#Texas school gunman

[antifainternational]

Far-Right Mass Shootings, May 2022-May 2023

Now that we know that the mass murderer in Allen, Texas was a far-right extremist and incel (as well as that puzzling but not-that-uncommon mix of being a racialized neo-nazi/white supremacist), we wanted to illustrate that mass shootings by the far-right are not aberrations with this list of similar events from over the last twelve months: December 23, 2022: A gunman opens fire in Paris, killing 3 Kurdish people & wounding 3 more in a plan to “kill non-European foreigners.” The attacker had just been released from prison after attacking migrants in Paris with a sword the year before. December 19-20, 2022: 22-year-old Anderson Aldrich enters a CO. gay bar with an assault rifle & opens fire, killing five and wounding 25 others before he is subdued. November 25, 2022: A 16-year-old former student storms two schools in Aracruz, Brazil, armed with two pistols and wearing a bulletproof vest emblazoned with a swastika. The teen shoots 16 people in the rampage, killing three of them. October 12, 2022: After posting an online manifesto against Jewish & LGBTQ+ people, a Bratislava, Slovakia teen shoots three people outside a local gay bar, killing two and wounding the third person before fleeing. The suspect was found dead the next day. September 27, 2022: Brothers Mark & Michael Sheppard are charged with manslaughter for opening fire on a group of migrants getting water near Hudspeth County, TX. One victim died from gunshot wounds, and one is recovering at an El Paso hospital. September 26, 2022: A gunman wearing a balaclava and a t-shirt with a swastika emblazoned on it enters an elementary school in Izhevsk, Russia, killing 15 people - 11 of them children - and wounding another 39 before turning the gun on himself. September 11, 2022: 53-year-old Igor Lanis’ obsession with far-right conspiracies ends when he guns down his wife, 25-year-old daughter, & family dog, before turning his shotgun on responding police, who shoot him dead. Only his daughter survives. August 9, 2022: A group of Black men helping someone jump-start a car in a Macon, GA. Wal-Mart parking lot are subjected to racial abuse by another man who then pulls a gun and begins shooting at them. May 15, 2022: 68-year-old David Wenwei Chou is charged with hate crimes after storming a Taiwanese church in Laguna Woods, CA. and shooting parishoners, killing one and injuring five others

May 14, 2022: An 18-year-old white supremacist opens fire in a supermarket in a black neighbourhood in Buffalo, NY, killing ten customers and wounding three others while livestreaming the attack.

May 11, 2022: A masked gunman walks shoots 3 Korean women working in a Dallas hair salon. Authorities believe the incident is connected to two earlier drive-by shootings targeting Asian-owned businesses in the Dallas area on April 2nd and May 10th. This is just a list of mass shootings committed by bigots, fascists, and far-right extremists over the last 12 months. We haven't included shooting with less than two victims, thwarted mass shootings, or any of bombings, stabbings, vehicle attacks, or other acts of violence.

In 2022 we documented 477 violent incidents motivated by hate or committed by bigots, fascists, or right-wing extremists, including 112 shootings. These attacks killed 366 people and injured 399 others. Read our 2022 report here. When we say anti-fascism = self-defence, we meant it. The endpoint for far-right ideology is mass murder. Fascists intend to do harm to our communities and will seize on any opportunity to hurt others. The only thing stopping them is ourselves. WE PROTECT US!

[follow-up-news]

City officials in Uvalde, Texas, released another trove of videos on Tuesday from officers responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, footage that they had previously failed to divulge as part of a legal settlement with news organizations suing for access. The new material included at least 10 police body camera videos and nearly 40 dashboard videos that largely affirm prior reporting by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE detailing law enforcement’s failures to engage the teen shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers. Officers only confronted the gunman 77 minutes after he began firing, a delay that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said cost lives. In one 30-minute video released Tuesday, officers lined up in the school hallway as they prepared to breach a classroom door about an hour after the shooter first entered the building. The footage, while not new, showed a slightly different angle from what had previously been released.

[allthegeopolitics]

Families of the victims killed in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, have filed two wrongful death lawsuits: one against the firearm manufacturer and another against two technology companies, Meta and Microsoft, for their alleged role in marketing the weapon used. Friday’s pair of lawsuits came on the second anniversary of the school shooting, one of the deadliest in United States history. The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, attacked Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, and killed 19 children and two teachers, leaving 17 more people injured.

Continue Reading.

[saintmeghanmarkle]

⚠️ [RECAP] Meghan at Uvalde, Texas on 26th May 2022 after the Robb Elementary school mass shooting. A Master Post including Thomas Markle's stroke

A Sinner asked for some references for why Meghan's pap walk in the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde school shooting and why it is still considered unforgivable by so many Sinners.

I went to look for a source post but its is scattered all over this sub, twitter (X) and the internet. So I thought I would create a master post for future reference. Please note that I wasn't on the ground that day and don't know have first hand knowledge. We had two Sinners (Feisty_Nurse and BubbleGum_Yum_Yum) who were on the ground and I have included their relevant comments. Both Sinners are considered to be credible to me. I will share their comments of their experience here.

There are follow on posts from Sinners which I will share. You will need to read them for full context.

... means that a portion of text is used and click on the link for full context

Those who can and want to support the Children in Texas, this is org is recommended by BGYY Texans Care for Children website link.

______________________________________________________________

The Uvalde school shooting occurred on the 24th of May 2022 at an elementary school. The gunman, Salvador Ramos, killed 19 children, 2 teachers and injured 18 others. Robb Elementary School would have had children who are primarily from the ages of 4 to 10 years of age. [Wikipedia source for school shooting].

