Well that didn’t take long. Once the media makes a television star out of a crazed gunman, the copycats begin to surface. Already we have Timothy Courtois who was pulled over “for doing 112 mph on the Maine Turnpike in York Sunday morning.”
Upon pulling him over, police found an assault rifle, four handguns and several boxes of ammunition, they said. Also found inside his car were recent news clippings of the mass shooting at the Colorado movie theater, police said.
Police said Courtois then admitted to police he had attended the Batman movie at the Cinemagic Theater in Saco Saturday night with a loaded gun in his backpack. He also told authorities that he was on his way to Derry, N.H. to shoot a former employer. (photo)
I don’t know how to stop this madness, but I’m pretty damn sure less gun control isn’t the solution. [via watertiger]
BGinCHI
Dylan said it best:
Probably works better for the neocons, but I like it for the NRA too.
jwb
Think of it this way: when everyone has a personal nuclear bomb, we won’t have any rogue nuclear states. amirite?
Nom de Plume
We can at least be thankful that most of these guys aren’t terribly intelligent. Way to keep things on the down-low there, Hawking.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Doesn’t this mean that he was uniquely prepared in case a gunmen stormed the theater he was in? Isn’t that how this logic works?
Dork
Did he have red hair?
redshirt
He had newspaper clippings of the Aurora shooting. Sure sign of madness – who the hell clips things out of newspapers anymore?
Also, I hit 100 on the Maine Turnpike on Friday. But it was for good, not ill!
Davis X. Machina
The freedom’s so thick up heah you could hang your hat on it:
Article I, Section 16 of the State of Maine Constitution — “Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.”
We added the italicized clause by referendum in 1987.
beltane
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Maybe this clown is the hero the wingnuts have been looking for. Quick, someone give him his own show on Fox before CNN signs him on.
Punchy
They write this in the article as if it’s a bad thing. Isn’t this precisely what the wingtards want Real Merkins to start doing? Start packing at theaters, hospitals, day care centers, nursing homes…cant be sure where the next crazy guy will surface, so better to take loaded guns everywhere?
Seriously, absent the admission of the homicide, wouldn’t the NRA defend this guy crotching a glock during a movie?
handy
Yes it is, you just don’t believe hard enough in the power of magical thinking.
Ash Can
Thank goodness he was caught before he started shooting. We won’t always be so lucky.
dedc79
Clearly the solution is for the police to let the guy go and to make sure his former employer owns a guy and has it on him so he can defend himself.
Republicans may not believe in evolution but I wonder if they believe in devolution because that’s what our civilization seems to be doing.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ)
I’m not sure how to stop it but I think better access to mental health treatment and facilities would be a good start. Of course we can’t have that on the public dime.
One of the tragedies of the Reagan era was he yanked funding for mental hospitals, and a lot of them folded. Not coincidentally, that’s when our homeless problem got a lot worse.
We can’t have nice things like good, appropriate, and affordable treatment of mentally ill people because that’s a public health issue, and anything public we just can’t have because the government never does anything worthwhile. Except build guns and bombs.
jwb
@Punchy: He should have said he needed all those guns to stand his ground against his former employer.
El Cid
One can only hope that the right lesson was learned — that everyone else on the Maine Turnpike pack some heat in case they have the
exciting opportunitysolemn responsibility of defending themselves against such an attacker. Or, of course, if someone cuts them off.Libby Spencer
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ): I’m so old I remember when Reagan did that and the turned all the former wards of the psychiatric hospitals loose on the streets. They swelled the ranks of the homeless.
wenchacha
For many years we have taken the family to Old Orchard Beach, ME. We’ve probably been to that theater. Sonofabitch.
I’ve posted that my son lost his best friend to gun violence earlier this year. It becomes difficult to separate from the sense of loss when this happens. Survivors of other massacres must struggle with the trauma when it happens so often; I think I would.
I see all the mourning friends and families on television, and now I know a little bit about what they are feeling. I would like to know the stats on how many people in the US have lost close friends or family to gun violence.
paulfl
What hypocrisy from the far-right conservative extremists. Like clockwork, they routinely come out after every one of these horrific mass shooting events (one a year these days…) and lecture the media and the rest of the country on how people should not “jump to conclusions” and that guns aren’t the problem and that these killings are all just the work of demented lunatics who would have found any way to deliver mayhem and death, etc. And in the next breath, these monsters instantly finger the “liberal values” of America as the reason for the “depravity” of the murderers and this would never happen if the USA was a Christian fundamentalist dictatorship, etc. Guns kill people, and assault weapons with 6,000 rounds of ammo bought in bulk off the web kill even more people… – Principled Progressive
El Cid
I’ll give this guy some credit, in the context of the demonic state in which we have arrived:
At least he claimed to be targeting his murderous rage upon one identifiable person connected with his life.
