Jared Lee Loughner
Who was the man who killed a number of people, and wounded Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D)? Fox has him down as a person against fiat money, suspicious of federal power and ranting about the Constitution. His YouTube Channel, however, also puts him down as a fan of the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.
Wikipedia’s entry says “18 people were shot during a Congresswoman’s meeting in a Safeway grocery store parking lot in Casas Adobes, near Tucson, Arizona … According to The Arizona Republic newspaper, 6 people were killed. Someone from the crowd, possibly a security agent, reportedly fired at the gunman, but the gunman survived.” The gunman was Jard Lee Loughner.
Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old man who sources identify to Fox News as the gunman in custody in the deadly shooting rampage Saturday in Arizona, is suspected of posting a series of YouTube videos that show a focus on literacy and currency — as well as his distrust in the government.
“Hello, my name is Jared Lee Loughner,” one of the videos says, in words appearing on the screen. “This video is my introduction to you! My favorite activity is conscience dreaming; the greatest inspiration for my political business information. Some of you don’t dream – sadly.”
The video, posted Dec. 15, later turns more political.
“The majority of citizens in the united states of America have never read the united states of America’s constitution. You don’t have to accept the federalist laws,” the video’s titles say. “In conclusion, reading the second United States constitution, I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar. No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver! No! I won’t trust in god!”
But he’s other things too. On his YouTube channel, Loughner says: “I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver’s Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.”
His YouTube channel says he went to school in the following places: Thornydale elementary,Tortolita Middle School, Mountain View Highschool, Northwest Aztec Middle College, and Pima Community College. Maybe somebody remembers him from those places.
That’s the blog style you’ll find at DU and Kos.
I understand that he had a recognized handle at some blogs…
At every level, this is a seriously confused fellow.
It is, however, plain that his rants about precious metals has the Left projecting him as of the Right.
However, anarchist-libertarian-leftist is closer to the mark, based upon where he posts.
Oh my. The poor dude sounded thoroughly baked. What a shame that whatever demons haunted his mind permitted him to do such heinous acts. I pray for his victims and their families, and for the full recovery of the Congresswoman and all others wounded.
A confused fellow in many ways.
In his ‘Introduction: Jared Loughner’ YouTube video at the 3:06 mark, he mentions he’s a “…United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix.” A MEPS is a Military Entrance Processing Station, where you’re checked for viability as a recruit.
From the DOD site http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/mepsglance.htm – “Their job is to determine an applicant’s physical qualifications, aptitude and moral standards as set by each branch of military service, the Department of Defense, and federal law.”
He’s not yet been to Basic Training.
As – relieved – as some may be to find his political associations to be leftoid, saying that such a psychotic has any political position at all, is probably saying too much.
He’s a violent nutter who has already become the ragged ball in a sleazy game of political spin. Watch the political classes degrade themselves. This shooting and the subsequent spin make me feel sick and disgusted.
Looks at the whack-jobs reading list. Looks at my book shelf. Shrugs.
Reposted as I said asked to.
If any of the qualified practitioners in the Club could comment I would like to know what percentage of the population are generally speaking potentially violent on the order of the suspected assassin? It is my working assumption that he is a delusional and dangerous person, the last indisputably. The term “paranoid schizophrenic” is being tossed around on Facebook and Twitter.
Without getting deep into the weeds of what real psychiatrists or psychologists mean, may we make a distinction between sane but highly motivated persons who may consider using violence for ideological or other reasons and those who are simply to use a term of art, nuts? The former may be deterred or combated by so normalizing activity and strengthening the system that few individual targets, who are replaceable, are worth the cost.
The true lunatic cannot be deterred. They can sometimes be detected and intercepted in advance but often can only be stopped at ruinous cost. This question does have some larger implications regarding how we deal with rogue states and persons like Lil Kim and Ahmamadjackass.
So how many trusly dangerous lunatics are out there? Is it 1:1000 or 1:100 or 1:50? It makes a difference.
Partly replying to Blast from the Past’s comment above and previously posted on the “Take’s a thief” post http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2011/01/08/it-takes-a-thief/#comment-137036
John Lott’s statistical work on multiple public shootings, shows a correlation between when a state starts allowing concealed carry and a reduction in multiple public shootings, potentially implying a deterrent effect.
The usual caveat of “correlation does not equal causation” of cause, applies.
Looking at the places where those mass shootings that remain in concealed carry states, lends further weight to the idea of a deterrent: Schools, Churches, gun free / disarmed victim zones.
The pattern is repeated internationally, Zugg Parliament in Switzerland (one of the few nations in Europe to allow carrying)Dunblane primary school, Hungerford town centre. Horrit Campbell in a primary school with a machete, Whitehaven and the villages of south West Cumbria, Schools in Finland…
Notice, these events don’t happen on shooting ranges, where all those eeeeeevil guns are…
The use of body armour by some further supports the idea that these are not the sudden acts of someone possessed by insanity (ok Horrit Campbell was a schizo), they’re planned, the characters look to do the most damage with the least likelyhood of being interrupted.
ps, I’m not an academic, just a nerd who had his guns confistolen as collective punishment for Dunblane.
The tendency of the perps to kill themselves before capture or after being knocked down suggests a need to hang onto their own control.
Britain has not caught any of its multiple public shooters alive. they show up at a rate of about 1 in 60 million population in 10 years, although lesser attempts, eg stabbing kids in school on Teeside, Horrit Campbell etc do occur but are not linked by the MSM into the same pattern (they don’t count towards getting evil guns banned).
Those that do get caught appear to be narcissists.
The country where such events are sufficeintly common to have a name is Malaysia, and the name is “Amok”.
Wretchard, perhaps you can fill us in on the situation in the moslem parts of the Philipines?
I got the chance to ask a Brit who worked for several decades as a doctor in Malaysia.
He reckoned it was all to do with “Face”, and the loss of it,
that someone who had been slighted and belittled (had their “Honour” offended) would take up his machete unannounced, and run around the village killing as many as he could before killing himself – or getting cut to shreds if the other villagers caught up with him first.
Oh, yes, it goes without saying that the peninsular states in the Malaysian Federation are Muzzy Majority.
What if you stumble on one in progress?
John R Lott has links to coverage of Appalachian Law School, where several students retrieved their guns from their cars and approached the perp from different angles, The perp surrendered, similarly, the carrying school teacher at Pearl Mississippi, had the perp surrender to him.
Against that, the church attack a few years back where an armed lady in the congregation took the perp down, he had already attacked one armed guard, and took his own life. Another in a mall was wearing body armour and murdered the guy who was trying to stop him.
Columbine had a security guard, whom it turned out couldn’t shoot for shit.
I suspect that Appalachian and Pearl were exceptional, and that with most, the danger only stops when the perp assumes ambient temperature.
Sometimes a nut is just a nut.
bftp @ 6: well, as an indication, if there are 10m people in Los Angeles, and you know a nutter is dangerous only when a murder is actually committed, and there were (according to a quick search) 223 murders in the city last year, then – the order of magnitude of dangerous nutters is maybe one in 50k. On the one hand, maybe it takes a nutter five years to act out. On the other hand, maybe half those murder victims had it coming, that is, were victims of something other than nutters. And of course this is Los Angeles, not, say, Kabul – or Nogales. Your mileage may vary.
Jared Lee Loughner is a distraction.
otoh, speaking of what is dangerous:
“Dangerous!” cried Gandalf. “And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion.
Well there is a tweet that is reported on Business Insider that in 2007 the suspect was a pot smoking, radical left, dummy.
If true it is going to make a bunch of the usual leftist who jumped the gun on blaming the tea party (I.e., Paul Krugman) look like idiots……again. Apparenty he is not a veteran either, he just applied at an enlistment office and claimed to be a millitary recruit.
Well quoted, Josh.
otooh, speaking of dangerous:
http://www.lucianne.com/thread/?artnum=588539
Paul Krugman’s blog on the execrable NYTimes site comes out and blasts the right wing for this, apparently before any actual facts were available. I link to the ldot site instead of directly to Krugman, expecting his editorial to be pulled momentarily, comments are already shut down. This one goes on Krugman’s permanent record.
–
And we won’t even mention Jane Fonda’s tweeting on this as described on Newsbusters, cuz nobody expects any better from her.
–
besides the immediate casualties, what is sad about this is, here is a politician even attempting retail politics, a relatively sensible politican as these things go today, and it draws a nutter like a rusty knife to a superconducting magnet.
From what I’ve been reading, including the tweets of a young woman who knew him and was in a band with him, “catieparker”, he had an incident of alcohol poisoning in 2006, and his personality changed. From Hillbuzz, I picked up that he’d been arrested for possession of drug paraphenalia, and successfully completed a diversion program.
So I’m going to make a guess, based on a lot of reading, not a degree in psychology or anything else. When he’s assessed, they will find he’s a paranoid schizophrenic who’s been self-medicating, and has not had treatment. He may not even have been diagnosed, prior to this.
It doesn’t make it any better, it just makes him a nutjob, and politics tend to obsess certain kinds of delusional thinkers.
