According to The Washington Post, the latest shooter (the one at the Tulsa medical complex, in case you don’t have your mass shooting spree card handy) bought his AR-15 about three hours before the rampage:
The gunman who killed four people at a Tulsa hospital on Wednesday blamed a doctor at the facility for ongoing pain after back surgery and vowed to kill him and anyone who got in his way, police said Thursday.
Tulsa Police Chief Wendell Franklin told reporters that Michael Louis bought an AR-15-style weapon on the same day as the attack, killing St. Francis Hospital doctors Preston Phillips and Stephanie Husen. Two other victims were identified as William Love, a patient, and Amanda Green, a receptionist.
As the late great Janis Joplin once said, “It’s all the same fucking day, man.”
There’s not a ton of cause for optimism that we’ll see real gun safety reform at the federal level since the U.S. Senate is a catastrophically dysfunctional institution. But maybe red flag laws, waiting periods and age limits have a shot at the state level, especially if gun safety activists push for the measures while the state in question is still reeling from a mass shooting. We’ll see.
Open thread.
ETA: President Biden will give a prime time address tonight (7:30 PM ET) on mass shootings and “urge Congress to pass ‘common-sense laws’ in response,” according to a WaPo news alert that just popped up on my phone.