If we could go back to the good old days when murderous fucks would merely target innocent lives directly connected to them, rather than fetishize killing mass numbers of people in public whom they don’t know, well, it’d still be shitty, but at least maybe one or two people would be murdered instead of someone shooting 70+ people in a theater or college.
Philosophy, as written by ironic asides intended to be spoken by mob characters on TV.
MomSense
Damn, but this hits close to home. I have attended many movies at that theater with kids in tow. I am relieved that he was caught before he was able to harm anyone.
kindness
Yesterday’s exchange on Fox between Diane Feinstein & Ron Johnson (Wisconsin Senator) was a picture of the debate as it is allowed today.
DiFi (who I don’t like but will vote for) said the old Assault Weapons Ban she had engineered in 1994 would have worked. She’s right to the extent that had the insane guy only had 10 round clips he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze off so many shots.
Ron Johnson tut tutted DiFi and said what was really needed was to arm more people so the could have whipped out their guns and exchanged gunfire……in a panic’d, crowded theater….with a guy wearing completely covering kevlar bulletproof clothes.
Yea, that’s the ticket! What could ever go wrong in that scenerio?
At a minimum they should be able to limit clip sizes to 10 rounds and illegalize older larger capacity magazines. Of course, that won’t happen.
gene108
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us? (formerly MarkJ):
Part of the issue was a change away from locking people up for years on end, instead of trying to actually treat them and get them back into society and functional again.
There was a clinical movement away from large hospitals to smaller facilities that would try and get people out and into the world faster.
The problem came, when they still needed care and services after being released, but no money was available to staff any sort of post-inpatient care.
This problem continues through today.
LanceThruster
Maybe Gitmo can be used as a place to incarcerate those seeking the “fame” from their vile actions. I think I would approve of a tribunal (with proper checks and balances) that could mete out punishment/incarceration for the protection of the population while denying said perp the infamy they so desperately desire.
Greed Is God
Have we reached Peak Gun Nut yet?
NCSteve
@beltane: How can you say that? This man harbored ill will toward a job creator!
LanceThruster
@El Cid: Your points are well taken. I’m surprised it wasn’t the typical murder/suicide scenario.
I’ve always said, if you have the necessary rage to commit murder/suicide, do the suicide first, and if you still have all that pent up rage, you have my blessing for the part 2.
gene108
@kindness:
One day, when you are going home,
or walking down the street,
or sitting at the library or at your doctor’s office,
or getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist’s office,
or shopping in the shopping mall,
or at the car dealer’s looking for a new car,
and you get jumped by a pack of 50 criminals, you’d be wishing you had more than 10 rounds in your clip to defend yourself and everyone around you.
The second you take to reload, you’ll be killed by the remaining 40 bad guys.
That’s why nothing less than a 100 rounds per clip will do.
Greed Is God
@kindness:
Madame Senator, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten to twenty dozen killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks.
trollhattan
Please report to the nearest “Help, I’m a commie and don’t know what to do(tm)” deprogramming center.
Wasn’t there a Glenn-Beck-inspired yutz busted on his way to California on a similar “mission”?
El Cid
@kindness: People need to recognize that this is a values argument. Based on fantasy and cinematic visions, yes, but values.
The point made in such arguments isn’t that fewer people would be killed.
No, that’s not what’s important here.
What’s important is their sense of balance, of justice, of fairness:
Some guy shoots at us, we get to shoot back.
Okay, maybe more innocent people die. Well, that’s unfortunate, but it doesn’t violate that sense of fairness: I didn’t get to shoot back.
Sorry about your little boy getting shot, I didn’t mean to, but you have to understand it was part and parcel of me trying to help save his life.
It’s about the god-damn American right to pull out one’s firearm and blow off your own fucking nose to spite that god-damn uppity face its on.
YellowJournalism
@kindness: Only 10?! But what do we do when the zombies attack?
And is that the same town of Derry used in Stephen King’s It? Perhaps the guy’s boss is a maniac killer clown…
Southern Beale
6 Facts About Guns, Violence & Gun Control.
Good piece in the WaPo.
whidby
We could require instruction and testing to get a firearms license and institute controls on the amount of ammunition one can possess.