Actually, these little wannabe reichstag fires are only going to increase. As the federal government continues to grow in power, those that have a vested interest in that power are going to grab on to anything they can to delegitimize, and eventually criminalize, the opposition.
KRB
Well, that didn’t take long…and from the usual suspects:
http://jammiewearingfool.blogspot.com/2011/01/classy-nj-democrat-blames-fox-news-for.html
The comparison in timing between the mid term stupid party gains and this,
compared to
Newt’s crowd becoming Congress critters and Timmy (my favourite book is the Turner Diaries) McVeigh taking windows out on one side of a street an demolishing the hardened McMurragh building with occupants (but excluding ATF) on the other
-does lend it a certain appeal to conspiracy theorists, especially as some have been keeping an eye open for a Reichstag Fire type stunt.
I don’t think this is it.
However, like Timmy (whom it seems couldn’t even get the pants off any of the several Fed and private agents at parties at Elohim city)in ’95, I guess it will be used to try to create a “narrative of 2011″ with which to slander anyone who gets the better of a collectivist in an argument.
On that point, has anyone seen Buddy L lately? I’m sure there’s an eponymous law to be made out of that lot, and Buddy is the guy to spot it first.
#6 – Yeah, I know all those books too, except for “Meno” – never heard of that one. I wouldn’t call them ‘favourites’ but they present a good sampling of Western literature. I suspect the drugs did in his brain – he should be able to write more coherently if he can read this well.
Such a tragedy should pull Americans together in sadness and horror at the loss. Instead, it is being used by those who have political agendas to further their own goals, including gun laws, stopping Mrs. Palin’s efforts to elect conservatives, shuttering the only non-leftist news network. Is there nothing the leftists will not stoop to in their quest for power?
@19 Meno- from Plato
e @ 20: Is there nothing the leftists will not stoop to in their quest for power?
Well, they seem to have a pretty strong aversion to the truth.
The list of books reminds me of apartments in college towns with bookshelves made of cinderblocks and boards. Just about the same titles, with due respect to date of publication, as forty years ago.
Probaby doesn’t mean much.
Meno’s the one where they discuss how a person can come to know something he didn’t know. The conclusion is that the knower has a soul, which partakes in the ideas, but that soul must be made to remember, which is why experience or instruction is effective.
Dianna, I bet you’re right. This person obviously doesn’t know enough to have a true politics capable of motivating him to do something like this.
This guy is gonna give fruitcake a bad name, typically a very hard thing to accomplish.
Too bad someone with a carry permit didn’t plug the dude. This is exactly why I never go unarmed. In this world you NEVER know when or where one of these miscreants will surface and start blasting innocent people.
Of course he’s simply the ALLEDGED shooter.
The young idiot says he into “conscience dreaming”, which I’m thinking is really conscious (or lucid) dreaming…
“Lucid dreaming may weaken the borders between waking
and dreaming, the conscious and subconscious mind, reality
and fantasy. This might lead to problems of a dissociative
nature. Probably the most common form of dissociation
involves having problems distinguishing your waking
memories from dream memories. Everyone who recalls at
least one dream will have to sort out their dreams from reality
in the morning. This can really be a problem for those who
have previously had zero recall and, due to lucid dreaming,
have had a major uptick in recall. Now, suddenly, they have
all these excess, illogical memories to sort out. This is
unlikely to be a major problem, but may be a big annoyance.”
Add some drugs, some college lit, youthful idealism, a little paranoia, a lot of self-importance, and political rage = dangerous nutball?
#6 bftp: the book list may be just that. Who’s to say if Mr Loughner actually read the books. If he did read them maybe his brain just spent time between the book covers, absorbing random fragments. That wouldn’t make him literate.
MBA graduates spend time in business school but it most definitely doesn’t make them into managers. I can spend time standing in my garage but it doesn’t make me into a car.
“conscience dreaming” may be his self-diagnosis of voices in his head, aka schizophrenia, per d @ 15 above, we have some practicing shrinks who sometimes post, if they’d like to do a little Internet/remote diagnosis as of course they won’t but the MSM will do for us if we wait a few days, and the defense lawyers certainly will.
From the evidence of the murder’s website, I would say he is a schizophrenic. He is 22 years old, and very probably fell victim to that disease about the time he dropped out of school, away from his friends. I wonder if he is still living with his parents.
Definitely, it is disgusting to watch the punditry attempt to make political points over this tragedy.
Schizophrenia:
Prevalence—about five per 1000; Incidence—about 0.2 per 1000 per year; Rates vary in different populations (from Johns Hopkins site)
The incidence of violence among schizophrenics is perhaps four times higher than among the general population, and accounts for about 10% of all violent crime.
Jared Loughner’s age is not an unusual one for a first psychotic break. Too often, in similar cases, one hears that family members or others try to get medical help for the person whose behavior has noticeably changed, but that help is rejected by the subject, and cannot legally be forced upon him.
Loughner’s incoherence is indicative of a tragically disordered mind, and it seems to have led to even greater tragedies for his victims and their families today.
In this case, the entire country will be the victim of his disease if this incident is allowed to alter the course of national events –
Follow Reuters
Healthcare vote postponed due to shooting: Cantor
Not today, but perhaps someday if the federal government continues its quest to enslave us all to the state via socialism the Right will rise up, but not today. This guy was a lone nut and the Left’s attempts to pin him on the Right won’t convince anyone. Good luck Kos, Krugman, et al!
Given his My Space and his friends Twitters I suspect his psychosis was triggered by high THC pot and/or methamphetamine– a very common combination in that part of the US unfortunately.
The link between high THC pot and psychosis is an increasing problem, the THC concentrations are now 7 to 10 times higher than they were 20 years ago.
“The word assassin is derived from the word Hashshashin (Arabic: حشّاشين, ħashshāshīyīn, also Hashishin, Hashashiyyin, or Assassins),[3] and shares its etymological roots with hashish (pronounced /hæˈʃiːʃ/ or /ˈhæʃiːʃ/; from Arabic: حشيش ḥashīsh)”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination
An unfortunate side effect of prohibition–bootleggers did not sell beer or fine wine–they sold bath tub gin.
Blood and hair analysis for drugs will sort that out.
It is still unclear what kind of weapon he used, pity the concealed carry guys did not kill him before his first shot.
Also, there appears to have been a break down in security–prominent politicians usually have pretty good security these days.
I agree with you, completely, Moniker; postponing the health care vote is more an act of cowardice than it is an act of deference to the trauma suffered by one member of Congress. One would think that the country’s fate — to be free as per our Constitution or to be slaves as per the progressive agenda — hinged on the life of one member of Congress.
It also sets a terribly bad precedent: anyone who wants to disrupt the actions of congress, need only to duplicate on another subject this evil act to dictate to congress what it will and will not do.
This is a very unwise step Cantor has made; on the surface it looks likes he’s being compassionate, but in reality it reveals how one coo-coo, evil act, can disrupt our government. Not, I repeat, NOT, a message you want to send to the unhinged among us!!!!!
Cantor gets an F. Especially enraging, is that most of the country is solidly behind this repeal of the Marxist O’care legislation — it is almost as if this STUPID Cantor is USING this despicable incident as a reason not to force the question on repeal. What is he? A weasel????
No words can describe my utter contempt for Cantor’s decision.
Professionally we are not supposed to diagnose someone whom we have not examined. So all I can offer is a theoretical speculation.
Yes, the typical window for the manifestation of schizophrenia is the late teens to early twenties. Yes, some folks with incipient schizophrenia self-medicate with alcohol, pot, and other things. Yes, his “conscience dreaming” might be a confusion in his reality testing or it might be a dissociative phenomenon like depersonalization or derealization.
However, evil is evil. Mentally disturbed individuals can be evil and those without psychiatric diagnoses can be evil.
While probable mental illness of one sort or another is, from a social perspective, a relief — because it suggests that the events do not tarnish the political beliefs of other citizens — mental illness generally should not absolve the individual of responsibility.
If, for example, a person fired a gun because they believed that they were using a star-trek like weapon to neutralize a Klingon, but in the process killed an individual standing near them, a plea of “not guilty by reason of insanity” might be justified. On the other hand, if a person fired a gun because they believed that in so doing they would save the world from bad politicians, even if they were paranoid and even if they were hearing voices, I would generally be inclined to find that they were mentally ill BUT at the same time guilty and deserving of conviction and punishment.
My rather strict view here is that mental illness, except in the rarest and most extreme cases, should be a factor AFTER the individual is convicted and should rarely if ever result in “not guilty by reason of insanity.” After they are found guilty their mental illness might be a factor in sentencing but most of the time should not be a factor before conviction.
We shall see what psychiatric findings emerge from this case. But mental illness — even serious conditions such as schizophrenia — do not automatically immunize a person from responsibility for their acts.
Zombie posted a transcript of Loughner’s entire 50-second video:
If I’m the mind
controller then I
control the belief and
religion.
– Action
– Thought
– Location
– Food
Mind Controller
/ \
Belief Religion
———————–
If you’re editing of every belief and religion reaches the final century
then the writer for every belief and religion is you.
