On Friday, a guy armed with a .223 semi-auto (like an AR-15) shot up Santa Monica, killing 5 and wounding 4 before the cops killed him. Pretty terrifying, but not the right kind of terror:
- He started by killing his older brother and father at home and then set it on fire.
- He had been treated for mental illness.
- He had a foreign name (Zawahri), but they were Lebanese (Arab, but not scary Arab) and had been in the country for 20 years.
Put it all together and what do you get? Another crazy guy with a rifle, and another story that had a little bit of national attention and then faded away.
If he had been yelling “Allahu Akbar”, or carrying some kind of IED cobbled together from an Al Qaeda website, had been attending a radical mosque, kidnapped a blonde girl in Brentwood, or had made a recent trip to the Middle East, then maybe we’d have some officially sanctioned fear. Instead, we get a story that had a little national play and then faded away.
And Baby Jesus forbid that we spend any money on a fancy database to track the cache of weapons this guy used – we save that money for the real terrorists, the ones sending around cat pix on Facebook.
debbie
The fact that more people are frightened that someone’s tracking their phone calls than they are that someone nearby is carrying 1,300 rounds is all the proof that I need that this country is dead, dead, dead.
raven
@debbie: So is Jerry Garcia
c u n d gulag
Ho-hum…
Just another gun-murder incident.
*YaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAWN!*
debbie
@raven:
Busted…
Gin & Tonic
@raven: Great shirt slogan I saw a while back. “Jerry’s dead. Phish sucks. Get a job.”
raven
@debbie: they just won’t let you beeeeeee
SiubhanDuinne
I don’t know how far in advance Randall Munroe does his comics, but today’s is uncannily timely.
Baud
@c u n d gulag:
Pretty much. We tend to chase news rather than make news.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Widespread is still rockin. . .
jeffreyw
Cat fud –>
Odie Hugh Manatee
Obama, caught in the act of email snooping!
Get GG on this stat!
Xboxershorts
The REAL terrorists on FB aren’t sharing cat pix, they’re trying to coordinate their efforts to rein in toxic Hydrofracturing.
LAC
Oh please, you were having the vapors about gubermint out of control 48 hours ago. Now you want a database.
Xboxershorts
@Xboxershorts: At least that’s how they’re treated by their government in PA. Ecoterrorists? It’s a shame that someone trying to protect a national forest is treated as a radical.
Paul in KY
He does have a furrin last name. You’d think they could make hay with that.
rikyrah
if you’ve been here 20 years…
you are as American as Apple Pie
Paul in KY
@raven: Saw them close out Bonnaroo 2 years ago. 3 solid hours of Panic!
Punchy
If you think wingers wont latch on to his tur’ist sounding last name, go check the comments on the Yahoo page article. Yes, Yahoo commenters are the cesspool of the internet, but dayum are they some racist fucks.
Maude
@rikyrah:
Thx for the info on the Snowden situation last night.
Todd
*chuckle*
The internets are starting to blow up with opinion about how Greenwald comes up as a total asshole on every TV show he’s appeared on so far this morning, as if his face is begging for a fist to be rammed into it repeatedly.
Warren Terra
Harpers had an intriguing article recently about the AR15 and the impossibility of regulating its distribution under current law or any law that conceivably might be enacted. Pretty scary stuff even before you start figuring in the insanity of the people profiled in the article who are ideologically committed to everyone brandishing an unregulated killing machine at all times.
debbie
@Todd:
I saw on the ABC Sunday morning show (whatever it’s called), and his “urgency” put me in mind of Bob Woodward. How long until Glenn too becomes frightened by Gene Sperling?
the Conster
@Todd:
Thin skin + giant ego + self aggrandizement is not a good combination.
Face
@Todd: He seems to be the de facto spokesman for a law-breaking pompous douchebag. Cant understand why peeps would despise him so.
The Other Bob
Had the Tsarnaev brothers used AR-15’s instead of the bombs, they would have been able to kill way more people.
They weren’t ready for a suicide mission I guess.
JPL
Once again the Supreme Court has the opportunity to dismantle previous laws. As Scalia mentioned, it is their responsibility to change precedent cuz those Congress men lack courage.
Todd
@the Conster:
The leaker, like young Manning, will come to learn that when he selected his media patron/spokesasshole, he chose poorly.
gene108
@Baud:
Bush & Co tried to change that by making news. It did not work well.
MomSense
@SiubhanDuinne:
I love xkcd!
jon
@The Other Bob: They could have used kitchen knives and killed more people, but bombers are not about body counts so much as scaring the crap out of people.
someguy
Doesn’t fit the narrative, does not compute…
LAC
@Todd: Not a surprise. Again, I wonder if anyone will have the temerity to ask ole chinless about his tweet concerning “working” with Snowden a month before he started working as a contractor. I mean, I thought “McSteally/Hero” had his “aha” moment while employed there.
Shalimar
@Face: Greenwald always comes across as a pompous douchebag himself, and you can count me among those who don’t think highly of his libertarian perspective. It is still important for someone to be fighting for the principles he champions (just like it would be nice to have an actual conservative party fighting against massive military and NSA wasteful spending). This is a discussion that a sane society should have.
JasonF
Since you mentioned mental illness:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/health/a-misguided-focus-on-mental-illness-in-gun-control-debate.html?_r=0
Proper treatment of mental illness is extremely important, but it’s also important not to demonize people with mental illness, or to assume that everyone with mental illness is a ticking time-bomb or dangerous. The overwhelming majority of people without mental illness are not at all dangerous.
