Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
by @heymistermix.com| 65 Comments
This post is in: Gun Issues
There was a shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station today, where at least two are dead. On Wednesday, two died and one was injured at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam near Honolulu. I thought military bases were high security areas where the only guns available were in the armory or carried by security, but that’s just an assumption.
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Fuck Matt Gaetz and his thoughts and prayers, individually and collectively.
In February, Rep. Matt Gaetz said building “the wall” would be more effective than background checks. And he got into an argument with a Parkland father whose son was fatally shot in his high school, and tried to have him ejected from a hearing: pic.twitter.com/8KjC8r9BWB
— Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) December 6, 2019
Pensacola https://t.co/FmGZQeWmJL
Comments are closed.
Elizabelle
From the WaPost, about the Hawaii attack:
Raven
Random
JaySinWA
@Raven: If in fact the Hawaii attack was as described, it was most likely murder-suicide. Not random in that sense. There may not be any correlation with Florida, but it is not impossible that the first attack influenced the thinking of the second attacker. In all too soon to judge.
rikyrah
This job was a lifesaver for me back in 2010.
Answer the phone, apply early. If they call you back and leave a message, call back ASAP.
If you are a veteran, you get extra points on the test.
https://twitter.com/uscensusbureau/status/1194635546129133570
Joe Falco
“Christ, what an asshole” sums up my whole view of Gaetz. I can relate to the gentleman who said outloud Jesus Christ at the end of the video.
Elizabelle
@rikyrah: Thanks, rikyrah.
West of the Rockies
Gaetz looks like the antagonist from an 80’s teen coming-of-age flick.
Jay
mistermix,
remember all those ships hitting other ships and stuff over the last couple of years, attributed to:
– overwork
– undertrained
– unmaintained
– understaffed
– overdeployed
– critical systems that never work
that might have something to do with it.
Kent
maybe a wall along the Mason-Dixon line except maybe swap VA for WV
catclub
@Jay: yeah, this. You saved me typing something less clear.
Amir Khalid
It seems to me that both shooters managed to smuggle their weapons into the base, but how did they do that? Surely they would have had to pass through a metal detector at the gate.
Jay
patrick II
Matt Gaetz: “We all are entitled to our own opinions and views”
The Republican’s go-to phrase when stating obvious anti-factual lies, mostly used when they know what they are saying is a lie. Similarly, when they say “you can’t prove it” it means they did it, they are lying about doing it, but they don’t think you can persuade the public they did it. They are more often right in the Limbaugh/FOX era.
ET
I know I have seen stories that talk about how suicides and mass shootings can be contagious for lack of a better word.
Served
Holiday season seems to see a spike in these incidents, as well, so I’m afraid we’re only at the beginning of this particular wave of mass shootings.
Jay
@Amir Khalid:
the Bases are drive on for Base Staff. Stop at a guardhouse, show badge/id, drive on and park. A huge chunk of the “security”’is based on the Honour System and Esprit de Corp.
Kent
@Jay: I’m not a military person. But it seems to me that the Navy is a lot more infrastructure-based than the Army and suffers more when there is understaffing and under-maintenance. If the Army has an under-staffed infantry battalion they just kick around a base somewhere until they are back up to strength and don’t accidentally smash the battalion into something because the wrong person is steering.
Elizabelle
WaPost. Three dead; others wounded. Shooter is also dead.
Betty Cracker
Gaetz is all kinds of horrible. Unfortunately, we’re probably stuck with the bastard in the House until he decides the Florida 1st is too small for him. It’s one of the most wingnut districts in the country, and his father is a highly connected bigwig who’s been bailing his wastrel son out of trouble forever.
Mary G
@Amir Khalid:
I posted on here a while back about being afraid of military MAGAts and was assured that a base is super safe. Having lived within a stone’s throw of a base for much of my life and watched cars barely slow down at the back gate if they look like they belong, this is security theater more than security. It’s tighter than before 9/11, when we civilians could drive onto the base whenever we wanted if we were white, but it’s still very much not on the “pass through a metal detector” level.
Kent
@Jay: Yes, this. Big bases have thousands of daily commuters. Both civilian staff and uniformed military who life off base. You can’t metal-detect cars. You have to tear them apart, run mirrors under them, and that sort of thing. It would be impossible to catch someone driving onto a base with a handgun and would take enormously intrusive security to even find rifles. There would be 2-hour long lines entering every base if they tried to do this.
Soldiers and sailors don’t have ready access to military armories on base. Those are under tight security. But it would be like trying to stop someone from smuggling a handgun onto a giant university campus with 50 parking lots and 100 different buildings. Pretty much impossible.
