Remember, America doesn’t have a right-wing domestic terrorist problem. We have a long string of completely unrelated “mass shooting” events where gunmen declare that various minority groups or random bystanders are the enemy and kill a bunch of them seemingly out of the blue in an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of millions and/or to force political change through bloodshed, but since these folks are FOX News viewers, it’s just “unfortunate” when this happens every couple of months or so. Meanwhile, the real terrorists are the New Black Panther Party because OOGA BOOGA BLOOGITY BLACK. Cue the scary chyron, folks.
Longtime white supremacist and border vigilante JT Ready saw himself as part of a war that few others would fight. He amassed weapons. He donned a uniform. He formed his own brigade of volunteers to walk alongside him as he hunted what he described as “narco terrorists” flowing across the Arizona-Mexico border.
On Wednesday, reports out of Arizona said Ready died, not at the hands of drug runners, but with his own gun during a mad rampage inside a suburban home just east of Phoenix. Along the way, the reports said, he took the lives of four other people, including a toddler.
The Arizona Republic reported the victims were Ready’s girlfriend, her daughter, the daughter’s boyfriend and the daughter’s 18-month-old baby. Ready still somehow managed to use the event to blame immigrants even after his death. A posting on his Facebook page appeared hours after the massacre took place.
“Reports are unconfirmed that a cartel assassination squad murdered JT Ready and several of his friends and family this afternoon in Gilbert Arizona,” the posting said. “This page’s admin will keep you updated of the situation as soon as possible.”
Don’t dare call them racists, don’t dare say we need law enforcement to look into the militia and white supremacist movements, don’t dare point out the people going on shooting rampages are not young urban minorities, don’t dare point out how easy it is to get firearms and ammunition in this country, don’t dare point out the people who actually are mounting up for a shooting war in our midst, because you should really be worried about the fellow down the street with the different religion or no religion at all or the unarmed black kid with the hoodie or the dirty effing hippie Occupy protester on the street corner or the Latino family driving along the border state highway or the people who want marriage equality for their loved ones, or the woman who wants to get rid of the fetus she’s going to be unable to care for in six months.
These people, I am told, are the terrorists among us who will kill people, and not REAL ‘MURICANS like JT Ready. And man, this one stomps on all the asshole buttons, he gets all this hardware to play Metal Gear Solid on the border to shoot him some brown people because he has to protect the white way of life, and in the end the person who was the greatest threat to his loved ones was JT Ready him-goddamn-self, who took the chickenshit way out and punched his own clock after murdering a toddler. Now that’s freedom, my droogies.
America, you need a good swift kick in the ass. Here’s hoping this wakes up the somnambulant among us.
[UPDATE] And let’s be clear here, this asshole apparently had a plan that consisted of A) kill his family, B) then kill himself in order to C) make it look like The Great Brown Horde offed him so D) he’d be some sort of white supremacist martyr and his angry nutjob buddies would E) then start a race war in Arizona. He’s not just a terrorist, he’s a complete “New branches of mathematics are necessary in order to sufficiently quantify how evil this asshole is” type of terrorist. [UPDATE, THE SECOND] But didn’t you know that Ready was secretly a far-left dirty hippie Occupy protestor? I know because the Dumbest Man In Saint Louis said so.
ant
Dude killed his own grandchild.
Inconceivable.
rlrr
“It’s clearly Obama’s fault.”
— Fox “News”
campionrules
JT was racist, neo nazi scum. Who after getting kicked out of the republican party, went to cry on the shoulder of his racist buddy, former senator Pierce.
And then decided to run for sheriff as a Democrat – apparently because he wouldn’t have won the Republican primary.
However, I’m hesitant to call what appears – at this point – to be a case of tragic domestic violence – an act of terrorism.
That just feeds into the right wing meme that postulates that all those POC killing each other in the urban core is just due to the fact that they are ‘naturally’ violent.
Ready was scum but not every act of domestic violence is somehow terrorism.
We’ll have to wait and see for the details to emerge.
John M. Burt
If only . . .
If only . . .
If only it would.
I’m entirely willing to be pleasantly surprised, and for this incident to be the one which, somehow, resonates with the public and makes possible the long-overdue conversation about right-wing domestic terrorism.
But that would be a surprise as pleasant as it is surprising.
Mark S.
He shouldn’t have killed the other people, but he did the right thing in killing himself.
deep
Since when did the NBPP kill anyone?
deep
Oh, and since he was a Nazi that makes him a “socialist!” and therefore a demonrat coward.
MattF
Y’see, keeping guns away from flat-out crazy people would put our country on the slippery slope toward Euro-Kenyan-soshalism. So. In any event, one actual possibility here is that Ready had convinced himself (or the voices in his head assured him) that killing his family would set off a race war. Turns out, though, it was just a false hope and he was just a murderous lunatic. C’est la vie.
SatanicPanic
Makes you think that people who talk about “defending the border” and “defending their family” don’t mean what it sounds like they mean.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
It appears that the Caucasian race needs to be protected from itself.
gbear
Hell, that Facebook posting shows that he was using his own family as collateral damage to try to start a race war. The hell it wasn’t an act of terrorism.
