nice, too but one step at a time, ok Chas?
One of the last things we mentioned on Friday was the
attempt by a "sovereign citizen" named Dennis Marx in Georgia to
shoot and/or bomb his way out of some three-year old drug beefs. Marx got
himself iced before he could do the damage he planned to do, but not before
he'd run down the first law-enforcement officer who'd confronted him. This was
one day after Aaron Ybarra had shot up Seattle Pacific University before being
subdued with pepper spray by another student. And this was a few days after the
National Rifle Association had told the Open Carry Texas people that they
weren't supposed to take the rantings of Wayne LaPierre so seriously that they
frighten old people, children, and some of the people who send the NRA money.
The Open Carry people told the NRA to stuff it, and people started burning
their NRA membership cards. The NRA bravely folded like a cheap suit 24 hours
later. It had been a tough week for the public exercise of Second Amendment
freedoms.
That was last week.
This is this week.
Details are sketchy, but Metropolitan Police Department
sources close to the investigation say the shooters shouted that "this is
the start of a revolution" before opening fire on the officers, and draped
their bodies with cloth showing a Revolutionary War-era flag. Investigators
have also found paraphernalia associated with white supremacists. Sunday night,
Metro homicide investigators and FBI agents cordoned off and were searching a
small apartment complex at 110 S. Bruce St., about four miles from the shooting
scene. A resident of the complex said he had spoken with a man who lived in the
apartment being searched. He said the man appeared "militant," and
often talked about conspiracy theories.
Yeah, like Dennis Marx, these two jamokes allegedly
marinated themselves in the stew of guns and paranoia that bubbles daily in the
conservative media from fringe radio hosts and chain e-mails all the way up to
the polite precincts of the National Review Online and the Fox News Channel.
That shouldn't surprise us any more. The enabling of dangerous loons and the
empowerment by firearms thereof is simply a staple of conservative politics in
this country, yet another fetish object, yet another set of conjuring words for
the conservative priesthood, which (always) deplores the activity of a few
while realizing in its heart of hearts that it has no political future at the
moment, no real substantial constituency, without people like this and millions
of others who sharee Dennis Marx's motivations and his view of the world, but
who thus far have declined the opportunity to ventilate their fellow citizens.
(And, not for nothing, but it's beginning to drain over our
northern border, too.)
But then there's also very important point of comparison
between the shooting at the end of last week and the one in Las Vegas
yesterday. Both of them were an assault on the justice system in this country,
and on the people who represent it.
Sheriff Doug Gillespie said officers Alyn Beck, 41, and Igor
Soldo, 31, were shot while they ate lunch at CiCi’s Pizza, 309 N. Nellis Blvd.,
at about 11:20 a.m. Sunday. In a late afternoon news conference he said no
motive for the attack has been determined.
“It’s a tragic day,” the sheriff said. “We have lost two
officers with young families.
Beck was a senior patrol officer who had taught Advanced
Officer Skills Training and at the Metro academy. He was hired by Metro in 2001
and had a wife and three children.
Soldo has been a Metro officer since 2006 and had a wife and
baby. Both were uniform patrol officers assigned to the Northeast Area Command.
A law enforcement official who has been briefed on the
incident said an officer — unconfirmed reports indicate it was Soldo — was
refilling a soft drink when the female shooter approached him from behind and
shot him in the head, killing him instantly.
The woman then shot the other officer several times as he
drew his pistol. Gillespie said the officer was able to return fire but it was
unclear if he hit anyone.
And this I ask -- where are the cops?
Why are there not a million police officers on the National
Mall right now, today, demanding that the Congress and the rest of the
political elite take even the most gingerly steps toward disenthralling the
country from its insane devotion to its firearms? Why are police officers not
walking off their jobs in protest? Why are their professional organizations not
raising holy hell about this? They're on the very vanguard of what's happening
in this country. They're not simply first-responders any more. They're primary
targets, for god's sake. In Las Vegas, two of their brethren were specifically
sought out and executed in a pizza joint. For all the talk we hear about how
whatever the cops do to people we don't like -- the indigent, the black, the
Occupy people -- is justified by the peril of their jobs, for all the
unfortunate souls who are tased to death, or shot, because some cop thought he
was threatened by "something in the suspect's hand" 100 yards away,
for all the Amadou Diallos and Sean Bells who have to be gunned down because
they posed some sort of "threat" to armed police officers, where's
the public pressure from the people in blue against the people who now actively
hunt them down, and against the people whose livelihoods -- political and
otherwise -- depends on the cultural and social climate that sustains the
people who now are stalking cops in order to kill them at lunch? There's been
some movement, but do you know where some of them are? Spectacularly, some of
them are on the other side.
The thought that Vermont's top law officers might publicly
oppose gun restrictions isn't a novel idea. Sheriffs in Colorado are refusing
to enforce that state's new background checks and ban on high-capacity
magazines. In Connecticut, tens of thousands of residents are refusing to
comply with a new state law that requires registration of guns and
high-capacity magazines. In Saratoga Springs, N.Y., citizens publicly protested
the state's new SAFE Act last week by burning a thousand gun registration
forms.
Tragically, the paranoid gun culture nurtured by the NRA,
GOAL, and their pet politicians has leached into the law enforcement apparatus,
especially at the level of the local sheriffs' offices. Put plainly, after the
events of the past five days, any police officer who drives himself home at
night in the family sedan with the NRA sticker in the back window is a traitor
to the uniform, and is demonstrating a profound lack of respect for the brother
officers who were killed in Las Vegas for the crime of being cast in the role
of some Redcoats in the Bunker Hill fantasies of two murderous loons. And that
was how last week ended, and how this week began in a lushly armed and increasingly
dangerous country.
UPDATE -- Of course, there's always the traditional American
response. Arm yourselves to the teeth and prepare to make war on somebody here.
During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data,
police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly
200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and
night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.
The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already
look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of
thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily
armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a
liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns
drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of
"barbering without a license."
UPDATE THE SECOND -- Well, whaddya know? The Universal
Theory Of Everything holds true once again.
Brandon Monroe, 22, has lived in the complex for about two
weeks. He said the man who lived in the apartment that was being searched often
rambled about conspiracy theories. He often wore camouflage or dressed as Peter
Pan to work as a Fremont Street Experience street performer. A woman lived with
him, Monroe said, but he didn't see her as often. They were weird people,
Monroe said, adding that he thought the couple used methamphetamine. "The
man told Monroe he had been kicked off Cliven Bundy's ranch 80 miles northeast
of Las Vegas while people from throughout the U.S. gathered there in protest of
a Bureau of Land Management roundup of Bundy's cattle." Jessica Anderson,
27, said. She lived next door. Reached Sunday, the rancher's wife, Carol Bundy,
said the shooting and the April standoff against the federal government were
not linked. "I have not seen or heard anything from the militia and others
who have came to our ranch that would, in any way, make me think they had an
intent to kill or harm anyone," Carol Bundy said.
Congratulations, Sean Hannity. You turned an aging deadbeat
into an icon for copkillers
No comments:
Post a Comment