You’re editing of every belief and religion reaches the final century.
Thus, the writer for every belief and religion is you.
———————–
You control every — thought, action, and
lifestyle — for the person or people as the
mind controller.
———————–
I’m able to control every belief and religion
by being the mind controller!
More on Loughner’s favorite punk left-wing band over at http://pajamasmedia.com/zombie/2011/01/08/jared-loughners-how-to-mind-controller-video/
Unless it is proven that this animal, whether sane or insane, acted on behalf of a group, he is personally culpable and responsible for the crimes of assault & murder.
The New York Times insinuates that Sarah Palin is responsible for this crime.
“During the fall campaign, Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, posted a controversial map on her Facebook page depicting spots where Democrats were running for re-election; those Democrats were noted by crosshairs symbols like those seen through the scope of a gun. Ms. Giffords was among those on Ms. Palin’s map.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/01/new_york_times_implicates_sara.html
In the Soviet Union, via their State media arms of Pravda and Izvestia, Sarah Palin would be considered a Kulak – part of the bourgeois middle class – and therefore guilty by class designation. In the Soviet Union Jared Lee Loughner would be considered part of the proletariat class – and therefore innocent by class designation.
batman,
Thank you Sir. My question was, How common is this?
This person’s thought process is not working will, but Nazi and Communist are not left and right, Communist is obvious, and Nazi is National Socialist. His reading list was not balanced, I think he was trying to impress people with his intellect. Based on his writing that I saw on youtube his thought process was some what bent.
Prayers to the victims, and screw him.
Here a five minute clip of Giffords responding on the issue of violent rhetoric and actions in response to the Health care vote. Palin and Boehner are also mentioned. I draw no conclusions from this other than she is attractive and articulate and the content/situation is just kind of eerie.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2011/01/flashback_giffords_interview_on_target_map.php/
# 30 Moniker,
Correct, and can add that close personal friend was afflicted with this terrible disease when i was younger. He was incredible impressionable and would react to televised shows as if the broadcaster was giving him instructions. It was very difficult to deal with as he was also brilliant in electronics and held several degrees as well. When the family tried to have him committed and cared for, he would retreat inward and would be released in 3 days.
Unintended consequences created a perfect storm for people in this category; When before a family could commit an individual to Hospital care there were abuses to this, and the 72 hour rule was instituted. This worked to overcome abuse, but also gave a way out for people to walk away and never receive the care and treatment.
The part people may not understand is how impressionable its victims are…anything coming over the radio, TV, movies, read in magazines, etc, could trigger a reaction as if the advertisement or program was intended solely for him and required him to take action.
Darcy, one of their colleagues was killed today. Postponing for a day or two is not a big deal. You come across as a bit of a nut on this one.
Did he shout “Allahu Akbar”? No? A pity. There go some really good conspiracy theories right down the drain.
Seriously though folks: His mental attitude is one and the same with the jihadists. There is the repition of certain words and phrases that seem incoherent to all of us and which the perpetuator does not really understand either BUT which serve as his justification because they make him the Holy One and his victims criminals deserving his version of divine retribution.
And, I am constrained to report, there is a passing resemblance
between nutters, jihadists and those confirmed to have been demonically possessed. (Read some of the works of the late Malachi Martin, himself a practicing excorcist with extensive experience.)
The point to remwember is this: Whenever this mindset/possession sets in, any and all stimuli inspires slaughter. There is no solution other than “steel on target”. Reason, bribes, compliance with demands, are all useless. Only thing that works is the Jeff Cooper two-step: “Front sight. Press”.
I’d just as soon see the shooter hang for murder next month, but IMHO, he’ll be found to be another Hinckley who will get free room and board in a rubber room for twenty years or so, just like Hinckley.
The rush to judgement for political spinning by the usual suspects in the MSM is sickening but expected. Krugman continues to astound me with his partisan blather, but on occasion, he does redeem himself by rising to Keith Olbermann’s level. That he is a recipient of a Nobel prize is even more astounding.
Often The M’Naghten Rules are applied at sentencing rather than as a defense, the insanity defense is very weak these days particularly in multiple homicide cases.
As this young man allegedly murdered 6 people the Arizona death penalty will apply.
Somebody asked where Buddy Larsen was. I think he is down at College Station trying to explain to his fellow Aggie quqarterback that completing a pass requires that you throw the ball to guys who wear the same color jersey you do.
LSU is not wishing him any success.
All the schizos I’ve dealt with have been relatively harmless, simple assault being the most common offense. Most of calls on them are when they yell crazy stuff at neighbors or jump into traffic yelling at people. Sometimes their elaborate sci-fi/fantasy/conspiracy fantasies are actually quite funny (after doing this job awhile our humor gets a bit warped, but it helps keep us sane).
Here lies the problem though: they don’t keep the crazies locked up anymore(at least in my state). When they do something drastic enough for us to commit them (hurting self/others)the hospital keeps them for up to 72hrs, gives them some meds and pushes them out the door. Then they’re ok for awhile until they stop forget to take their meds. Then they’re off to crazy-land again and the cycle repeats itself until they kill themselves or someone else.
A few months ago I attended an LE seminar on the Virginia Tech shooting. Here’s the gist: EVERYONE knew Cho was nuts. His professor had to privately tutor him because all the other students were scared to be in the same room with him. When he read the murderous, psychotic “stories” that he wrote aloud in class, he scared the crap out of everyone.
I’m reluctant about letting the government determine who is loony enough to be locked away, but you can’t just let all these wacko’s wander around until they decide to start killing people. The other problem is when the crazies reproduce (I can tell you some depressing stories regarding that).
I think a simple criteria would be that if the police commit you 2 or 3 times you need to undergo in-depth evaluation for permanent commitment. This relying on meds for everything is ridiculous. They always go off their meds at some point.
Habu #25 is right on.
Everywhere I go I am armed if possible (which is why I rarely fly or leave the country). Mid-size fighting handgun 9mm or larger, spare mag, blade and tac-light. No exceptions. I carry even when I go jogging. ALL THE TIME. Those who carry “most of the time”, or “when I go down town” are setting themselves up for failure. The fight will happen when the bad guy chooses, not you. I am willing to bet that at least one off-duty cop or CPL holder was at that rally in AZ and their gun was at home.
Also, having a gun is not enough. As the Colonel said “owning a handgun doesn’t make you armed any more than owning a guitar makes you a musician.” First you need professional training: presentation, reloads, malfunction drills, shooting on the move, using cover. Then you need to get your butt to the range on a regular basis and make your payments.
Being a warrior is a discipline, a mindset. Your profession does not matter. I know regular citizens that are warriors and cops that should be but are not. They are what they are because they CHOOSE to be.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are not protected unless you protect yourself. 99% of the time, when we get there it is too late. That is the reality. If you live in a state that allows concealed carry and you don’t take advantage of your freedom, then shame on you. Stop wasting time on fantasy football, bowling, golfing or other useless activities and become a warrior.
Feedback always welcome, Dwight.
b @ 34: of course the problematic is that any perp can claim temporary insanity, or can otherwise seek and be judged to have found a cure, and where then the equity for the act?
otoh can there be any equity for the act in any case?
please turn in your hand-written essays in less than thirty minutes.
Could the gunman possibly mean “conscious” (i.e., lucid) dreaming, rather than “conscience” dreaming?
He did get ratifications and ramifications mixed up…he gives “literacy” a bad name.
Alexander Pope was right on this one. Nuts!
Tee is right. Don’t think I read all the posts first, do you?
What blend of narcissism, delusion, drug induced psychosis and toxic pop culture produced this freak? Donald Fagan wrote a song about demented loners like this in the 1970′s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tllhmK9g4G4
And this:
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
When the mental hospitals were closed, the prisons soon began hiring psychiatrists because deranged criminals are now locked up there instead of in hospitals.
When there were hospitals for the criminally insane, the insanity defense didn’t allow the criminal to go free. Such a person could be immediately committed to a hospital and kept there indefinitely. Now that defense is outmoded, really. Violent criminals, whether mentally ill or not, must be detained, and therefore, must be called guilty, I think. (No doubt the laws of various states differ).
Anyway, now there’s talk of an “accomplice” of some sort – an older man. A facilitator? A manipulator? Maybe just a stranger who gave him a ride?
great. local fox affiliate leads with the story, has on two local dem congresspersons, asking them over and over if they are afraid. one blames things on the tone of the tea party and “that we tolerate (their) hate”, and that she will “speak up and react when she hears that kind of thing.” the other, slightly more moderate, tried to simply say nice things about Giffords, but eventually agreed with the first after the fox guy kept goading him. only a bare mention in the intro that the guy’s website includes Mein Kampf and Das Kapital.
also a recently taped interview with Giffords, ex-Republican, deficit hawk, anti-illegal immigration, blue dog, who participated in the reading of the constitution just yesterday, I’d take her over fifty of the schmucks that fox just put on the air.
Understand it’s not here, but lost in the shuffle yesterday in Acupulco, cartel thugs killed 25 people and decapitated 15 of them. The violence in Mexico is sickening and positively demonic. It can’t happen here. You wanna bet?