I can almost imagine him telling each victim that this was for the good of the country before he shot them.
Deen
Disagree. The right thing would have been to get himself treatment for his violent tendencies and his paranoia. Too bad he lived in a subculture where those are considered virtues, not vices.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@gbear:
Yeah, running a false flag operation using his own loved ones as sacrifices shows an ugly amount of premeditation..
But don’t forget that this is only an isolated incident, amongst about three-hundred fifty thousand, ninety bleen other isolated incidents.
Cacti
This piece of human debris was BFFs with our recently ousted state senate president, Russell Pearce.
Russ was one of the masterminds of SB 1070.
Go figure.
Zandar
@gbear:
All of the This, in toto.
kindness
It wouldn’t bother me if the reichtwingnutz killed themselves and each other off. Taking the lives of others is way wrong.
I do believe in karma and this guy just knotched a bunch of bad stuff to his collective being.
General Stuck
Brace for the ‘both sides do it’ screeching. Led by General WATB, herself. Malkin will soon post the libtards are worse with the photo evidence of college students pie facing Bloody Bill Kristol
Oh, and WTF is wrong with Arizona? Are we going to have to line our NM border with defensive Drum Circles?
amk
scumbag nra – guns don’t kill people.
What a pos to murder unarmed women and a child. Hell should kick out this animal.
beltane
There is a considerable overlap between domestic abusers and white supremacists. Their alleged superiority exists only in their fevered imagination as they are, without exception, the defective backwash of the human species.
Egg Berry
Am I the only one who finds it funny that a neo-nazi racist has an “admin” for his Facebook page?
gocart mozart
Yesterday, J. T. Ready went into a home in Gilbert, Arizona and blew away four people and then himself, which was definitely doing things in the wrong order.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/arizona-shooting-2012-8546826#ixzz1tofTYwAk
aimai
The article is filled with chilling examples of the disconnect between people in suburbia– “everyone driving by” is filled with disgust and distress. Because there are no people walking by, this is a drive by community in which no one knows their neighbors. Another person is quoted as saying, in disgust, that she would have “come and got the toddler” and prevented that shooting because…what? She’s pissed off that she can’t have babies and the shooter wasted one. She thinks the child got killed because the shooter was overwhelmed with parenting cares or something that could have been prevented. He shot that baby because he wanted to–he was implicated in the violence directed at plenty of people and their children. He was a violent guy. He wanted to start a race war. He wanted to be Sherriff. He wanted to hurt people. His biggest violation was not being ungrateful that someone in his household had a baby.
aimai
funluvn
Small mind, big rifle. A whole lot of this going on in ‘Merika these days. Perhaps some one(s) will notice this time.
Jennifer
You know if we really want to deal with this gun lunacy once and for all, we need to do this: get a bunch of toy guns that look like real ones, and hand them out to every African American and Latino American in every state with a right-to-carry law…and have them walk around for a few days wearing these guns in the open.
I suspect that the people who currently support these laws would quickly decide that maybe they aren’t such a good idea, after all.
JCT
@General Stuck: Oh, and what are some of the gun nut assholes in AZ (some who apparently live not far from the guy) saying today?
They are all bitching about how bad “they” will look in the lame stream media. Not to mention how they hope the media is sure to point out that the guy planned to run as a Democrat for Sheriff (uh-huh, his stated reason for doing that was that he admired George Wallace). Along with the requisite support for his “pro-white” views because they are just the same as pro-black and pro-hispanic, wait, no, they are “better” because the browns and blacks are the real racists. And finally — maybe this really *was* a Mexican cartel hit.
So much intense stupidity and racism, so little time. So awesome that these complete crazies are armed to the teeth.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Hope in vain. This guy died after being shot in the head by his brother, with a loaded gun that his dad just left lying around.
In 1917.
The only thing exceptional about this story is that he lived to be 103. The rest of it could have happened yesterday. Or twenty years ago. Or a hundred years ago. America has never “gotten it” on guns and never will.
Raven
@Jennifer: Yea, that’s a great fucking idea, and when you do order real body bags.
balconesfault
Consider these armed border vigilantes.
If you’re going to aim a gun at someone, you better be ready to kill them, unless you’re just really stupid.
Who the hell would be willing to seek and harass with deadly force an illegal who has never done anything to them?
A crazy mo-fo. Period.
Cacti
@aimai:
Gilbert, AZ is Stepford with a southwestern twist.
Think Stepford, but with 110 degree summers, and all the houses are biege stucco with Spanish roof tile.
Jennifer
@Raven: Well, that is the unstated excuse for all the white nutsos wandering around armed to the teeth.
Amir Khalid
From The Republic’s description of his group’s activities, JT Ready was the ringleader of a group of vigilantes, which conducts armed “border patrols” authorized by no government agency, and presumably harasses people who don’t look American (i.e. white) enough to suit its members. In most countries, as far as I know, the authorities would consider that a criminal gang. Why not in America?
