Reporter: What are you giving up for Lent?
President Biden: You guys pic.twitter.com/SYUL9Lqnv8
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) February 14, 2024
Would that President Biden, and the rest of us, had that luxury. There are times I’m very glad to be a volunteer aggregator on a not-quite-ten-thousand-top blog, and not a professional journalist. Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on the last ‘Second Amendment’-related tragedy — “The Shooter’s Family Was Begging for Intervention Before She Opened Fire at a Megachurch”:
… Our latest unfortunate public exercise of Second Amendment freedoms took place in Houston, at the headquarters mega-church of Joel Osteen, a prominent teevee huckster Pharisee. (Osteen was the whited sepulcher who refused to open his megachurch so that poor and homeless people would not be left outside to face Hurricane Harvey in 2017.) On Sunday, a 37-year old woman named Genesee Moreno showed up at Lakewood Church with both her seven-year old son and her AR-15 in tow. She set up a firefight with two off-duty cops that ended up with Moreno dead, her son in critical condition with a gunshot wound in the head, and a bystander slightly wounded in the leg. The subsequent investigation has revealed Moreno to be quite insane. From CNN:
“My daughter-in-law when she was taking medication for schizophrenia was a very sweet and loving woman,” Walli Carranza, the mother-in-law of 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno wrote in a Facebook post that Moreno had been put under an order for emotional detention in 2016. She had a mental health history documented by Houston police, said Christopher Hassig, commander of the Houston Police Department’s homicide division. Carranza, the shooter’s mother-in-law, had unsuccessfully petitioned to be declared conservator of Moreno’s son Sam in 2022. She said Sam was wounded in the head when off-duty officers shot and killed Moreno at the church. Moreno should never have been allowed to own firearms, her mother-in-law said. Texas has no red flag law – also known as an extreme risk protection order law – that would allow authorities to take weapons from a person thought to be in crisis.“
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‘Gun Issues’ Open Thread: Not Enough Time Between Public TragediesPost + Comments (41)