UPDATE (2:00 PM PDT): Jim Geraghty of National Review Online tweets, “BREAKING NOW: Suspect shot by police officers, device may have gone off, all three hostages safe.” Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard adds, “Local police say there are several more suspect packages in the building that they’re checking. He thinks no injuries except gunman.” CNN adds, “Discovery standoff suspect shot, in custody;” which means presumably that he’s still alive.
Update (2:50 PM PDT): Or not. “CBS News confirms James J. Lee is dead,” DC-area CBS affiliate WUSA9 tweets.
Original story follows below, updates added at end of story after jump page.
The Washington Post reports, “A man with an explosive device entered the Discovery Communications building in downtown Silver Spring Wednesday afternoon and has taken a security guard hostage, Montgomery County Police said.”
Police responded after receiving a 911 call about 1 p.m. of shots fired in the lobby. They confirmed that one shot was fired. Police said they have no reports of injuries.
Some employees were evacuated. Others told to go to the highest floor in the building. An email to Discovery employees had a subject line that read: “URGENT: Employees at One Discovery Place Proceed to a Locked Office IMMEDIATELY.”
Tactical and bomb squad officers are on the scene and are developing a plan to deal with the situation, said Montgomery County Police spokesman Cpl. Dan Fritz.
Friz said the suspect was an Asian male who has some issues with the Discovery Corporation. He did not elaborate.
“We’re working on getting everyone out of there,” he said on WUSA.
As for the “issues with the Discovery Corporation,” Allahpundit adds:
WUSA, a local station in D.C., threw a jolt through Twitter by claiming that the guy is a nutjob on an environmental crusade and that this is his manifesto/list of demands. Now they’re saying that that’s unconfirmed. Way to toss a political hot potato into a story that may be completely unrelated, guys.
Here’s what we know, sort of:
ABC affiliate WJLA in Washington, DC is reporting that the gunman is an Asian man and may be a former Discovery employee.
“A man entered the lobby and may have fired a weapon and declared, ‘Nobody is going anywhere,’” Montgomery County police told WJLA. Witnesses said they
Police are trying to establish contact with the suspect. A person inside the building tells The Associated Press the man had something strapped to his chest and has hostages.
It was, apparently, an Asian man who wrote the manifesto, and a cop on the scene says the suspect has “concerns” about the Discovery Channel, but that’s the closest thing to “confirmation” that anyone has that it’s the same guy. I actually don’t care if it is; I’m not going to blame the actions of a nut on all lefties and environmentalists. I will, however, be sure to remind them of this the next time they pull that on the right. Which they do, merrily, at every conceivable opportunity.
Stand by for updates.
Update: NBC says the gunman has been identified as James Lee. “Lee” is the name given at the end of the manifesto. The page appears to be down since it’s getting slammed with traffic, but here’s a taste. It’s basically a long rant about overpopulation and pollution and finding solutions to global warming, etc etc.
The suspect’s “manifesto” is being slammed by a Drudge-lanche, but the cached text is reprinted below, after the page jump, along with a flashback to a 2008 incident in front of the Discovery Channel’s building, which likely involved the same suspect, and additional updates as they come in.
Shoot this nut through his diseased skull and send his corpse to the landfill to be recycled.
Hose off the blood and everyone just move right along.
One quanta less of the Mathusian problem that he’s apparently so concerned about.
Mad Cow!!!!!!!!
Well…there ya go.
Congratulations and Bravo Zulu to the Montgomery County Merlin Police sniper(s), who took this defectoid out and no-one but plant-food was hurt.
See, if more people listened to ole Bilge, we’d have much less stressful life and work environment.
One less lame-@ssed trial that tax-payers will have to foot the bill for.
Sniper FTW!
Violence and the Leftist ideas…just sayin
Oh, another bitter clinger … oh wait … move along folks … nothing to see here.
Let me guess. He’s upset because the Discovery Channel played the short Bambi Meets Godzilla?
Damn, I was wrong. It wasn’t Bambi Meets Godzilla. It was An Inconvenient Truth that upset him. The Discovery Channel has no one to blame but themselves and Al Gore.
Leftist against Rightist has nothing to do with this. Lives are in danger. This is no game. Pray for the people in that building. Psychos have no right to any sane affiliation in our country.
If this was what Bloomberg was hoping for with the Time Square bomber, would you be saying the same thing or excoriating those dirty, clinging tea-baggers? Just asking.
Whatever this clown wants, he’s not getting, including my attention. Now if he had abducted Al Gore, I’d give him what he wants to keep him.
Jeez, if only Ted Kaczynski had had his tubes tied back in the day…
You just know this is driving eco-lefties butthole crazy. “Why couldn’t it have been a crazed denier?” Actually Discovery/TLC have been shameless promoters of eco-babble. What if this left-wing had gotten into UAH…oh, wait…another lefty nut job already did that.
In an odd way, this makes sense.