They have such laws in Norway.
Villago Delenda Est
@gene108:
Well, there were more important things to spend the money on.
Like killing brown people by the hundreds.
Priorities, you know. Priorities.
Greed Is God
O/T, via TPM:
Justice Department Investigates Pennsylvania Voter ID Law
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has launched a formal investigation into whether Pennsylvania’s voter ID law discriminates against minorities, TPM has learned.
In a letter to Pennsylvania officials on Monday, the Justice Department requested state data on registered voters as well as the state’s list of individuals with driver’s licenses and ID cards.
Pennsylvania has said that over 750,000 voters lack an adequate form of voter ID, a number greater than President Obama’s margin of victory in the state in 2008. One top Republican even said the voter ID law would help Mitt Romney win the state. As TPM reported, the public relations firm contracted to educate the public about the new voter ID law is stacked with Republicans.
DOJ’s probe marks the first time it has publicly acknowledged a formal investigation of a voter ID law passed in a state which is not covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states with a history of racial discrimination to have changes to their voting laws precleared. The Pennsylvania investigation falls under Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits any state from enacting a “voting standard, practice, or procedure that results in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.”
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/doj_investigates_pennsylvania_voter_id_law.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TPMmuckraker+%28TPMmuckraker%29
El Cid
@whidby: WHAT? You want US to be like one a’them YURPEEN hellhole countries? What kindaMerican are ya?
john fremont
In all of the firearms training I’ve ever had trigger discipline is controlled by breathing.I was trained in the Marine Corps ;breathe relax aim squeeze fire to ensure one hits their target.
Irregular breathing causes one to jerk the trigger and miss the target. How the hell do you control breathing while choking on tear gas?!! Let alone getting a good sight in the dark with your eyes burning.
Also too, how do you know there wasn’t someone packing heat in the theater and at the moment of truth they froze up and panicked and never got off a round . After all many troops in their first time in combat do the same thing. See SLA Marshall’s works and Lt Col Dave Grossman’s On Killing. If someone were packing heat in the theater I really doubt they come forth now and admit that .
kindness
When I look back at the ’94 law and think about it, it tried to do 3 things. It tried to keep military type assault weapons out of the citizens hands (Mac-9 machine pistols were used in the 101 California shootings that got DiFi to write the law). It tried to make concealed weapons permits more difficult to come by. And it tried to limit clip sizes to 10, even though it allowed a grandfather clause (you could drive a semi through) about old clips being legal.
The only part of the law that I think a cross section of politicians could vote for now is clip size reduction. The ’94 law would never come to a vote today.
jl
@whidby:
” We could require instruction and testing to get a firearms license and institute controls on the amount of ammunition one can possess.
They have such laws in Norway. ”
That could be read several ways. What is your point? I am slow, or can’t read your mind, or probably both. Thanks in advance.
patrick II
Guns give the illusion of power to the increasingly powerless. Obama got in trouble for saying it, but as times get bad people turn to their religion, guns and xenophobia. The conservative oligarchy makes money off of all three, while stealing their jobs, their homes and their investments.
Svensker
@kindness:
Nu unh. Cuz having a megaclip is part of the Konsteetooshun. According to sum peephole.
burnt
@kindness: DiFi’s heart is in the right place on this issue but Ms. Concealed Carry Permit For Me But Not For Thee is not credible on the issue of gun control.
And like you, Kindness, I don’t like her but she would have my vote–if I lived in CA.
tulip
Even in the “liberal Bay Area” I got into it with a co-worker who thought the answer to arm more people. That what happened in the movie theater would not have happened if only every in the theater was packing.
I’m not a gun owner, so I know my view really, really differs from most, but I say melt every single goddamn gun and piece of ammo that we have outside of the military… AND that includes any kind of law enforcement.
Or go the Chris Rock route and make a bullet cost $5K each. See if that POS could come up with $30,000,000 to play out his ugly fantasy of killing lots of random people.
WereBear
Thus, the evil beauty in it!
Comrade Dread
@kindness: Right, and what those making that argument never mention is what happens when someone arrives late to the party (either a cop or another sovereign citizen packing heat) and finds two or more people shooting it out and can’t determine who the bad guy is?
pseudonymous in nc
Since the NRA considers every gun regulation an incursion on Teh LiBrtAy!, they own every mass shooting. That’s simple enough. The campaign needs to be one of encouraging the NRA to take appropriate pride in their massacres.
jl
Not sure what whidby’s point was, but went to wiki for numbers.