Paul in KY
@Shalimar: I think Glenn serves a useful purpose as a privacy rights/civil liberties watchdog. You have to have people on his side to balance out the ‘only criminals want any kind of privacy’ side that is riding high right now.
Todd
@LAC:
Does this mean that GG crossed the line and is a co-conspirator?
LAC
@Todd: Seriously, I wonder. I would love some clarification on all of this before the canonization and getting Ryan Gosling down as Snowden in the 2014 movie happens.
LAC
https://twitter.com/lawscribe/status/344099792357576704/photo/1
I don’t even know if this will work, but this is a screenshot of Greenwald’s tweeting.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
One of the most infuriating things about this incident is how quickly assholes around me leapt to point and shout how this proved ‘gun-free zones’ were just massacre boxes and how guns guns guns were the only true safety.
Villago Delenda Est
Which is absolutely the best possible use of that money, because LOLCATs are Satan’s tools, especially the calico ones.
Villago Delenda Est
@someguy:
DING DING DING DING DING
Mnemosyne
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik:
At least two of the victims were killed because the murderer shot at their car as they were driving the opposite direction. So, what, we’re all supposed to have Mad Max-style machine guns attached to the roof of our cars on the off-chance that a psycho shoots at us from another car? Or are we just supposed to drive with a .44 Magnum in one hand at all times?
Villago Delenda Est
@Mnemosyne:
If you think traffic tieups are bad now, just wait until road rage gets weaponized and dumbshits who think they can inflict injury without any immediate consequence get cut off .
The carnage will be…formidable.
Tom_B
@debbie:
Agree 100%. I am far more afraid of random nut cases than Islamic nutcases; there’s more of them. I think, in part, people’s general innumeracy blinds them to this point.
? Martin
CA has a bill going through the legislature that would require background checks on buying ammunition. There is also a bill that would allow the police to actively confiscate guns from felons and people with mental illness who might have purchased the guns before being convicted/diagnosed. There’s a bunch of others as well, but either of those will be viewed as having been able to limit or prevent this specific incident. Those bills are going to sail through now.
? Martin
@Tom_B:
As I once explained to someone, I don’t worry about the Islamists. Most of them just return to their home country. I worry about the nutjobs who can’t return to their home country because they lost the Civil War.
Villago Delenda Est
@? Martin:
Word.
Elizabelle
@? Martin:
tee hee. so true about the civil war.
Law Enforcement is getting in on the “crazy guy with gun” schtick. In the DC area, in the past 2-3 weeks:
** An off duty sheriff’s deputy shot and killed a young black guy (who happened to be a shuttle driver for PBS’s The News Hour) after a personal altercation in Alexandria, VA. Deputy threatened, then came back with a gun. Several days later, he was arrested and charged. Neighbors and witnesses wondered why it took so long.
** This weekend: an off duty New Jersey police officer has been charged with 2d degree murder/manslaughter for killing a Maryland man, on a Maryland roadside, after a road rage incident. The cop shot the man in full view of cop’s wife and kids, in the family minivan.
WereBear
One of the greatest risks is breaking up with a control freak, yet “jealous asshole” is not yet in the DSM. Is that a mental illness? When so many of them kill the estranged partner and then themselves? What do we call that?
jon
@WereBear: Nearly-justifiable Homicide, a.k.a. “But I understand.”
The prophet Nostradumbass
@jeffreyw: cat fud
Jebediah
@Villago Delenda Est:
Of course it won’t be – because, as the NRA tells us, a heavily armed dystopia is a polite dystopia!
mclaren
@debbie:
Here again, have to disagree. This sounds reasonable — but statistically it’s all wrong.
The chances of getting shot by a crazy guy with a gun are so vanishingly small you can’t even run the stats. These are such one-off events, so rare, that you can’t even assign them a probability. It’s like the probability of a meteor strike. Or the probability of dying because a bridge collapses while you’re driving on it.
On the other hand, with millions of people getting their phone calls tracked, this is a high-probability event. It’s likely. It’s roughly a thousand times more likely that you’ll have some NSA guy intercepting your phone call than that you’ll die from a drunk hitting your car.
So once again, this is a gross misuse of statistics, debbie. You’re conflating two events which exist in completley different universes, statistically speaking. The probability of getting shot by some wacko with a 150-round magazine full-auto assault rifle is so much exponentially lower than the probability that your phone call to grandma will be tapped and recorded that it’s just bizarre to speak of both events in the same sentence. One type of event (getting shot by a nut case) is so unlikely that, for all practical purposes, you can ignore it. It’s like winning the Powerball lottery. Someone will win — but it won’t be you. Someone will get shot next year in America by another wacko with an assault rifle — but it won’t be you.
The other event (having your phone call intercepted) is happening tens of millions of times a year. That’s a high-probability event. It may well happen to you.
I know we live in an innumerate country where no one learns math or science in grades K-12, but, still, people, can’t we at least try to speak sensibly about events in terms of their probability? It’s theoretically possible according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution that all the molecules of air in the room where you’re sitting will all rush to the corners, leaving a vacuum that suffocates. It’s statistically possible. The probability against it is so staggering that it’s never going to happen during the lifetime of the observed universe.
Let’s use a little common sense, shall we?