And now for something completely off-topic: Asia Times Online assesses the impact of Bersih 3.0.
beltane
@aimai: You make a wonderful point. Arizona is a dystopia, a distillation of everything that is wrong with 21st century American suburbia. Even if you took a group of nice people and stuck them in soulless, climate controlled, faux-communities sprawled out under a blazing sun, these people would gradually become less nice and more paranoid and hateful over a period of time. Arizona’s land developers are like scientists working to create the perfect breeding environment for alienated, delusional sociopaths.
Linda Featheringill
@General Stuck: #17
:-)
Lojasmo
Waiting for some jackass to stumble along to tell us “nobody here knows what happened.”
redshirt
And if anyone dare’s speak up against this kind of violence and mentality, Fox News and the Gang will use that as proof that OBAMER’S COMING FER YER GUNS!!!
Amir Khalid
@Lojasmo:
If I were a gamblin’ man, I’d put money on it being Clime Acts.
chopper
@Lojasmo:
i haven’t seen any pictures of the body.
Cacti
@beltane:
This.
Tempe is the lone island of sanity among the Phoenix burbs because of the presence of ASU.
I still wonder who it was that convinced the first sexagenarian that a triple-digit summers death trap was a great place to retire.
Hoodie
Obviously, the real problem was that the toddler wasn’t armed, because that would totally have prevented this. Therefore, we need to reaffirm the right to bear arms at birth, or even before that.
redshirt
@Hoodie: Gun rights begin with Zygotes!
sherparick
Very sad, but not uncommon news. What I find interesting is the way Fox has been exploiting loser like Mr. Ready the last ten years to propagandize for the Conservative movement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU2l4oh-7qk
Why has politics gotten increasingly wacky lately? Because, in bad times folks get angry and tend to retreat to tribalism. In Arizona property values have fallen over 50% from their bubble highs. Further, the Arizona economic model the last 20 years much like the Florida model, was built on folks selling their homes in cold climates and moving their, hence development, housing, and construction, all of which have gone sout the last 7 years. The business elite quickly saw that directing the anger of the populist against immigrants and “others” would make sure that anger was not directed at them. Hence sad, twisted, losers like Mr. Ready, and corrupt grifters like Pearce and Arapiro, became useful tools. And a Democratic party, with its current neoliberal pro-business ideology, without the anchor of the old Western mining uinons, was blown into the wind.
Roger Moore
@Jennifer:
Why toy guns? I think we should give all those “Other” people real guns so they have a prayer of defending themselves from the right wing assholes. A well armed society is a polite society, so now those assholes are going to have to be polite to black and brown people for a fucking change.
beltane
@Cacti: A friend’s brother lives in AZ and she told me that little league games there are always scheduled at night because it’s too hot to go outside during the day. Why the f*ck would anyone want to live in a place where the heat makes it dangerous to go out during the day? Sounds like hell on earth to me.
burnspbesq
Sad, pathetic, delusional, and heavily armed. The only wonder is that there are actually days that go by without tragedies like this.
What a country.
Cacti
@beltane:
I once had the misfortune of spending the summer in the hottest town in the state, Bullhead City, AZ.
Daytime highs were in the low 120s. Not exaggerating.
Roger Moore
@Cacti:
Advertising. You don’t honestly think Arizona became a retirement destination because a whole bunch of retirees independently decided it would be a great place to go, do you? That’s not how these things happen. Besides, with enough air conditioning, any place is livable for people who don’t worry about going outside.
beltane
@Cacti: Not a good place to live if you’re fond of outdoor activities. No wonder people have a bunker mentality there-they all live in bunkers.
MattF
@beltane: Slightly OT, but there are people who love the desert– I’m not one– but it’s OK by me. You find them around Tucson. And not anywhere near Phoenix.
burnspbesq
@Cacti:
Real estate developers. Think about it. It’s New Years Day, and you’re a soon-to-retire middle manager or skilled manufacturing worker at GE Power Systems in Schenectady, or Jeep in Toledo, or 3M in Minneapolis. It’s fucking zero degrees outside with a -20 wind chill. And the Fiesta Bowl comes on your teevee.
SatanicPanic
@Cacti: I grew up in the place like that. Hottest day I remember was 125. The heat sucks but you get used to it. And I love the desert, so it wasn’t all bad. I didn’t live in the burbs though, and not in AZ, so my experience may not be typical.
Emperor of Ice Cream
Helter Skelter … the 60s are forever with us. Teh Black One has just heightened the cognitive dissonance for these folks that feel like their lives are sh*t and need someone to blame. Our society is dysfunctional and getting sick … the weakest and most vulnerable are the canaries in the coal mine. This is a very dangerous time and the election season is going to be a giant Rorschach test for the country. I’m afraid that will be one scary inkblot.
burnspbesq
Arizona was sold as Florida without gators, hurricanes, or humidity.
I’m old enough to remember the teevee ads for Del Webb’s Sun City.
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
Pretty much this. I remember somebody saying that more people decide to move to Southern California on New Years Day than the rest of the year put together. They see the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl on TV, and decide they want some of that. I’d say they should be worried about the hot days in the summer, but it’s not as though the hotter but drier SoCal summers are definitively worse than the hot, muggy crap they get back east.