This dude’s “cuckoo for cocoa puffs” but I swear only sicker in degree from the gasping MFM, as Rush says. I had ABC News on just to see how those libtards would react to this tragedy. Well, the tragedy seemed much less important than putting the first spin on the matter and they slipped that in quickly as if they were either embarrassed to say it or they wanted it to affect the subconscious. “Did she have any enemies to your knowledge?” they asked her father. He snappily replied-”JUST EVERY MEMBER OF THE TEA PARTY.” Even in the midst of grief, hyperbolic partisan crap must be immediately slung. Then the smug anchor, slightly smiling as if he knew his “performance” might gain him admission to Katie Couric’s next party, casually mentioned and showed the infamous Sarah Palin target map. Although preceeded by two Democratic Target Maps, (see,http://www.verumserum.com/?p=13647), I assume the Palin Map will be declared the more provacative by these network sleuths who launch their exhaustive and unbiased investigations from behind the anchor desk. Do these clowns still think their words will go unchallenged and that if they are clever enough, we won’t catch the subtleties? Well, thank God it’s a new day pinheads! We don’t need you telling us news we heard about 5 hours earlier and also giving us your learned interpretation of what we’ve already seen, interpreted and analyzed. Give it just a couple of years and the highest and best use of your rigorous J-School “education” will be slinging mustard from a Sabrett’s cart.
40, 43, 44, 52: You are all correct. When California decided — all the way back to 1964 — to undo the abuse of railroading senile grandma into a State mental hospital, they slowly but surely decreed that they preferred to let citizens “die with their rights on,” rather than overrule any mentally ill person’s autonomy.
48 Josh: You articulated the reason why I want to see guilty verdicts FIRST and have mental illness considered second. I saw plenty of people feign insanity and fool gullible psychiatrists and psychologists, especially under the very loose Bazelon rule in the early ’70′s in Washington DC, and then miraculously recover.
There is already too much attenuation of personal responsibility and agency. On the one hand the government wants to diminish free choice and instead mandate as much as they can. On the other hand there is erosion in people’s willingness to take responsibility for the consequences of their own deeds.
If the facts of a case prove that a person committed a criminal act then they should be found guilty. If we want to take their mental condition into account AFTER that in determining sentence, that is reasonable. But guilt is guilt and evil deeds are evil deeds. And with only the very rarest exceptions this should be our one and only standard in dealing with criminal acts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/us/politics/09shooter.html?_r=1&hp
Loughner, suspended from school for bizarre behavior, reported to his parents, he drops out, rejected by the Army for reasons they cannot disclose, may have met Giffords a couple of years ago, his “final thoughts” are textbook – dissociation, depersonalization, whatever the appropriate terms that I barely recall from an undergrad class and a quick google, but I think will be textbook something or other in the next editions, thank you Mr. Internet.
Giffords herself seems so middle of the road (and in a good way) you wouldn’t think anyone this side of anarchist would have a political beef with her of any major degree.
As a prosecutor, I’ve always wondered why the “voices” these people hear never compel them to do anything non-violent and positive such as “work a second job,” “pay bills on-time” or “plant a victory garden?” Maybe that’s just the ones I see.
I am not in any way a fan of the Tea Party or Sarah Palin, but the vitriol directed toward each in comments sections today was astonishing. I’m a centrist; I used to be able to discuss issues on either side with equinamity and find some common ground, but this hysterical b.s., blaming Palin, blaming Beck, is purely emotional & irrational. And widespread.
I’m used to media-driven memes since GWB’s terms, and this looks like the newest, perhaps set to spring since the November elections at the first opportunity. As in payback. Completely disgusting.
Worm has it right – the real problem is we let obviously dangerous nuts roam society. If politicians weren’t so stupid, their self-preservation instincts might kick in and they’d realize they are disproportionately the targets of nuts and agree to re-institutionalize the most dangerous people.
Of course it’s coming out now that this guy has evidence of antisocial behavior. It’s no okay to let people like that loose.
As to the idiots complaining this is all Sarah Palin’s fault, or the Tea Party’s fault – what worthless twits. We need to be free to disagree with politicians. We need to be free to say a political position is dangerous, misguided, and should be fought against. We can’t have political debate stifled by the fear that some loose nut will decide it’s an instruction to shoot somebody. Normal people hear one politician give a stem-winder against another politician and go vote. It’s nuts who load up and start shooting.
Loose nuts are the problem, not political debate, no matter how heated.
14. Josh said…
“besides the immediate casualties, what is sad about this is, here is a politician even attempting retail politics, a relatively sensible politican as these things go today, and it draws a nutter like a rusty knife to a superconducting magnet.”
Indeed.
She may well have been chosen because her open and informal style of interacting with her voters made her the easiest target for this scumbag.
Sad.
“In August 2009, when there were demonstrations against the health care measure across the nation, a protester who showed up to meet Ms. Giffords at a supermarket event similar to Saturday’s was removed by the police when the pistol he had holstered under his armpit fell and bounced on the floor.”
Jeff Flake called her “fearless” as did the Rabbi that oficiated at her wedding, according to this account:
“Rabbi Stephanie Aaron, who in 2007 officiated at the wedding of Ms. Giffords and the astronaut Mark E. Kelly, and leads Congregation Chaverim in Tucson, said the congresswoman had never expressed any concern about her safety.
“No fear.
I’ve only seen the bravest possible, most intelligent young congresswoman,”
Rabbi Aaron said.
“I feel like this is really one of those proverbial — seemingly something coming out of nowhere.”
58. David Spence:
Quite a severe selection bias involved in
“the ones you see.”
On the whole, I think this is a good thing,
as are victory gardens and prompt payments!
Rufus II said…
IS DAILY KOS INVOLVED IN ARIZONA MURDERS?
“My Congress WOMAN voted against Nancy Pelosi! And is now DEAD to me!”
— eerie Daily Kos hit piece on Gabrielle Giffords just two days before assassination attempt; repeated use of word “dead” in relation to Giffords just 48 hours before she and a dozen others were fired upon.
UPDATE: Daily Kos scrubs “dead to me” thread but screengrabs document everything;
UPDATE: school classmates and former friends describe shooter Jared Lee Loughner as committed Leftist
—
Dupnik said the shooter had previous run-ins with the law and had threatened to kill someone before.
There had been “difficulties” at Pima Community College where Loughner attended, Dupnik said. One student, who had a poetry class with Loughner, said he would often act “wildly inappropriate.”
“One day he started making comments about terrorism and laughing about killing the baby,” classmate Don Coorough told ABC News, referring to a discussion about abortions. “The rest of us were looking at him in shock… I thought this young man was troubled.”
Another classmate, Lydian Ali, recalled the incident as well.
“A girl had written a poem about an abortion. It was very emotional and she was teary eyed and he said something about strapping a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomber,” Ali told ABC News.
The 9 year old girl, Cristina Greene, that was murdered by this nut, was born 9/11/2001.
Speaking of nuts, the infamous Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church plans a “protest” at the girl’s funeral.
From Wikipedia entry on Tim Blair:
“The notion of far right and far left groups allying with extremist Islamists is sometimes called “Blair’s Law” (“the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force”) by conservative and libertarian bloggers.”
Leaving aside the Islamist reference, Laughner’s brain seems a case in point… a hothouse for all sorts of crazy and inconsistent ideas to come together.
Tee @ 59–you’re just now noticing that the left is overjoyed whenever they can find anything to blame on the other side, no matter how baseless, unfair and farfetched? Better late than never.
There’s really not much you can say about this perp, except “Jared Loughner, meet Charles Guiteau and Leon Czolgosz”.
Like them, he had “political views” that were mainly the product of his own subconscious. Like them, he wanted to kill publicly to “make a statement”. And like them, he succeeded (more or less).
As for his sanity or otherwise, I will not comment. Except to point out that the M’Naghten Rule does not distinguish between those who do not understand the difference between “right” and “wrong”, and those who do but simply believe the rules don’t apply to them, for whatever reason.
clear ether
eon
Mommy told me “When you can’t find anything anything nice, you can always just link to it. ”
Happy days.
Civil libertarians must take responsibility for this and similar events. I guarantee we will find that his parents and family had sought help but were told the young man could not be held and treated if he refused. We have thousands of mentally ill people on the streets in California, not because evil Reagan (as is the myth) closed the mental hospitals, but because the California lawmakers sided with civil libertarians in closing the hospitals in favor of community clinics (that never came to be). Such is the legacy of social legislaton gone terribly awry.
Keith (above) is apparently a real moron. First of all, it was the Murrah Building–not the “McMurrah.” Secondly, the building was in no way, shape or form “hardened.” Thirdly, write about which something you have at least a modicum of understanding. I was INSIDE the Murrah building within a couple of hours of the bombing, helping to haul bodies of babies out and over to the coroner’s temporary facility. It happened almost 16 years ago and it STILL haunts me–and I had previously served two tours in Vietnam. McVeigh got what he deserved–as THIS moron hopefully will. Let’s not start speculating about whether or not he’s “insane.” I see no purpose in giving him a phony excuse for what he did. He obviously knew (and knows) the difference between right and wrong, otherwise he wouldn’t have immediately asked for an attorney when he was caught.