Norway could have a mass murder tragedy like Utoya every year (God forbid!) and still have homicide rate less than half that of U.S. (too bad God does not forbid that).
So what else do we have from the guns and ammo manufacturers’ front groups? The idea that potential for armed insurrection is part of U.S. style democracy to keep gummint scared? Well, James Madison explicitly said “no”, since that would boil down to dudes going after each other with guns for every disagreement. Jefferson said “no’ too except for his little excursion into la la land during the nullification crisis.
Madison at the time he wrote his debunking of the semi Constitutional right of armed rebellion, was trying to extricate himself from his involvement in the nullification mess, but he could have said “Hell yeah, mad at the gummint, shoot ’em up, that’s the American way!” But he didn’t.
So, what other than selling more guns and ammo is left.
Comrade Dread
Actually these days, if the government got so oppressive that our last resort to defend freedom were to take our small arms and join a rebellion, I’m pretty sure that rebellion would end with drone strikes.
jl
@Comrade Dread:
Are you questioning my second amendment right to own drones, and deploy them to protect myself against evil doers, fight our oppressive government gone bad, and hunt sundry small varmints, if you will, to feed my family?
This commie blog makes me mad, sometimes.
El Cid
When a bunchaMerkun patriots got made about taxes and started talking about their 2nd Amendment Right to defend themselves from oppressive gubmit w0ith force of arms (Alexander Hamilton’s attempt to pay down the debt with a tax on whiskey), George Washington got ready to kick their asses, by using that “well regulated militia”.
That was what that “well regulated militia” referred to — that force which was ready to shoot their asses when they thought they’d bad ass around with their 2nd Amendment pop-shooters.
For those who appear to think that they’ll be able to intimidate our modern US military / National Guard forces by talking about their little home armories, grow the fuck up.
Calouste
@tulip:
Besides all the arguments already made about shooting in a dark, crowded theatre, the next point your co-worker misses is that a lot of massacres end in suicide by the perpetrator. The risk of getting shot at is hardly going to put off someone in that state of mind.
Roger Moore
@LanceThruster:
Not big enough.
El Cid
Monty Python, still ahead of their time.
When mangoes are outlawed, only outlaws will have mangoes.
Clearly the thugs failed to take Monty Python’s warning seriously.
john fremont
@jl: Funny that same constitution these guys are always talking about ,and how it enshrines a supposed “right to revolution ” in the 2nd Amendment, states that the militia when called into service shall … suppress insurrections and execute the laws of the union.”
I actually outflanked a dittohead coworker on this issue several years ago. He was ranting about Obama’s alleged plans for a civilian security force. If the militia is law abiding gun owners not the national guard I asked, what would be unconstitutional about this? Besides, the Founders disdained “professional standing armies” I added.He lost it to put it mildly.
gex
Well, our love of tough guy macho-man codpiece wearers is probably related to the problem somehow. Maybe it’s the liking a tough macho brand of manliness that absolutely excludes introspection, thought, and consideration of others.
There’s a reason Coke and Pepsi had to market different diet soda for men.
There’s a reason people sell vacations to guys as “mancations.”
There’s a reason eating quadruple stackers is marketed as “man food.”
We have a fucked up idea of what being a man is.
SiubhanDuinne
@Libby Spencer: Yup, me too. I was living in Battle Creek, MI at the time. Not really where you want to be when mentally ill people are suddenly removed from their institutionalized support system.
gex
It’s interesting how the people most quick to say culture matters for EVERYTHING else suddenly think that these things happen in complete isolation with no outside causes that anyone else has to worry about.
El Cid
@john fremont:
They’re just using a different notion of “execute”.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
@SiubhanDuinne: I was a teenager at the time living to your northwest in Grand Rapids. I was just starting to follow politics but even to me closing mental hospitals with no contingency plan seemed like a really dumb idea.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
@SiubhanDuinne: I was a teenager at the time living to your northwest in Grand Rapids. I was just starting to follow politics but even to me closing mental hospitals with no contingency plan seemed like a really dumb idea.
S. cerevisiae
@El Cid: But what if he comes at you with a pointed stick?
Lurking Canadian
@Comrade Dread: Shoot them both, of course. God will know his own.
john fremont
@El Cid: I wonder if that’s in Conservapedia?
Jay in Oregon
Has anyone done any research into how long after one of these shootings the NRA waits before sending out pleas for donations?
You know, “After the XXX shooting, Democrats in Congress want to take your guns away. We need your support, even a donation of $XX can help.”