4tehlulz
Jews did it, obvs.
rikyrah
these mofos think somebody is playing with them. NOBODY is playing with them
SatanicPanic
@MattF: I wouldn’t live in AZ regardless but you’re right, if you love the desert you’re going to pick somewhere like New Mexico or Joshua Tree, CA, somewhere with some nature. People who move to desert suburbs are making the conscious choice never to leave their house for 9 months out of the year. They probably couldn’t care less about the weather.
Jennifer
@Roger Moore: Well, yeah…I guess my thought was toy guns would be cheaper and no one has to go through the sham registration process still used in a few places. Plus I guess I’m thinking of making an in-your-face point to these assholes who insist on taking their guns with them wherever they go: openly carried guns are only openly carried for one purpose – intimidation.
That’s what most chaps my ass about all the open-carry and stand-your-ground laws. It tells the most pathetic among us, “you’re free to mask your inadequacies by carrying this gun everywhere you go; NOW you’ll never have to deal with anyone humiliating you again because people are polite to the guy with the gun.” It forces obsequiousness to the weakest among us, literally at gunpoint. Fuck that noise.
ThresherK
@MattF: Is “the desert” still the desert for much of the suburban southwest?
I speak as a Yankee going through an incredible pollen season. Of course, I’m allergic to everything green except kelp.
But I’ve read that “going to the desert for the easy breathing” has been counteracted over the last ~30 years by people from the north and east bringing their pollenating plants with them, and I’d really dig some learned knowledge on this.
Cacti
@SatanicPanic:
Or if you’re a 1%-er, to an enclave of the privileged.
Sedona, AZ is one of the most beautiful places on earth. But it’s not somewhere you move to unless you already have Willard-type money.
Cacti
@ThresherK:
Phoenix has filthy air, but mostly due to a combination of auto emissions and dust, compounded by the fact that it rarely rains.
beltane
@SatanicPanic: I didn’t mean to be critical of people who love the desert. I’ve always wanted to visit New Mexico and, in my wilder dreams, North Africa. What I do find repellent is gated community/sprawl/box store culture out there. I am a firm believer that land use patterns strongly affect human behavior and psychological well-being.
ThresherK
@Cacti: Good add. I know that Phx hass expanded by untold sq mi over the last 20 years, and the added VMT must be a fright when it comes to (edit) traveling by anything but a car, but hadn’t thought about auto pollution and aerobic activity outdoors.
MattF
@ThresherK: There’s a lot of bad around Phoenix, but there’s also a lot of relatively empty space in ‘east of the mountains’ California, AZ, and NM. Nature’s not so Motherly in those places, and they can be fragile ecologically– but if you like it, it’s great.
SatanicPanic
@ThresherK: A lot of our southern CA desert has been hit by invasive species, but mostly grasses. Air quality generally sucks in the low desert areas. I’d love to live in a small high desert town, but there’s no work out there.
artem1s
Slightly OT. but related to the ‘both sides do it’ issue.
Gang of terrorists here in Cleveland were recently rounded up by the FBI for trying to blow up a bridge. Seems like the media and Fibbies are trying to link them to Occupy Cleveland. But all of them had previous records and histories of mental illness.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2012/05/accused_bomb_plotters_commited.html
Their involvement with OC seems to have been largely hanging around Public Square during events, where they eventually gravitated to one another. Their activities seem a lot more like what we usually see from militia groups gone postal than anarchists. But my view point is biased to see them as redneck, gun-toting thugs out to start a race war. I tend to think of the OCW/99% as relatively well educated kids of the middle class.
It will be interesting to see how this spins out in the news given Ohio is a battleground state. I’m sure the local media are salivating at the prospect of using this to tar the OCW movement but it’s unclear at this point how much twisting it will take to tie this to Obama/Dems and their efforts to tax the
richjob creators.SatanicPanic
@beltane: You couldn’t get me to move to Phoenix or Victorville if you paid me. Those places are awful. You’re right, it is a problem with land use. You can learn to like the desert, but if you live in some crappy suburb and never plan to leave your house, and nature is 50 miles away, you’re not going to. Not to mention all the waste that goes into watering your lawn trying to pretend you live somewhere that such a thing is acceptable.
Nutella
@Roger Moore:
LA Times has a tradition of advertising their warm, dry weather on a day in late winter by publishing pictures of whatever place has the worst winter weather that day. One year they had that story all queued up for the front page but the LA weather was actually quite dramatic that day — a tornado hit downtown LA. The Times suppressed stories about the tornado because they didn’t fit the narrative.
Merp
@Lojasmo:
Happy to oblige!
This theory that Ready wanted to blame his murder/suicide spree on Mexican drug cartels in order to start a race war is entirely dependent on that posthumous facebook message coming from him with that specific intent, right?
. . . what’s the evidence that he posted this posthumous message? It was posted from a mobile phone; can you even program a mobile phone to make an facebook update at a particular time? (You might, I have no idea).
No other posts of his were made from a mobile phone. And the wording of that post – “this page’s admin will keep you updated” – strongly implies that someone other than Ready has access to that account.
And if someone else, in fact, posted it, is there any evidence at all – like, any piece of empirical observation anyone can point me to – that lends credence to the idea that the poster was in on the scheme, that he knew Ready was going to do this, that Ready wanted him to try and incite violence against Mexicans? I don’t think there is.