If anyone really believed the hard environmentalist line, I mean really believed that the world will end in the next few years without drastic intervention, that governments and corporations don’t care, and citizens don’t know enough to resist, then this would be quite logical. Extreme acts to raise public awareness would be the only reasonable course of action. Taking hostages is a bad thing, but letting the world die without a fight is immeasurably worse.
In fact, sacrificing yourself in such a visible manner to draw attention to the cause would be quite a noble act. If you’re going to go down, you may as well go swinging. It’s infinitely more valiant than sitting around and waiting for a global doom you might be able to help avert. In fact, it would be insane not to do something. Anything.
Of course, when your prophet flies around from giant mansion to giant mansion in a private plane, it makes it clear on a subconscious level that he doesn’t believe the message he peddles, or the urgency he projects.
Should we all try to reduce pollution and be good stewards of the planet? Sure. Everyone can get behind taking responsibility for whatever messes we make and cleaning them up. Still, this end-of-the-world-unless-you-pay-up line has the psychic resonance of un-serious hype. Because it is un-serious hype. It’s never really been meant to be taken literally. And nobody does take it literally.
Almost nobody, anyway.
Poor Lee. He went sane in a crazy world, and took Al Gore seriously.
“If anyone really believed the hard environmentalist line, I mean really believed that the world will end in the next few years without drastic intervention, that governments and corporations don’t care, and citizens don’t know enough to resist, then this would be quite logical.”
Except that those who have been saying that, have a very poor track record at being proven correct. At this point, believing them anyway is quite ILLogical.
I don’t think he intended to “sacrifice himself”, except in the sense that an Islamist homicide bomber does. He wanted to take people with him, on the grounds that there are too many “filthy humans” around already.
Considering that he was apparently an “animal rights activist” to judge by his online rants, he rather conclusively proves that, as a PM columnist said earlier this week, the animal rights crowd is now ready to start using lethal force to “dramatize” their agenda. To this lot, animals are sacred; humans are not merely expendable, but a blight on “Holy Mother Gaia”. To paraphrase Stallone in “Cobra”, their motto is “Humans are a disease, and we’re the cure”.
So much for the “inherently benign” nature of the environmental movement. At its foundations, it has always been about the destruction of civilization, and (preferably) the extermination of most of humanity other than the “true enlightened conservators” of the Earth.
Someday (if we survive) someone should do a research paper on the exact reason that the majority of “progressive” causes end up calling for the extermination of somebody else. Or, indeed, everybody else.
Oh, and BTW; police sharpshooters are never referred to as snipers. That’s the military’s name for a specialized marksman who takes preemptive offensive action against enemy personnel or materiel’. A police sharpshooter only takes the shot to save the life of a hostage, an innocent bystander, or a fellow officer, when they are under immediate threat of harm or death. His shooting is inherently defensive in nature, and is required by law to be such; big difference.
I congratulate the officer who took the shot for saving the lives of the hostages. Well Done.
clear ether
eon
Eon writes:
“Oh, and BTW; police sharpshooters are never referred to as snipers. That’s the military’s name for a specialized marksman who takes preemptive offensive action against enemy personnel or materiel’. A police sharpshooter only takes the shot to save the life of a hostage, an innocent bystander, or a fellow officer, when they are under immediate threat of harm or death. His shooting is inherently defensive in nature, and is required by law to be such; big difference.”
Good to know and thank you for the informative post!
From the manifesto..
“All human procreation and farming must cease!”
O.k. I’ll get right on that.
Already the “churnalists” in the MFM are changing his background and motive – from Canadian enviro-terrorist to American anti-immigrant tea-bagging hater.
By the way, his ramblings cite Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” and recent calls for action as his prime motivations.
“The humans? The planet does not need humans”
Um…yeah. Enough said.
This guys blood is on Al Gores hands.
Don’t be surprised if he is made into a hero by segments of the leftist media. After all he did what some of them possibly fantasize about.
This was positively rich.
Listened to both AP and NPR do this story by 5PM PT. Hard to ignore, to be sure. Neither breathed *word one* about Lee’s motivation — in a bizarre twist (for them), it was all by the book: what happened, where it was, quotes from the cops, etc. I kept waiting for any *slight* inkling of why this guy did this — and realized about 30 seconds into each piece that it wasn’t coming.
Of course, if he was some “right-wing” nutjob you can be sure they’d have a 20 minute symposium with a complete phalanx of psychology academics weighing in.
I have an ex-boss with the same name, but darn it, it’s not him. Oh well, one can dream.
Google statements by Holdren and Maddow and you’ll find this guy’s mentors.
And taken down with bullets from authorities, as he should have been.
“well done” to the police, and the marksman in particular. as for lee, another darwin award candidate, “think of it as evolution in action”
Terrorist..
Call him what he is/was, a leftist terrorist.
Good riddance.
It’s a safe bet anyone who reads about this won’t find the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement so funny anymore.
Scary website, Zeke. Fortunately, they seem to be promising they’ll stay out of the gene pool.
Let me guess what the latest comments are: MSNBC and NPR say the enviromentalist gunman was a right-wing radical.