Geraldo Rivera has much to answer for.
Willowbrook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_sYn8DnlH4
The shooter seems to be a devotee of the writings of the notorious crank Lyndon LaRouche, someone whose politics defy easy categorization — though “demented” will do nicely in a pinch.
LaRouche is neither right nor left but a bizarre concatenation of both, with various weird obsessions that fit perfectly with the shooter’s internet postings — mind-control, currency, grammar, Plato’s Meno, etc.
Loughner is associated with a group called American Renaissance. They are not just anti-government but are specifically opposed to the Zionist Occupation Government.
Rep Giffords is Jewish.
Case closed. The guy has more in common with Al Fatah and Hezbolah and nothing to do with American Conservatism.
However Gifford’s father has blamed the Tea Party for the shooting. I guess he does not want a crisis to go to waste.
#56, #60, #68:
The Earl Warren Supreme Court decreed in the 60’s that you could not put someone in a mental institution that did not want to be there and had done nothing criminal. This was terribly convenient for the Left, enabling them to divert money from the state mental institutions to welfare and also represented “defining down deviancy.”
And yes, we have all kinds of nuts roaming free and families required to put up with seriously ill people because they cannot be subject to protective incarceration. That is where the homeless problem comes from, among others. A development in recent years is that they are putting such people in rest homes, where they prey on the elderly there.
Those who wonder at the similarity of delusional material among psychotics are right to do so. In my experience, they’re much more likely to be drawn to the delusional ideas of the left, probably because they share the same paranoia about lack of control over their lives. But the government also usually figures big-time in paranoid delusions, as do the greater authorities, God and the devil, with whom they struggle, even more than most of us.
It would make sense to me if either he was a psychotic leftist or a paranoid who was now threatened by the same power grab by the Democrats that has a lot of people freaked out. Somehow, I think the Dems may have unwittingly put themselves in the position of threatening the unhinged among us who fear the government.
Meanwhile, it bears mentioning that the incidence of psychosis has been skyrocketing in recent years, for reasons we can only guess at. Drugs must be a part of it, but the really bad ones from the standpoint of psychosis (acid etc.) have been around and making people crazy for decades. Yeats, above, probably has the best explanation for the increase in the incidence of virtually all mental illnesses.
And the center falling apart, like the deinstitutionalization of the psychotics, is to be laid directly at the feet of the left. This disorganization and societal upheaval is what they have been striving for, consciously or unconsciously, for more than a century.
It’s going to get a lot darker before we see any light at the end of this tunnel.
Joe Zamudio…
Exceptional Witness
Very objective, exceptionally modest, and generous in his praise of others.
Never mind
“If politicians weren’t so stupid, their self-preservation instincts might kick in and they’d realize they are disproportionately the targets of nuts and agree to re-institutionalize the most dangerous people. ”
On the contrary, this sort of crime almost NEVER touches “the protected class”. It’s far more likely that a paranoid schizophrenic will end up killing a family member – http://www.gazette.com/articles/insane-100695-springs-death.html or a complete stranger in humdrum surroundings: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/596139
When is a politician likely to rub elbows with the common herd on a Greyhound bus? THEY fly first class, and how likely is it that they’d run into a jobless, penniless nutcase there? No, these wild creatures are allowed to run loose because they typically only savage small deer like us. This is a big shocking story today because this time it was one of the prize cows in the heavily-guarded paddock that fell victim. Ironically, Giffords was shot because she was doing something that the rest of us never think twice about: she was at a suburban grocery store, so she was caught in the same hail of bullets that brought down all the “typical” targets (does anyone even know their names yet?).
The civil liberties fanatics never expected their grand experiment to affect them and their class. Random death from crazed maniacs is a price that they were all too willing (for us) to pay so that they could continue on their simon-pure process through life.
I agree with #49 that “conscience dreaming’ is probably intended to be “conscious dreaming” AKA lucid dreaming. It’s probably a way of explaining his fugue states to himself and making them seem like something under his control. My students (college level) confuse conscience with conscious all the time. Maybe their hs teachers didn’t know the difference either.
Joe’s account
Re: Paul Krugman’s blog comments
Exhibit A illustrating why the titles “Ph.D.” and “Nobel Prize Winner” after one’s name cannot guarantee he won’t act and talk like a damn fool.
ds @ 58: As a prosecutor, I’ve always wondered why the “voices” these people hear never compel them to do anything non-violent and positive such as “work a second job,” “pay bills on-time” or “plant a victory garden?” Maybe that’s just the ones I see.
Well there’s that, but (speculating wildly) two things, one is that it’s probably just the way we’re all built, the second voice is self-protective but not entirely plugged-in, and from some tv treatments of this, sometimes the perp is kind of trying to rid himself of the voice by killing something external.
rwe @ 72: however, if Loughner is into Larouche and seriously one of these anti-ZOG types, then he has also been channeled in a particular direction.
I’ve long speculated that this is a cultural development of Islam, they keep jihad around so they can *train* their psychotics into doing something marginally useful (in primitive terms) for their socity. Marginally useful, plus it tends to terminate the jihadi so he is no further trouble to his family. A double win! Based on zero research, I would expect to find this in pre-Islamic Arab society as well.
–
The ZOG thing is sadly very significant, RWE – link? I didn’t see it up on Drudge. …
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/136837-report-dhs-says-shooting-suspect-possibly-linked-to-anti-semitic-group
68. “Civil libertarians must take responsibility for this and similar events.”
And also for Fred Phelps and crew.
Someone trying to take advantage of the situation. Someone under the name of Daniel Saltman Jr posted a link to the AP article http://goo.gl/oPOsy . Which is fine in and of itself, but the story is linked as ” Tea party nut job shoots Arizona Rep. Giffords in the face, 6 killed in rampage “.
I skimmed the google searches and he was listed in the vast majority of links for the first 39 pages http://goo.gl/xijXA . Just found it interesting, I guess either someone trying to make political hay or another nut job. The fact that there was just a title with a link on all these bulletin boards and no attached rant makes me think someone is trying to take advantage.
Also if you look at the very broad spectrum and the times “he” registered on all those forums makes me wonder if it is actually some kinda “bot”, similar to those that register on forums and spout nonsense advertisements.
“As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the coming of the Son of Man.”
It is written of those days that the earth was filled with violence. Jesus is coming. Whether any of you personally believe it or not is irrelevant except as it pertains to your final abode after judgment. I urge each of you to pray and seek the face of God for yourself, your families and our nation. Jesus became a man, He came to earth, He died for your sins, He rose again. Your sins can be forgiven. Repent.
I don’t know what scares me more: Jared Loughner’s descent in to madness, or the reaction so many are having to it.
H/T my wife. Why ,when a Muslim kills someone in an atrocity, like Doctor Goatraper in Texas, the left insists we don’t jump to conclusions but in this case, the first words out of their mouths are…Palin, tea party, right wing extremists. Liberalism is a mental disorder.
Julian James “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” Chapter 4 pg84
We are conscious human beings. We are trying to understand human nature. The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god and a follower part called a man. Neither part was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us.
Very little of it can be said to make the man side of it seem familiar to us, except by referring back to the first chapter –to remember all the things we do without consciousness. But how unsatisfying is a list of nots. Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles. We feel there must, absolutely must be something he feels inside. What we are trying to do is invent a mindspace and a world of analogue behaviors in him–just as we do for ourselves and our contemporaries. And this invention I say is not valid for greeks of this period.
Perhaps a metaphor of something close to that state might be helpful. In driving a car, I am not sitting like a backseat driver directing myself, but rather find myself committed and engaged with little consciousness. In fact, my consciousness will usually be engaged with something else, in a conversation with you if you happen to be my passenger, or in thinking about the origin of consciousness perhaps. My hand, foot and head behavior, however, are almost in a different world. In touching something, I am touched, in turning my head the world turns to me; in seeing I am related to the world I immediately obey in the sense of driving on the road and not on the sidewalk. And I am not conscious of any of this. And certainly not logical about it. I am caught up, unconsciously enthralled, if you will in a total interacting reciprocity of stimulation that may be constantly threatening or comforting, appealing or repelling, responding to the changes in traffic and particular aspects of it with trepidation or confidence, trust or distrust, while my consciousness is off on different topics.
now simply subtract that consciousness and you have what a bicameral man would be like. The world would happen to him and his actions would be an inextricable part of that happening with no consciousness whatever. And now let some brand new situation occur, an accident up ahead, a blocked road, a flat tire, a stalled engine and behold, our bicameral man would not do what you or I would do, that is quickly and efficiently swivel our consciousness over to the matter an narratize out what to do. He would have to wait for his bicameral voice which with the stored up admonitory wisdom of his life–would tell him non-consciously what to do.
I am perturbed by this shooting…it has some very queer aspects to it. Most are apparent in media reports like CNN’s, and even in threads like this one.