So the idea that Ready intended to incite violence against Mexicans is based on implausible evidence, and a plausible reading of the evidence is that there’s no indication that Ready wanted to incite violence.
Neo-nazis are a problem. Right wing extremist groups are a problem. Ad hoc border patrol yahoos are a problem. The fact that these groups are violent is a national tragedy and needs to be dealt with a lot more seriously than it is currently.
But making wild accusations and shouting race war on flimsy pretexts do not make that more likely to happen. It makes it less likely to happen. Stop doing it.
Uncle Cosmo
@Cacti: I was through Sedona a few years back &…yeah, it’s beautiful, but when the first store you walk into is a place the size of a Least Coast supermarket selling nothing but crystals…
Now I did like Flagstaff, where I spent 2 days in early August, a lot. The fact that I came in overnight from Lost Wagers where the nighttime low was 85 F & hopped off the Amtrak into a 6 AM with a temp 35 degrees cooler probably had something to do with that, but still… Struck me as Santa Fe without the pretension & the adobe. (Who in their right mind deliberately makes a >$1M house look like it’s made of slapped-together mud?) Plus 2 observatories, kinda neat for an astronomy freak, & as the main staging area for Grand Canyon visits, awash with foreigners 3/4 of the year, which is cool for a cosmopolitan. (One night I walked out to find a restaurant & heard more German than English in the streets; next morning I lined up for the breakfast buffet in the EconoLodge between a guy from Helsinki & two schoolteachers from France, who graciously helped me practice my français during p’tit déjeuner)
I seriously enquired about RE prices in the area at the time, but now I wonder whether the nearness of the fundy-LDS belt has completely deformed its politics. Anyone know?
ksmiami
I think this is why I don’t worry about these f***s. So dumb, they will eat themselves, but actually I reread Asimov and frankly, the sentient robot age can’t come quick enough…
Commish
Best post in a while.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jennifer:
Haven’t read through all the comments, but someone may have already mentioned that this happened, for real, with real guns, in California in the 60’s, and Ronald Wilson Reagan was in the forefront of doing something about open carry, as in banning it.
Black Panthers were parading around exercising their 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms (and bare arms, at the same time) and there was an uproar about it.
Mickey
One less Republican voter in this world!
You missed the best part. He was apparently buddy buddy with that guy mostly responsible for the SB1070 law who has now been recalled.
Mouse-Bear
Not even his own family; his girlfriend’s family:
They were living in a home owned by Ms. Medoros’ ex-husband.
balconesfault
Arizona suburbs always make me think of Arrested Development …
Prup (aka Jim Benton)
@beltane: Then you have Valley Fever which is endemic to the area, was investigated as a possible bio-war weapon, and which, while usually mild, can become incapacitating and even fatal in some people.
Arizona, a true ‘garden of Earthly Delights.’
And, btw, while I am simply incapable of celebrating anyone’s death, in Ready’s case — unlike in the other prominent gun suicide of yesterday, Junior Seau’s — I can not find one reason to mourn either.
Uncle Cosmo
@Merp:
You have a point. At the minimum, there’s no need to rush to judgment here, before someone establishes how Ready could have set it up beforehand, & uncover evidence he did. (Among other things I’d want to look at phone records–who was the last person Ready called, & how close in time to the killings?) Or more interestingly, pinpoints whoever it was who tried to make it look that way, & why.
Anonymous
Not ALL assholes are handgun owners.
But chances are pretty good that if you’re a handgun owner, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.
PS And no, asshole, I don’t want to take your asshole handgun away from you.
jon
@Uncle Cosmo: That “slapped together mud” you speak of is the most sensible way to build walls in an area in need of insulation and without much rain. My question is: why would you use wooden frames and stuccoed-over drywall when you’ll just have to blast the air conditioner to keep cool inside?
Adobe wouldn’t work well in Washington, Minnesota, or Illinois, but it makes a lot of sense in the desert.
WereBear
@Uncle Cosmo: There’s a half dozen apps, some of them free, which lets people set up a Facebook post to appear in the future.
This does look like the unfortunately typical “Hitler in the Bunker” behavior where she has tried to leave; and he’s going to make her sorry.
arguingwithsignposts
@jon:
from my dealings with their shit software, Adobe wouldn’t work well anywhere ;)
catclub
@Uncle Cosmo: I am not ready to concede that point. If BJer’s are not allowed to speculate, rush to judgement, get their knickers in a twist over some random turn of phrase, all free of any knowledge or facts, the next thing you know people will be saying it is irresponsible _to_ speculate. And we know the opposite is true.
Plus if no one were doing that, what would the people who accuse the former group of jumping to conclusions have to do?
Sit on their thumbs? Productive work? Attain inner peace?
It kills the entire model of blogging.
Glyph_2112
This happened less than a mile from my house. I first heard about it when my son texted me from his school and asked why it was locked down. It’s very scary to know something like this and not know if there is a gunman running around.
It’s hard for me to take anything away from this other that the jackoff killed a child.
