Mentally Deranged LAX Gunman Had 'Anti-Government Material'

NBC News is reporting that the gunman who shot and killed a TSA officer and wounded several others at the Los Angeles International Airport had “anti-government materials” in his possession when he was taken into custody.

A man carrying anti-government material and an assault rifle shot his way through security at Los Angeles International Airport on Friday, killing one Transportation Security Administration worker, wounding as many as three others and sending terrified travelers diving for cover and fleeing onto the tarmac, authorities and witnesses said.

The gunman, identified by law-enforcement officials as 23-year-old Paul Anthony Ciancia, was shot by law enforcement and taken into custody in critical condition. The motive is not clear but it’s believed he had anti-government views based on written materials he was carrying, the officials said.

Federal officials told NBC News it was unclear whether Ciancia was targeting the TSA or was trying to shoot his way through to get further into the airport. But one witness said the shooter, who calmly walking through the terminal with his weapon, approached him with a one-word question.
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“All he said was, ‘TSA?’ Just like that,” Leon Saryan told MSNBC.

Unless you are willing to make the argument that walking into an airport and shooting people is the act of a sane man, shut up. I don’t want to hear what your thoughts are on his “motive” because the idea that someone mentally ill has a rational motive to kill people is absurd on its face.

The only reason it’s given credence is that one side or the other — in this case, it will be the left — will try to make political hay out of the incident by using the body of a dead TSA agent as a soap box, standing on this victim’s bleeding corpse to make a partisan point.

What’s the point? Conservatives promote violence? Conservatives want to kill people? Conservative rhetoric causes crazy people to do crazy things?

Fine. Where’s your evidence? Show me the direct correlation between a specific spouting by some right-wing nut and a violent act by a mentally ill attacker. It doesn’t exist and until it does, shut up.

I would say the exact same thing if the murderer was carrying around Occupy Wall Street materials. Every single tragedy like this brings out the ghouls –the soulless harpies from both sides who reflexively use the same tired, inane talking points about the other side’s rhetoric to prove absolutely nothing to nobody except those trapped in the same partisan cocoon they are.

Enough already. Can’t a tragedy be just a tragedy? At long last, people, have you no sense of decency? Has rancid partisanship so warped your sense of humanity that anything and everything that happens in the world must be crammed through an ideological filter that distills all facts, all emotion — even reality itself — into a nice, neat, tidy political attack?

You don’t gain anything. You don’t win anything. You convince nobody. Whatever self-satisfaction you get from sticking it to the opposition (at the expense of human decency), your mental masturbation yields nothing and leaves you empty.

There is no “false equivalence” here. Both sides are equally guilty of it — continuously. Assigning political blame for the actions of a madman is about as futile a gesture you can make. Keep that in mind the next time an incident occurs and you feel the need to make a partisan idiot of yourself.