Jay
@Kent:
yup, and hours are longer,( shifts), deployments are more regular, family stress is higher, crew tensions are higher.
it’s pretty hard to “just ignore” somebody on your “crew”’that you have a petty beef with, when it’s week 3 of a 6 month deployment, on a sub.
it’s also often a civillian contractor/USN “beef” because of different work cultures and methods of engagement.
sdhays
@Kent: No. We’re coming for North Carolina and Georgia in the near term and the poor souls still stuck in the other Deep South states can’t be abandoned.
Amir Khalid
@Mary G:
I am astounded. I would have thought that having metal detectors at the gate was an obvious and easily implemented precaution.
Jay
@Kent:
or a Walmart,…..
Kent
Statistically they are probably safer than most other workplaces. I expect it’s not the MAGA types you need to worry about but more domestic violence type situations and PTSD and that sort of thing.
raven
@JaySinWA: pffft
Dorothy A. Winsor
@West of the Rockies:
LOL. That is so true.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Nothing says “Modern America” more than taking the easy way out and offshoring the problem.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jay:
WTF? They already do! That’s what driver license exams are for, including the driving portion. What world is Johnson living in?
Kent
@Amir Khalid:
You can’t metal-detect cars. Everyone drives onto bases. They are huge and dispersed and have lots of housing on them. You’d have to completely re-design military bases to put all the parking off-base and then have shuttles or something. Or else put metal detectors and security on every single building on a sprawling base and there are often hundreds of buildings to secure. Just can’t be done.
Kent
@sdhays: I was just facetiously responding to the Matt Gaetz assertion that Trump’s wall on the border will prevent school shootings.
Jay
@Kent:
probably more domestic violence and “going Postal” than PTSD.
most PTSD fatalities are a result of differing baseline conditional issues, interaction stressors, miscommunication, ignorance and conditioned distrust of societal representatives.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jay: It’s also not impossible that with the Forever War all the resources in mental health are going to the Army and Marines and the Navy is getting ignored.
Kent
Doesn’t the VA and TriCare treat all the service branches equally?
Mr. Mack
I reached out to a friend who has a daughter stationed there (she’s fine) and she says her daughter said suicides and depression are rampant there.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
in the world view of the Libertarian Leadership Debate and thier audience, drivers lisences, car registrations and plates, manditory insurance are all the illegal overreactions of the Nanny State crushing the free spirit of Free Americans.
When a major mainstream political party goes full bugnuts brown acid koolaide insane, like the ReThugs,
fringer parties have to go one better to attract ?????????? nuts? Idiots? Randhats?
Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
there is still a big stigma in the Military and LEO communities around mental health, both about seeking help, and those who seek help.
trollhattan
@Kent:
Active bases I’ve been on (as civilian contractor) have perimeter fencing with guarded entry points, ginormous parking lots and then on base, certain buildings with their own discrete security. Those would likely preclude smuggling in firearms but the vast majority of the facility would remain vulnerable. Add BX traffic to the active military and contractor populations at many bases.
guachi
I’m in the Navy and this morning we had command quarters where the CO emphasized that you shouldn’t be afraid to talk to people if you have problems at the same time a shooting was occurring (unbeknownst to us).
Pensacola is a major training facility for the Navy and many of the people at our base train there.
Uncle Cosmo
@Kent: The good Democratic voters of MD say Fuck you with a rusty chainsaw.
raven
@guachi: I was surf fishing near Panama City last week. It was very windy and the water was chilly. There there were three guys about a half a mile down who were fishing and swimming for a couple of hours. I decided to hang it up and went down to ask if they wanted my shrimp. One of them had a Navy Aviation Air Rescue cap on and I realized that the wind and water wasn’t bothering them a bit!
chris
Dumb question maybe. Are military people forbidden to have personal weapons in their quarters?
guachi
@chris: Yes.
raven
Rut ro, sound like the shooter was from the middle east.
Mnemosyne
@Kent:
From initial reports, the Hawaii shooting sounds like it fits the classic pattern of a domestic violence murder. Not enough details yet about today’s murders to make a similar assumption, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Mnemosyne
@raven:
Bring on the conspiracy theories! I’m sure that Alex Jones and all of the other assholes are ginning up their anti-Muslim machines.
Patricia Kayden
Republicans care more about guns than people so we’ll continue to have more lives lost to gun violence and nothing will be done. If we want gun reform, we won’t vote for a party which takes its cues from the bleeping NRA.