One queer aspect is its timing. It appears deliberately planned to coincide with the recent mail-bomb “attacks” in Maryland. Mind you, this apparent 1 – 2 – 3 tempo might be coincidental, and the shooter just an attention-seeker, or it might not be.
Another is a curious exemption in media coverage of Giffords’ political agenda. Giffords was a credible, moderate face for Tuscon’s and, by extension, the state’s, very liberal teachers unions. She is a matron, too, of the state’s university system and its aggregate patronage cliques. But, just as they did with their semi-coverage of the Clintons, the Obamas and the Kennedys, (and perhaps to avoid the obvious Reichstag comparisons) the media keeps glossing over this important fact.
Another one is, it was a Bush-appointed judge and a twelve year old little girl that lay dead in Safeway, but almost all commentary obsesses over the ‘favored’ victim, the female politician. It’s as if the fact of this Congresswomen’s injury has distracted the media from the gunman’s other confirmed, multiple victims, and from the less partisan speculations that a generalized massacre might generate.
And most disturbing to me, the Democrats’ media apparatus appeared to be pre-poised to advance their “Sarah-Did-It” narrative within mere minutes of the calamity. This rush to assign vicarious guilt is queerly similar to the Left’s social justice method in that it exculpates the clear culprit and substitutes an unindicted, unquantifiable “other” in his place. The rhetorial pre-position currently on display indicates, perhaps, an innocent “rush to get it wrong,” and that the citizens can expect that the media’ll correct the record as the facts roll in. Or, more likely, it indicates a reflexive, defensive dishonesty, and the Democrats’ earnest water-carriers’ efforts to use the social justice play book to obfuscate the murderer’s clear guilt.
And some in this thread are falling for it. Are we cattle doomed to circle mindlessly in the statists’ discursive corrals? Calls to justify imprisonment for disturbed teens, or to relaunch the Drug Wars, or to add more gun laws to the books, or to change the “nation’s discourse,” are just more appeals to empower government to step in and “save” us from the “Monster-of-the-Day” TM. And something tells me, that’s exactly where the Left’s media portals like Jane Fonda’s CNN would like us to be.
Moooo!
This is to add to Worm’s comment above. Fox NC is now saying that the crime was preventible because of the shooter’s obvious psychosis, moreover that he was apparently linked to American Renaissance, a white racist group some of whose members “friended” me on Facebook, and who are secessionists who would like Jews to move to Israel. I figured them out and “defriended” them. Fox also mentioned that Giffords is Jewish. I agree with those comments that state that this mass murder should never have happened, and who cite earlier incidents where psychotics were known and not stopped before they killed. Many in this country are ashamed and afraid to deal with mental illness; some are part of the anti-psychiatry movement and/or deny that there is such a thing as mental illness of so grave a nature that protective institutionalization is indicated.
Josh:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/01/09/arizona-suspected-gunman-no-stranger-to-trouble/
only right-wingers have guns, or kill, right-wingers should shut up and leave the words to the left who know how to use them properly, oh yeah, professor lakoff.
worse things have been said about Bush by the democrats over the past two years, much less the past ten, than anything the tea party usually says, if the dems want to clean up some rhetoric they should send a telegram to the white house for starters, to president lipstick on a pig.
RWE@72: This was terribly convenient for the Left, enabling them to divert money from the state mental institutions to welfare and also represented “defining down deviancy.”
A development in recent years is that they are putting such people in rest homes, where they prey on the elderly there.
Now is not the proper time to initiate this point of disagreement, so, quickly, in passing, the flip side of closing the institutions was equally ugly. They were cesspools of humanity where who was preying on whom was a fine distinction not reserved for an survivalist environment. The Street was no better – the sad part is that it was no worse. On the financial end, the allocated funding was routinely looted by state bureaucrats. It is now routinely looted by state bureaucrats working in another department.
85. “Liberalism is a mental disorder.”
Most of us in the US of A are liberal to some degree, the country is extremely liberal on the world stage…the classic use of “liberal” belongs to people who believe strongly in individual rights within government, as with those who originally took up the cases of warehousing the mentally ill. Nothing about this value system requires avoiding offending Muslims at all costs, and then smearing Sarah Palin at any opportunity, for example. That stuff is just weird. It has more to do more with (I think) setting a moral code, a trend, within government that benefits certain interests. Opposing this code makes you immoral, and therefore dangerous – that needs to be hammered into the masses. Obviously it has succeeded.
…and a twelve year old little girl that lay dead in Safeway…
By his own accounting, one of the shooter’s favorite books was To Kill A Mockingbird.
Apparently he missed the part that begins, “It’s a sin…”
Tee, you make a good point. I don’t think the problem is liberalism, per se, but Liberalism–or, as I’ve come to consider it, the doctrine of the illiberal Left.
YBR,
IIRC, the comfort and health of one’s elderly parents and grandparents was the responsibility of the family. This included mental health and comfort.
But, like so many of the duties on the adults’ to-do lists – from schooling and discipline of children to infant day care and providing meals, the responsibility for maintenance and care of the aged and mentally infirm has been given over to government agencies (or to private ones that suffer government oversight). And, as I’m sure you know, the government has devoured every institutionalized “need” greedily.
Which only leads to a cloying, Euro-socialist system…and so I’d like to think we can imagine a American response to this calamity that doesn’t demand more institutionalization.
CS@88: Many in this country are ashamed and afraid to deal with mental illness; some are part of the anti-psychiatry movement and/or deny that there is such a thing as mental illness of so grave a nature that protective institutionalization is indicated.
I am ashamed and afraid that the psychiatric community will be recruited as another tool that demeans and diminishes individuality for the sake of preventing the tragic and the unpreventable.
The subject in question is a kid with no impulse control – a not unexpected result of living in a culture where consequences for behavior are rapidly disappearing, as I note frequently in the context of 2008. I sincerely doubt he is much more than a latter day John Hinckley, noted only for his unrelenting banality of motivation and character, but I withhold a formal opinion until more information becomes available.
46. Worm: Good post – I have experienced and agree with you on many points. Just one thought: since mentals are amoung us, (i.e. no longer institutionalized), some do-gooder could use this tragedy (Ralm’s “never waste a tragedy”) to push for internet censorship in guise of limiting “inciting and inflamatory” speech. Our limey friends across the Atlantic have this in place already.
is Gabrielle Republican or Democrat ? our TV channels can’t agree wether she is of one party or the other, all they retain that she was the target of a dementg
Last night I was channel surfing and stupidly stopped on the Pravda America (MSNBC) channel. Who did the delusional Keith Olbermann have on to converse with? A representative of the “Southern Poverty Law Center.” (This alone should instantly start your gag reflex).
So who else used to have these “experts” on their show all the time? Rick (I don’t have a job) Sanchez for one). (This should put that reflex in high gear).
Now the amazing thing about this interview was that I instantly knew what would be said. How could this be? Call me pychic?
Did the “representative” say this psycho was a pot smoking delusionnal,left-wing murdurer? No, he commented about Tea Party connections because the alleged murderer mentioned taxes on his website. What?
Why does MSNBC continue to have the “Southern Poverty Law Center” come on all of your shows?
In an excellent report put out by the Center for Immigration Studies, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jerry Kammer detailed the smear tactics used by the Southern Poverty Law Center to silence those in the immigration debate. Kammer shows that the SPLC’s attacks on immigration control organizations were carefully coordinated with the National Council of La Raza. La Raza means “The Race” in Spanish. The SPLC recklessly listed the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a hate group, just as La Raza began its “We Can Stop the Hate” campaign aimed at pushing FAIR from being quoted by the media or testifying at Congress. FAIR’s board of advisors includes such right-wing racists as former Democratic Governor of Colorado Richard Lamm and the former head of the Congressional Black Caucus foundation Frank Morris. Kammer shows that the SPLC even sees racism in the Lord of the Rings, which one of their columnists called “little more than a glorified vision of white patriarchy” in which the heroes “are manly men who are whiter than white” and “are frequently framed in halos of blinding bright light and exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good.” The SPLC not only sees no problems with left wing racists, they also have no problem with left wing terrorists. Their “Teaching Tolerance” magazine fawningly interviewed Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, who they described merely as a “civil rights organizer, radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author” who “has developed a rich vision of teaching that interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.” They did not mention that Ayers set off bombs in the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and the New York City Police Department. Unrepentant, he told the New York Times in 2000 “I don’t regret setting bombs…I feel we didn’t do enough.” Gabrielle Lyon, a fellow with the SPLC’s Teaching Tolerance project co-edited a book with William Ayers and was director of his School Change Institute at the Small Schools Workshop.
That’s the SPLC in a nutshell. The Lord of the Rings is racist, but a group called “The Race” is not. Patriotic Tea Partiers are potential terrorists, but actual terrorists like Bill Ayers are civil rights organizers.
But lets not forget one more group of “professional” reporters who love the “Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Remember Joe Stack, a disturbed man who crashed his small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas back in February, was not known to have any ties to any tea party group, any “patriot” group, or other right-wing groups. His manifesto reads like a confused communist rant with hate for the U.S. government and George W. Bush liberally sprinkled throughout. But NPR lumps this nut in with the right with claims that they are all dangerous to government officials and facilities.