As for living in Arizona, the politics make me want to bang my head against the closest wall, but with the current republican crop of radicals, that could happen almost anywhere in the US. There are pro’s and con’s to living anywhere, and not having to deal with any extreme weather other than the heat has it’s benefits.
Merp
@Uncle Cosmo:
Yuhp. Exactly what I wanted to say, more eloquently expressed.
@catclub:
We shouldn’t do this about attempts to incite race war. Most everything else is fair game.
For example: could Romney be trying to impede the progress of gay rights by being such a jackass that Obama simply has to go “gays aren’t possessed by the devil” and people will love him for it, preventing substantive achievements from being made? Is this the master plan dreamt up by the sinister neoliberal cabal trying to prevent tax benefits from flowing to middle class couples? Shouldn’t Romney being craven to the troglodytes in his party mean that we should attack Obama even more vociferously?
It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Ben Franklin
But chances are pretty good that if you’re a handgun owner, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.
Anti-gun nuts are just as rabid as ex-smokers, and uh,………….gun-nuts.
trollhattan
I feel compelled to point out this similar story from soggy Washington.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2018110502_bunker01m.html
Survivalist end-timer kills family then self, but the latter only when they sussed out his mountainside subterranian hideaway.
Typical Obama voter, amirite?
trollhattan
@arguingwithsignposts:
Heh. Although you’ll have to pry Lightroom from my cold, mouse-crippled fingahs.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
@Deen:
I disagree with your disagreement: You can’t carve rotten wood. Some people are just ‘broken’ beyond repair.
Not only am I completely comfortable with un-redeemable idiots like this killing themselves, I urge them to do it early and often. IMO the horrible tragedy here is that he took others with him. Esp. his own grandchild.
But for him? I wish there were a Hell for him to burn in for all time.
Roger Moore
@Prup (aka Jim Benton):
How about “he took a bunch of innocent people with him” as a reason to mourn. You can’t separate his suicide from the murders he committed immediately before.
Mike Nardozzi
Sadly, not new. Charles Manson was trying to start a race war with his actions as well.
Kay
@Glyph_2112:
That’s scary. It’s pretty amazing what we’ve allowed to happen, don’t you think? Gun nuts and their bought and paid for representatives refuse all regulation, which means everyone else is subject to increased regulation like “lock downs” at school, as protective measures against gun nuts.
Eventually, one would hope the majority non-gun nuts would get tired of being locked into buildings, so a minority can do whatever the hell they want, but I’m not optimistic.
the Conster
@beltane:
My Republican but not nutjob in laws would come back to Massachusetts from wintering in Tucson with their country club friends filled with terrorist anchor baby stories and say the most ridiculous things about what someone heard from someone’s nephew’s wife about what happens in the desert south of there. They’re both college educated and fucking knew better, but they were willing to be so credulous because of all the racists and racism acceptable there.
Snowwy
@General Stuck:
The Paradiddle Line
Mnemosyne
@Merp:
Except that, as Uncle Cosmo pointed out, it’s pretty clear that someone wanted to incite violence with that Facebook post.
We shouldn’t rush to judgement on whether it was specifically Ready or whether it was one of his pals who decided to go that direction, but it’s pretty clear that someone decided to take this domestic tragedy and use it to point the finger at immigrants.
Uncle Cosmo
@catclub: Heard & noted.
On a serious note, although the horse has left the barn, I really don’t fancy the levuloblogosphere getting its twickers in a knist over this instantamundo, in fear of having some idiot hacker on our side of the aisle caught with his false flag halfway up the yardarm. (& that, dear Mnemosyne, is what concerns me–whatever the nutjobs over there might have done will eventually see the light of day.)
Jax6655
@Jennifer:
Given that the police on a multitude of occasions have pumped 20+ bullets into UNARMED Black men, this has got to go down as one of the dumbest ideas of all time.
Buy a clue, girlfriend!
Jax6655
@Roger Moore:
I was wrong about Jennifer having the dumbest idea of all time.
Winston Smith
@Cacti:
There’s a photo of Pearce and Ready hanging around together at some kind of party. I expect we won’t be seeing that much on Fox News — and my “much” I mean “at all.”
What a sad, sick tragedy. This can only be fixed by doing whatever it is Erick Erickson says.
S. cerevisiae
@Uncle Cosmo: Flag was pretty blue, at least a few years ago. Absolutely the bluest place in northern AZ. Pretty expensive from what I understand but a great town.
gaz
I blame Charles Darwin.
Paul in KY
@Jennifer: You’d have to be a brave African American/Latino to walk around with a fake gun (that looks like a real gun).
I wouldn’t want to endanger them.
Monala
@Cacti: Here’s a question. New Mexico shares a similar climate. What are New Mexicans doing right that has prevented them from turning into Arizona?
Paul in KY
@Hoodie: There’s a tragic murder case up in Detroit where the POS son of a couple went to their house with a fellow druggie and proceeded to try & murder several members of family. He killed his dad & almost killed his mom & little brother.
During the rampage (which went on for several minutes) his younger sister (8) tried to protect her father by coming at them with a softball bat (she was disarmed & baseball bat was used on dad/mom, little girl was physically unhurt). One of the younger brothers tried with a pellet gun & was disarmed & about beat to death with it. The poor dog attacked them & was killed.