Uncle Cosmo
@Jay: When I was first hired by the Military-Industrial Complex I was told I’d need to file paperwork for a security clearance. SweartoDog it was the first time they mentioned it.
I told them I’d been a peace freak in college & hung out with a Trotskyite faction & asked if that was going to be a problem.
Did you become an official member? Sign anything or get a membership card? Well, no. Then don’t worry about it.
A few weeks later they came back: There’s a problem with your clearance. Here we go, I thought – but no. The “problem” was that I’d had psychological counseling, & they needed me to sign off on their querying the providers to make sure I wasn’t on the verge of “going postal.” I signed & a few weeks later my Secret clearance came through – which I kept for 20 years or so.
(Speaking of which, one of my subsequent bosses [a card-carrying sociopath FWIW] once told me that the only thing on my resume that disturbed him was my summer job in college – with the Post Office. I think he was joking. But if he had anything to worry about on that score he’d have taken a dirt nap decades ago – & I’d be waiting for my next parole hearing.)
West of the Rockies
@Mr. Mack:
Some blame needs to go to the Putz-in- Chief, who is forever tossing micro and macro-aggression at the services.
Jay
@raven:
as of an hour ago:
the Pearl Harbour shooter has been unofficially identified,
no motive has been identified,
so take reports that the Pensecola shooter has already been identified with a huge serving of salt,
raven
@Jay: I report, you decide.
chris
@guachi: Huh, thanks. Does the NRA know that the US military doesn’t support the 2nd Amendment?//
Raven
Saudi
Raven
Twarnt Mormons
Del Gue
Jay
mrmoshpotato
@Jay:
“And what is Gary Johnson?”
“You’re kidding …”
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
In my ancient 45 years ago experience, a whole lot of heavy tools go in and out the gates of those bases… We walked through, but lots of employees and service-members drove right through the second the contract guard saw an ID badge. Probably a little more secure today, although we worried about Cuban infiltrators back then.
Not as scary as a Saudi trainee, though, right? Trump thinks the Sawdis are our best friends anywhere, but for the Russians. And Bi-Bi the crook in Israel. None of whom are our friends. They were Sawdis who took down the Twin Towers, after all.
They are NOT our friends, they’re suckering us for everything they can take, esp weapons systems. Fortunately, their subjects don’t for whatever reason make very good military folks.
catclub
Nope, they’ll give the Space Cadets the best drugs.
Aleta
@Kent: She was talking about threats that one person, L.Col. Vindeman, had already received from Trump supporters. A condescending reply to her implied she had no idea about base security. There was no reason (except for posturing) to underestimate her knowledge, and the reply showed less understanding than hers.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
This may have already been stated here, I heard it on the radio today on the way into work, but the person who did the shooting WAS the security watch for the submarine. When a sub is in the yards there is an armed security watch at the head of the pier that the sub is on. From a local Honolulu paper:
Pearl Harbor shooter identified
Romero was assigned to the USS Columbia, a Pearl Harbor-based submarine that was in drydock for maintenance.
The 22-year-old shooter “opened fire on shipyard personnel with his M4 service rifle and then turned his M9 service pistol on himself,” Fox News Pentagon reporter Lucas Tomlinson reported, citing a preliminary incident report.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
Additional information, from another Hawaii news source, about the Pearl Harbor shooter:
Pearl Harbor shooter was up for Captain’s Mast (nonjudicial punishment)
“The U.S. Navy sailor who fatally shot two at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard on Wednesday and wounded a third was having disciplinary problems at work and had been enrolled in anger management courses, multiple sources confirm to HNN.”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Amir Khalid: I’ve worked at both Army and Navy bases in the continental US and never passed through a metal detector. Not to get on base, not to get in a building, not to board a ship.
Obviously that can change depending on the location or mission.
I’m talking about someone with permanent approved ID of course. They are locked down pretty tight against random visitors and their vehicles.
Also the last base I worked at did claim to have intercepted firearms, but I have no idea how or how reliable their method was.
Rich Webb
Yard periods are stressful for ship’s company. They are Not Fun. They can be especially hard on junior enlisted. I can see some kid on the pier watch just losing it with some “yard birds,” only for a moment but that’s all it takes. Then the awful realization and the quick way out.
SteverinoCT
Interesting that he carried a rifle. I guess these days there is heightened security; the only time I, on a boomer, carried more than a .45 was during some threat alert when one of the two sentries carried a shotgun (we had no M16s, just M-14s which were probably impractical given the situation).
As for shipyard security, at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard there was a random thorough inspection of vehicles, but that was leaving the yard, checking for pilfered tools.