I bet they have an email template ready to go. Just change “Fort Hood” to “Aurora, CO” and whammo, the money starts rolling in before the bodies have even been counted.
Jay in Oregon
@pseudonymous in nc:
Maybe a nice open letter, congratulating the NRA for defeating specific bills over the years that would have made the specific weapons and accessories used in the Aurora, CO shooting illegal (or at least severely restricted the sale thereof)?
“Without your tireless efforts, this would not have been possible… “
Cain
@wenchacha:
One of the people who died at the theater was a person who escaped a mass shooting in Toronto. Talking about bad luck, to be involved twice… Someone was desperately trying to recall this person..
jl
” A political system which does not contain an effective provision, for a peaceable decision of all controversies arising within itself, would be a Govt. in name only. Such a provision is obviously essential; and it is equally obvious that it cannot be either peaceable or effective by making every part an authoritative Umpire; The final appeal in such cases, must be to the authority of the whole, not to that of the parts separately & independently. ”
James Madison, Notes on Nullification.
http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-print-02-02-02-3065
Can’t find it now, but someplace in the text, Madison says that you always have the right to revolution against an oppressive government. But it is a natural right, not a constitutional right, and if you are so pissed you feel obliged to recourse to your natural right, that is fine, but the results are variable, the rules unwritten, may hang separately, and maybe God will have to sort it all out (that last is my paraphrase).
Jay in Oregon
@Cain:
I hope I’m misreading you, because it looks an awful lot like you’re saying that it was God’s plan that Jessica Ghawi/Redfield was killed?
Ben Franklin
@jl:
you always have the right to revolution against an oppressive government. But it is a natural right, not a constitutional right, and if you are so pissed you feel obliged to recourse to your natural right, that is fine, but the results are variable, the rules unwritten, may hang separately, and maybe God will have to sort it all out
We touched on that this morning. It doesn’t end well. Show trials, mass executions, then…………….Bonaparte !!!!
john fremont
@jl: So if the “right to revolution” is anywhere it’s covered by the 9th Amendment not the 2nd?
goethean
According to Wikipedia, most gun deaths are suicides. So theoretically, shouldn’t the number of gun nuts be decreasing?
jl
@john fremont: If you read the Madison’s whole Notes on Nullification, and related writings, which I can’t find online, Madison saw no right of violent revolution within the US Constitution. Madison thought that would be an absurdity. From what I have read, he recognized a lot of ways citizens could register their dissatisfaction, voting being chief among them, and late in life went to the extreme of acknowledging that when the rights of extreme wealth came into irreconcilable conflict with the right of the majority to govern itself through voting, the right to vote won. He recognized the right to simply not be forced to defend the country because of one’s conscience. He never acknowledged a Constitutional mechanism for redress of grievances through armed violence, so, no Constitutional right to do that, period.
Ben Franklin
“You have a Republic; if you can keep it”
Benjamin Franklin
El Cid
@jl: Of course you have the natural right — meaning, the powers of the Universe (physics etc) or God don’t limit you — to revolt against your government.
That’s why freedom of speech was endowed by the Creator.
In the Cartesian sense, none had to give you the right to speak, or think, that was a natural consequence of the order of the Universe and the abilities of the human organism.
It didn’t mean that it would be legal or respected by this new government or would protect you from being canceled by this government’s armed forces.
I don’t think many people understand the difference between a natural right and a legal right.
You have the natural right to choose between, say, stealing your neighbors’ goods, and not stealing your neighbors’ goods, because you have a mind, or a soul, or whatever decision-making principle the historical era would describe it as.
And if you get away with choosing to steal your neighbor’s goods, this has nought to do with God’s rights or Constitutional rights — it has to do with the capacity of humans to choose.
jl
@El Cid: I think the confusion is that the gun nuts think they can shoot the place up in an organized revolt if they are not happy, and still have some kind of dibs on whatever Constitutional protections they desire. As I see it, Madison was simply pointing out that it could not, and would not, work that way. Seems like it should be an obvious point that once you organize to kill and destroy a system, the system doesn’t have to be nice to you or treat you like others who play by its rules, but guess it isn’t an obvious point.
El Cid
@jl: Also, they don’t give a shit what the words and phrases of the Founding Father Gods As Interpreted in Their Hearts meant. They have their own version of the Constushun just like they have their own version of the Bible, and both lie within a protective shield of instinct and transmitted cultural dictate within — where else — their “gut”.
TenguPhule
Trials and Executions. Lots and lots of executions.