I know 9 times out of 10, real guns usually don’t help the situation, but if the younger brother had a real gun, maybe the father would be alive.
BTW, they entered thru an unlocked outer door.
Mouse Tolliver
This is the second Minute Man related mass murder involving a child. (Remember Shawna Forde? She was convicted last year.) How many more of these need to happen before we can call it a trend? And how many need to happen before the media starts portraying them as the violent rightwing lunatics that they are?
Clime Acts
@Mnemosyne:
hahahaha…good old “it would be irresponsible not to wildly speculate before we know anything” for certain Memn.
Monala
Another question: the girlfriend’s name was Lisa Lynn Mederos. The last name sounds Spanish. Her daughter’s name was Amber Nieve Mederos. Her middle name, Nieve, is Spanish for snow. Any change the girlfriend and her family were Latino?
Catsy
One of the reasons that area is popular with retirees is because the weather is better for arthritis–even in the winter it doesn’t get cold enough to bother them.
My other half and I spent six excruciating months living in Phoenix while she was going to a trade school there. For a liberal who spent most of his life in the PNW, it’s about the closest thing to hell. Just a blight on the nation.
Mnemosyne
@Clime Acts:
That’s what was posted on the Facebook page. So is your claim that it’s a totally innocent, if erroneous, posting by a known racist and Minuteman who had no idea that people might think that “a cartel assassination squad” would be one of the ones from Mexico that he spent the rest of his time on Facebook ranting about?
But I think we all know that you’re not really big on the whole “facts” or “evidence” or “context” thing. Clearly we have to look at this one Facebook post in total isolation without having any idea who Ready was or what organization he led, and if you erase all context … it’s still falsely blaming a “cartel assassination squad” for Ready’s crime.
aimai
@Ben Franklin:
Really? I’m an “anti gun nut” and I never find myself open carrying my animus and threatening other people with, you know, DEATH.
aimai
Clime Acts
@Mnemosyne:
Are you for real?
Terry
@Jennifer: I like the idea of distributing a bumper sticker that says “Concealed Weapon On Board” and seeing tens of thousands of the wrong sort of people drive around with them. (Costs less than fake guns.)
Or, how about “Take a Squirt Gun to Work Day”?
Cmm
If a gunman ambushing and murdering 4 police officers because “Obama is going to take away his guns” didn’t set off any alarms, I doubt this will. They were able to stifle the outcry after Gabby Giffords was shot by saying that the guy is a random nut job, as well, even though he picked Giffords over all the other people he could have shot, and even though he had been immersed in an atmosphere of eliminationist rhetoric about everything left of extreme right, with Giffords as the local “target”. There really have not been significant armed revolutionary left wing radicals in this country since the mid 70s at the latest. I don’t count Eco terrorists because they are mostly small groups or individuals and the tree spiking stuff was horrible and murderous, but limited in both targets and efficacy. The Unibomber was also somewhat ideologically leftist but his philosophy was a mishmash. The only significant bombings in this country otHer than the foreign led attacks on the WTC and of coure 9/11 have been from the right wing–Oklahoma City, the Olympic bomber (who bombed 2 abortion clinic and a gay bar as well, people tend to forget that) and various abortion clinic attacks and murders. And yet the DOJ was forced to back down from a report characterizing right wing radicals as the most dangerous source of domestic terrorism in this country. I hope they only stopped talking about it publicly and are still researching, analyzing and preparing based on the study.
catclub
@Terry: I think this has been done. The bumper stickers say “Insured by Smith and Wesson”.
LAC
@Amir Khalid: especially since he has unpacked the last box in his new house in st. Louis :-) He is all settled in and ready to be dumb.
Uncle Cosmo
@jon: My friend lives just south of FantaSé in a custom-built house whose walls are RASTA , which is pretty much state-of-the-art material (85% recycled expanded polystyrene, 15% cement, sold in slabs cuttable with chainsaws, insulating, with concrete poured between inner & outer walls).
But the goddamn covenants for the community require that the house look like it’s covered with a slapped-on layer of mud. Go figure.
Uncle Cosmo
@S. cerevisiae: Thanky kindly. University/research towns tend to be blue-tinged (NAU, Lowell) but that close to Greater Deseret, you never know.
Young fellow clerking at the EconoLodge told me at the time that they were all primed to become a year-round tourist trap except for unreliable precipitation & thus iffy snow cover on the ski slopes. Apparently the local Native American leaders were blocking plans to manufacture snow on the grounds that the mountain was sacred & the snow would be made out of graywater. (This was 2004 or 2005–not sure where things are now.)
g
@Monala: Maybe, but here’s a detail that gives me more than I want to know about this sick guy:
“Morton said Ready tried to boss the girls and criticized Amber’s baby for being half Hispanic. “He said, ‘She’s 50 percent ugly,’ that’s how he described her,” she added.”