NPR similarly uses as proof of these dangerous patriots the disturbed actions of John Patrick Bedell who opened fire on officers near the Pentagon on March 4. Bedell was an anti-war protestor, heavy marijuana user, and exhibited paranoia for which he refused to seek medical help. Bedell also has no known ties to tea party groups, any political organizations, or NPR’s frightening “patriot groups.”
Yet NPR put forth both of these sick-minded men as examples of “patriots” that have become dangerous and unstable. If NPR wasn’t saying so why include them in this report?
Naturally for its “expert” on dangerous patriots NPR turns to Mark Potok, the director of the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center. As always, Potok cites claims of a “huge growth in the so-called patriot movement that includes militias out there.” Not that NPR offers any actual proof other than Potok’s say so, of course. “We’ve seen in particular a huge growth in the so-called patriot movement that includes militias out there,” Potok says. “And I think that some of the violence that we’ve seen, such as the Pentagon shooter and the IRS, are at least in some way a reflection of that rage.” Potok says there are now more than 500 patriot and militia groups active in the U.S., more than triple the number in 2008. Again, NPR trots out Potok to warn of those evil, evil right-wing patriots and tries to back his claims up with two crazy people that have no ties at all to those same right-wing patriot groups that are being blamed for this “upsurge” in violence.
What NPR doesn’t tell you is the sort of people that work wt. the SPLC. Chip Berlet, for instance, is one of those people. Berlet has all sorts of extremist, left-wing associates (like anti-American billionaire financier George Soros) and is a member of other far left organizations such as the Socialist Workers Party. Here is an entry on Berlet in discoverthenetwork.org nestled in a page about the left-wing Tides Foundation: Berlet is a senior analyst for Political Research Associates, and has had affiliations with the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, the Christic Institute, the Socialist Workers Party, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. To show how unbiased SLPC’s Chip Berlet is, he once wrote that, “right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.” Not too biased there, eh?
Discoverthenetwork.org also has a page on the SPLC itself.
So, for its expert on those monstrous patriot groups, NPR turns to a group that has ties to the Socialist Workers Party, George Soros, and the anti-Christian ACLU and then expects us to think such an organization should be accepted as an unbiased news source! Apparently NPR does expect us all to accept as gospel its left-biased report on how dangerous those “patriots” are, but I hope America is more skeptical than that.
Remember folks, our tax dollars support NPR.
One reason why it may be unwise to torture the Gifford tragedy into a political narrative is that the most embarrassing “distortions” have turned out to be a kind of mirror imaging. Not much distortions as revealing reflections of self. Maybe Sondheim had the best phrase. “I thought that you’d want what I want. Sorry, my dear.” You can fill in the rest.
Things are usually what they are; only rarely is a reality whose facts we have not exactly understood turn out to be what we hoped them to be.
sa@96: I’d like to think we can imagine a American response to this calamity that doesn’t demand more institutionalization.
I’d like to think so too since anything worse is hard to imagine. My two posts on this subject were meant to suggest that the directionality of the prey vs predator in an institutional setting is neither well-defined nor consistent, and the prevailing aspects of dominant-submissive relationships might surprise the initiated. The back story of state-funded institutions was never about the money. It was a story of people – doing unspeakable things.
dla @ 97: Just one thought: since mentals are amoung us, (i.e. no longer institutionalized), some do-gooder could use this tragedy (Ralm’s “never waste a tragedy”) to push for internet censorship in guise of limiting “inciting and inflamatory” speech. Our limey friends across the Atlantic have this in place already.
It’s a good idea. I’m all for it. Except for one thing – I cannot find any human being I can trust to do it. Much less the hundreds it would take to even review complaints filed about Internet postings.
Anyway, we already have plenty libel lawyers and civil suit attorneys who will go after eggregious examples. Government participation will only make things worse, guaranteed. Overall, freedom of speech seems best.
Though I wish I could have censored some of the innuendo I heard from a dozen democrats this morning.
#62 Doug and #80 Josh-More tongue in cheek than anything although it is hilarious to watch a forensic psychologist trying to explain it to a jury when a simple “I cannot verify that” would suffice.
#80 Charles-A minor correction: The author of the fascinating book you reference-The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicameral-Mind/dp/0618057072/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294601871&sr=8-1-fkmr0) was written by Julius Jaynes.
Two related and excellent books are by Marcel Kuijsten and Daniel B. Smith-fascinating hypotheses.
It seems our shooter was not only and atheist, but someone actively against any sort of reliigious belief.
This will never be reported in the MSM. Never.
After watching his YouTube ‘video’ (the writings) I had a troubling feeling…
There is a cadence to the writings.
I knew the style.
I originally thought of Hemingway – and, I can see a reference to Hemingway in his book list. But, not quite right. His writings voice a crescendo of thought, crescendo of action, and then disillusionment with we normal flat earthers.
I think it has the feel of ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ and ‘Cats Cradle’ by Kurt Vonnegut.
Anyone else get this feeling???
Sooo, there’s a total nutjob left-winger who shoots a moderate Democratic congresswoman, one of the 19 that JUST VOTED AGAINST NANCY PELOSI for speaker two days beforehand, and it’s Sarah Palin’s fault, huh?
RWE@ 5:38am:
You are accurately describing our current landscape as to why mentally imbalanced people are running around loose; and I agree with the commenter who identified the civil libertarians as people who have much to answer for in this regard.
Does anyone know of a psychiatric patient that was “cured” of his/her psychosis? I’m simply skeptical of psychiatry and its efficacy. I’ve seen too many professional, psychiatric witnesses claim, after a half-hour interview, to be able to not only accurately diagnose a mental disorder but to tell what may have been in someone’s mind at the moment they committed a crime! That’s purely and simply–BS of the lowest order. In my opinion, incarceration of the dangerously psychotic is the ONLY reasonable “solution.” In most States, the legal definition of “insanity” is the inability to determine right from wrong and to adhere to the right. This moron obviously knows right from wrong and COULD have decided not to do what he did. No one who’s “insane” demands a lawyer and invokes his Miranda rights immediately upon arrest.
Great comments, Steve AZ.
Pima College said he would have to see a shrink before he could return.
Apparently, this was not enough of a “sign” to the “parents” who were housing and supporting him to take notice of their responsibilities as parents and citizens.
I’d guess they rarely did so in his “upbringing.”
Of my few accomplishments, I am most proud of our homeschooling our son from day 1 to adulthood.
The experience, and the result, makes the lack of parenting in many “homes” these days stand out in bright relief.
101. wretchard
As Michael Ledeen writes,
“One of the wise sayings I preached to our kids is ‘there is no reward for being wrong first.’
Would that the media believed that.”
– Ed Driscoll
In Italy, insane people is first convicted by their crime, then committed to an Judiciary Psychiatric Hospital, where they must stay for the lenght of the sentence. They will be released only if they are not deemed “socially dangerous” by the clinicians taking care of them.
Also, we commit people against their will if the care is needed, there is no way to care for them out of a psychiatric ward and they refuse to be admitted voluntarily. This is done for seven days that can be renowed at will. This is all under judiciary scrutiny. There is the need of two doctors (one psychiatrist at least) of the public health service to request the major of the city to do this, then the local police will do it (after giving the documents to the local judge supervising these activities). The first time people is admitted, the local police will show up to talk with the patient, to talk with the patient about what happened.
@109 Pappadave
Patients can be cured, not healed. The distinction is fundamental.
Psycothic they are, psychotic they will always be. But if they don’t suffer for the consequences of their disease, they could have a, relatively, normal life. Unfortunately, they MUST take their medications all their life (or a large part of it) and be under medical supervision to change the medication to accomodate their changing state: the become older, they have problems like normal people and so on. The biggest difficulty to take care of them is they often refuse or forget to take the drugs as prescribed (like many normal persons do, also).
@110 Doug
The parents are, often, the source of the genetics of the disease. Maybe they are not clinically insane, but they probably have many traints in common. They usually act like the lid of a pressure cooker. Any professional in psychiatry will talk to you about families of psychiatric patients treated.
By the way, in Italy, the last agression against Silvio Berlusconi, our Prime Minister, was from a left wing nut. In fact, he was put in a psychiatric community after by the judges. Or this or the Judiciary Psychiatric Hospital. But he didn’t planned the aggression. he did it on the moment.
113. Mirco
The description of Steiner’s book, Scripts People Live
focuses on Transactional Analysis, and etc.
but my memories from reading it long ago were the many bizzare examples of dysfunctional families, especially wrt to the projection of their dysfunction onto the designated
“sick family member.”
(don’t recall how Steiner described it)
Many quite intricate, and very sick, “scripts.”
Darcy #108:
The Civil Libertarians are also in favor of unrestricted gun ownership so they correctly think that the adoption of ALL of their ideas will be self -correcting. Everybody else in that store would have had a gun and the nutjob would have been dead 12 times over before he got off his 2nd shot if not before that.