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/12news/news/articles/2012/05/02/20120502gilbert-mass-shooting-horrors-vigilante-jt-ready-final-act.html#ixzz1tqAMrcDb
Mnemosyne
@Clime Acts:
Hey, you’re the one who’s claiming that we can’t jump to conclusions about a known Neo-Nazi who murdered his girlfriend, girlfriend’s daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, and a toddler before killing himself. Maybe he had a really good reason for murdering four people and then turning the gun on himself and we just don’t know about it.
Wait, let me guess — the 18-month-old baby wrestled the gun away from Ready and he shot her in self-defense, amirite? After all, we don’t know it didn’t happen that way, so we shouldn’t rush to speculate how it happened.
Clime Acts
@Mnemosyne:
Three is something wrong with you. I wonder what neurosis is behind your desperate need to jump to conclusions, assume, speculate, and pontificate; all without any evidence sans what you read in the media…
…thoughts on what your neurotic need stems from?
Mnemosyne
@Clime Acts:
You’re the one making excuses for a guy who murdered four people — including an 18-month-old baby — and then killed himself. After all, in your world there are dozens of good excuses for killing four people — including an 18-month-old baby — so there’s no reason to jump to conclusions.
Why don’t you enumerate some of those for us? You were full of excuses for George Zimmerman killing an unarmed 17-year-old, so I’m sure you’ll have some completely plausible and logical reasons why Ready was totally justified in killing his girlfriend and her family, so therefore we can’t judge him until we hear why his bitch of a girlfriend deserved to die along with her daughter, daughter’s boyfriend, and 18-month-old granddaughter.
Clime Acts
@Mnemosyne:
Memn…seriously, take a deep breath and read my actual comments in this thread. I haven’t written one word about this incident one way or the other.
“Making excuses?” wtf?
All I’ve mentioned is YOUR reliably over the top speculation about what happened, and how eager you are to dissect a case with very little information.
drawandstrike
Yes, let’s ignore the fact this guy was an OWS Arizona regular:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2012/05/horror-neo-nazi-occupy-phoenix-protester-goes-on-shooting-rampage-5-dead/
So that’s 1 OWS guy killing people in AZ, 5 OWS arrested plotting a terror attack in Cleveland, 7,000 arrests in 8 months, thousands of acts of vandalism, hundreds of assaults, but hey lets still wait with bated breath for the violent Tea Party to…you know..do some ACTUAL violence.
Stupidity runs deep.
Mnemosyne
@Clime Acts:
No?
I do love how a posting on the guy’s Facebook page claiming that it was “a cartel assassination squad” that really did the crime is not wild speculation in your book, but any commentary on that claim that points out that the police say it was a murder/suicide is totally wild speculation.
I guess we have to look at all of the possibilities equally because, after all, we don’t have any photos showing Ready doing the murders, so it’s equally possible that it really was a Mexican drug gang that killed those people, amirite?
ETA: In Clime’s world, only a fool would take the word of the police over that of a racist Neo-Nazi because obviously the racist Neo-Nazi is a much more trustworthy source than teh gubbmint.
Clime Acts
@Mnemosyne:
OK. Enough. You’re just flat out psycho.
Soonergrunt
@drawandstrike: Going to one meeting to get some camera time does not make someone a regular of anything.
Quoting Jim “The dumbest motherfucker on the internet” Hoft does however, make you sad, pathetic, stupid, and probably impotent.
gaz
I got out of the boat. I visited gateway pundit. I waded the fever swamp and all I got was this lousy bacterial infection.
I need to shower. Twice.
gaz
@Soonergrunt: drawandstrike crawled out from under his rock at Hoft’s place, I see.
Hai!
Patricia Kayden
Guns don’t kill – Repubs do!
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Emporer- yeah Helter Skelter is right. I’m surprised more people haven’t noted the glaring similarity between the plans of this guy and Manson. Come to think of it, maybe Manson could get the VP slot for the GOP.
Mnemosyne
@Clime Acts:
Yes, clearly I’m psycho for pointing out that the police report is probably more accurate than the race-baiting Facebook post. After all, if we don’t completely believe the Facebook posting over what the government said, clearly we’re just little authoritarians who believe everything the government tells us.
jon
@Uncle Cosmo: Those community covenants are for those who choose to live under the petty dictatorships known as Home Owners Associations. Those things are truly a blight upon the ideals of liberty and property, but since the faux rich people who flee urban areas consider them to be the protectors of all that matters (which is real estate values), good luck convincing those Kool-Ade drunks of that.
Clime Acts
@Mnemosyne:
Dearest, you are a psycho because you keep arguing even when I’m not disagreeing with you about anything at all.
Meds. Look into it.
Sally Rakowski
@Jennifer
This sounds like one of the worst-designed social experiments ever concocted, where you care not one wit about your subjects and the dangers you’d be exposing them to, Jennifer. It sounds almost racist on your part, like it was about as well-thought out an idea as something concocted on ‘Jackass’.
This makes Jim Hoft look like a genius by comparison.
Drew
Yeah, that Jennifer comment was bizarrely ignorant, and definitely slightly racialist.
Remember the (black) grade school kid shot by cops in New Jersey for carrying a toy gun, which then caused toy gun manufacturers to stop making “realistic looking toy guns”, as if THAT were to blame.
Sally Rakowski
Does Jennifer always just blurt things out without thinking beforehand?