Pretty soon you run of nutjobs you have to shoot. And druggies. And criminals. That’s the theory. But along the way it is a real mess.
And that is if EVERYBODY subscribes to those beliefs. When you have some that do not…
That’s why I say that American Conservatism should equal Practical Libertarianism.
There’s a Daley in the White House now. Any Democrat who goes against the party line isn’t safe.
The assumption that mental illness can be termed the easy scapegoat is woefully misguided. If Mr. Loughner lived in a land of drugs, anarchy, youthful indiscretion and mental illness, then the combination was the potent factor. Mr. Loughner can be institutionalized and medicated to a safe stupor, but will no doubt be drawn back to mind-altering, potentially psychosis-inducing drugs and the violent mindset of anarchists, if freed from the current art (or nascent science, if you will) of psychiatry and psychology. Drugs can inhibit and enlarge personality, but they do not create or prevent a mindset.
Thank you Batman for a cogent analysis. Evil acts are evil acts, whether done by the “mad” or “sane.”
The ABC *Evening* news still has it all mucked up, and are worrying about hate speech and yada yada. They are broadcasting from the scene. Must have been a hard decision for them, being on strike against racist Arizona and all. I saw Christine Amanpour doing that this AM – quickly turned to Fox, though that was little better.
We can thank the Lord above that this shooting didn’t happen a month ago. If it had, the lame duck Democratic Congress would certainly have whipped up and rammed through a 2,000 page bill to “prevent this from ever happening again”, and we would have had a civil rights disaster on our hands, with all sorts of blatantly unconstitutional restrictions on “violent rhetoric” that would have taken decades to unravel.
One thing I will say about his list that I haven’t seen mentioned yet. Since every one of those books appears to be a high-school or community college class-assigned book, he probably didn’t do a whole lot of reading except for the internet. I’d sure like to see his browser history and bookmarks.
De-institutionalization for mental patients involved both issues of liberty and of saving money. In this climate it is difficult to see all those state mental hospitals which have been shut down, often demolished, coming back. The states are already broke.
How this guy got his gun, should make for some interesting discussion, though.
117. Lark…
A swift execution is the only sure cure.
Inexpensive, also.
Dwight #120
“How this guy got his gun, should make for some interesting discussion, though.”
Not sure how it works in AZ, but in my state the mentally ill are not always flagged in the computer system for being prohibited to purchase firearms. I believe that it requires a specific action through the court and is not automatic. I think a lot of people slip through the cracks.
Also, in my experience even the seriously deranged have lucid moments where they can appear quite normal. Unless you engage them in detailed conversation about politics or religion, their delusions can go unnoticed. So unless the guy working at the gun-shop gets overly chatty, he may not even realize that he’s selling to a mentally unhinged individual.
#69 – Pappadave: I’ve thought of all of you on that horrific detail often through the years and read that eventually you all had to leave emergency services so haunted were you by those events. I will never be able to scrub from my mind the pictures of you carrying out those dead babies. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for you. Thank you for doing what had to be done. I wish we could have executed McVeigh many times over. Perhaps once for each victim (and I’m talking not just about the people who died that day).
Anyone else here wonder why, when a conservative doesn’t like guns (or is afraid of ‘em) he just keeps his money in his pocket and doesn’t BUY one, but when a liberal feels the same way, he or she does everything he can to keep anyone ELSE from owning one?
Wow, I went to Mountain View High School as well, tho I do not remember him. Im 24, so we had to have been going to the school at the same time.
Unfortunately, it seems possible to me that this SOB will beat the death penalty, that he so richly deserves. Arizona has the death penalty and there is a death row in one of Arizona’s maximum security penitentiary. Arizona gives the condemned the option of choosing either lethal injection or poison gas. I wish we could go back to the days of the good old fashioned hangman’s noose. This jerk is obviously going to try and plead that he is not “mentally competent” to stand trial. Most likely, he will stand trial, be found guilty, and spend the next 10 years on death row exhausting his appeals, and then he will be wheeled into a room, a line placed into his vein, and a lethal does of Sodium Pentothal will enter his bloodstream. He will lose consciousness and then his heart will stop. He will feel no pain, other than whatever mental stress occurs in his thoughts during the months as the execution date comes closer. Again, this is totally insufficient. He should get the death penalty, and he should be hung by the neck until dead, preferably in public.
72. RWE
Loughner is associated with a group called American Renaissance. They are not just anti-government but are specifically opposed to the Zionist Occupation Government.
Rep Giffords is Jewish…
Representative Giffords also has publicly expressed her strong support for Israel. The “zog” guys hate that kind of thing.
Others have pointed out that Representative Giffords was also among the few democrats who voted against Pelosi.
While obviously the kid is crazy even crazies have noticeable political and religious biases.
86. Charles
Julian James “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind” Chapter 4 pg84-85
We are trying to understand human nature. The preposterous hypothesis we have come to in the previous chapter is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god and a follower part called a man.
…………
the amazing thing about James discussion of the earlier
kind of consciousness of man–that of the god/man–
is that it maps over onto the theological description of Jesus.He is
considered to be fully God and fully man.
Further if you read theological discussions of the relationship between the parts of Jesus being–they map over almost point by point onto james description of the god man consciousness.
Small wonder our age is defined by Jesus. 2011 dates from his birth. why. well go figure.
RE: Loughner
So the issue becomes one of refining critical mental health thresholds along the spectrum of human behavior as a means of identifying warning signals that warrant disruption of personal liberty to mitigate against some predetermined risk to societal comity.
I shudder to think.
@127. Jay, American Renaissance stated in a press release that they have no record of him being in any way associated with them.
Fox News retracts
WRT the mentally ill:
Many of these victims are actually survivors of viral attacks against their brains.
Viruses are the only known pathogen that can normally get into the brain blood. Some paranoids clearly show brain damage to critical tissues causing ‘un-linkage’ between functional centers in the brain.
A classic case of such damage is rabies. It triggers insanity in both man and beast. Such insanity being a direct effort by the pathogen to spread to a new host.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies
Hence, there is a prospect of replicating viral cures for these pathogens rather in the manner of polio.
Whereas polio victims are in-your-face obvious, those who’ve suffered a viral attack on their brain only appear to be of poor mental state. The common man DOES NOT link the malady with any pathogen at all.
It takes an MRI of high quality to spot the traumas left by such viruses. It should be made law that MRI scans become part of the process for anyone committing mentally aberrant behavior — particularly if it involves LEOs. This should prove to be the best way to detect a hefty percentage of paranoid victims.
The significant number of mentally ill exist because of viral infections that go unacknowledged.
It should be noted just how often it is that this or that mental patient comes from bloodlines that don’t show such propensities. Hence, we’re still missing the picture.
I would also suspect that sweetbreads are on balance too risky to be used as food for man or beast. Man is recently evolved. The true source of brain viruses is VERY likely to be bird populations. They are linked back to the dinosaurs and represent a toxic cradle for pathogens across the ages.
Chinese geese, in particular, are now known to be a vast reservoir of pathogens which have killed hundreds of millions of people. Most of them are viruses!
Chinese geese? You means ducks?!?
NOOOOOO!!! I love my duck dishes, roasted or braised!!!
*runs away crying*
One or two here have floated the idea of greater restriction for gun ownership – on grounds of mental health.
I can sympathise with the sentiment, and certainly anyone showing signs of delusional or psychotic behaviour shouldn’t be sold a gun, and their friends and relatives need to decide how to address any weapons they have got.
BUT
Be careful what you wish for!
Gun laws only affect the law abiding, The owner of a business in a rough area, the doctor or nurse who has to travel to dangerous areas to treat people, the aging farmer who is suffering harrasment and theft. Those are the ones who will be disarmed.
By definition, those willing to break the law, don’t obey laws. Those willing to commit the ultimate in crimes – cold blooded multiple murder – are hardly likely to obey any laws.
Britain has had a system of highly restricted discretionary licensing of individuals, stipulation of permission for each gun to be bought and where it can be used and recording of seriel numbers and sales… since 1921, (shotguns came under the same level of control in 1988 and the last pistols were confiscated in 1999) it’s an island, and with relatively (by any international comparisons rather than in absolute terms) law abiding citizens and effective, un corrupt police.
Use of handguns in armed crime has doubled since the “ban” in ’99.
Last Summer, this character: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Northumbria_Police_manhunt , fresh out of jail, clearly delusional, and in no way or form likely to get access to a gun legally, found no difficulty in getting a gun and going to shoot his ex girlfriend, her new boyfriend and a traffic cop.
Just check out how countries like Russia, which have had gun bans and murderously brutal police state enforcement of those bans fare in homicide rate compared to the US.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Anyone assuming that guns are difficult to make should google the name “Philip Luty”.
There are probably very few people in the world with Luty’s mechanical and bodge-it abilities, but he proves the point that a working submachinegun can be produced with materials and ordinary hand tools from any small town hardware store, likewise, improvised ammunition for it.
His books have pretty much gone viral, and the bureaucrats are still kicking him, and his friends and family, for his pointing out the irrelevance of their laws.