Photo 1: Regular people paying their respects at the school

On the same day (24th May), it was reported that Thomas Markle Sr suffered a major stroke days before he was about to fly to London for the Queen's Jubilee. [Dailymail archive link]. The trip to London was meant to be a big deal. He was going to be on GBNews and hang out with Lady C.

Photo 2: Thomas Markle Sr rushed in hospital after stroke. Photo taken by Backgrid

Meghan flew to Uvalde on a private jet, Texas 2 days after the shooting on the 26th of May. Here are the highlights of the photographs released and an attempt to hitch her PR to a national tragedy.

The photos below went viral globally in the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde shooting.

Photo 3: Taken by Chandan Khanna (AFP)

This photo of the visit to the community centre was provided directly to Buzzfeed by Meghan [Buzzfeed article] | [Archive link]

Photo 4: Meghan attends a community centre with vending machine sandwiches and Dorito chips / crisps

The Sussex Squad promoted World Central Kitchen (WCK) and they were the top donor to WCK to celebrate Archie and Lili's birthday. https://donate.wck.org/team/425216. credit: Aware-Impression8527. There were tweets about $100k raised to celebrate Lili's birthday. There was a mixup that Meghan also funded WCK at Uvalde from the Sussex Squad. This is because the Squad's $100k Lili donation was confused with the Uvalde attendance of Meghan. eg. this Scobie tweet on the 6th of June 2022.

I remember the squad saying that THIS stall was set up by Meghan to provide food to Uvalde. But in reality it was pre-made sandwiches and Doritos.

Photo 5: WCK kitchen in Uvalde not funded by Archewell

Archewell Partners was released and confirmed that WCK was a partner and that that money was donated to WCK for meals in Haiti. credit BuildTheHerd [Source Post]

Photo 6: From BuildTheHerd post

CONTEXT MATTERS

What many people didn't realise is that Meghan was living her Pretty Woman fantasy during the Santa Barbara Polo match just a few days before this crass PR tactic. Remember that young polo player refusing to share his award with her? It was just us Sinners and the sugars who were watching these events unfold more closely. What's worse is that she went back to grifting at the Polo club immediately after the Uvalde stunt and didn't rush to Mexico to see her father. Here's the colour swatches of Meghan before and after Uvalde. It shows that she body glazed specifically for Uvalde like it was a red carpet event. [Source Post]

Photo 7: Her shade of bronzer is particularly striking as her skin is darker in the sun than in the shade.

Thomas Markle Sr, aged 77, suffered a stroke and was a mere 54 miles from Uvalde and a 4 hour drive from Montecito. She was happy to fly on a private jet to publicly show sympathy for dead kids but didn't show the same level of concern towards her dying father. [Full context, this Leilani of Barbados opinion post.]

______________________________________________________________

Soon after social media was divided about the incident and a lot of the focus was diverted to Meghan's stunt instead of the victims. Many pointed to the similarities between this incident and Catherine paying tribute to Sarah Everard. I dont think these incidents are the same thing as Kate was not captured by the media and was only recognised by those who saw her up close in the crowd [source post video] credit RoohsMama

Photo 8: Meghan turning around to watch the photographing capturing her flowers on the cross

When you search for "Meghan Markle at Uvalde". You are most likely to see this video. Post source video by -ellen-degenerate-. In this version, the posing for photographers and the her photographers following after she leaves is not visible. There were photographers in the area, but Meghan brought her own photography team. This was confirmed after the pic from the community centre was exclusive to Buzzfeed and Sinners on the ground.

This VIDEO shows raw footage of 3 photographers capturing Meghan at the scene (source: NBC News: Meghan Markle Pays Respects At Scene Of Texas School Shooting YouTube).

Pay close attention to this NBC video as you can see the photographers snapping pics of her and how she poses. The photographs from these 3 photographers is what ends up getting circulated amongst the press. Note that this was 2 days after the tragedy. Bigger celebs like Matthew McConaughey turned up much later and the visit was not publicised.

Video 1 - NBC video, photographers following her

Here you can see the female photographer with the mask goes into the photograph the Meghan's flowers and Meghan cannot resist turning back to watch her taking the photo. You can also see Chandan Khanna capturing her laying the flowers at the beginning of the clip.

Video 2: close up of photographers capturing her

Carolyn Durand, Finding Freedom co-author tweets about Meghan's visit to Uvalde with the high res pics from the photographers

Photo 9: Look at the names of the photographers credited in the tweet

Shutterstock also tweets about Meghan's visit a few hours later and tags Kensington Royal

Photo 10: Shutterstock photo

These are the photographs from the 3 photographers from different agencies: Jae C Hong / Yasin Ozturk / Chandan Khanna. Credit Yahoo News | archive Even this article is disgusting because it talks about the couples impending travel to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee rather than discussions around the tragedy.

Photo 11: Jae C Hong photo (AP)

Photo 12: Yasin Ozturk photo (Anadolu Agency)

Photo 13: Chandan Khanna photo (AFP)

So by this point even casual on lookers were disgusted by her behaviour, especially in the context that her father was in hospital after a stroke.

Then came the leaks from the Sinners who were Boots on the Ground...

Brief highlights from from Feisty_Nurse post [Read About that Uvalde visit... Full post here]. Posted on 28th September, 2 days after Meghan's visit. So the crisps / chips weren't even from her.

I was visiting recently with one of the other nurses who also went to Uvalde, Texas following the school shootings. ..... I was busy staffing a shift at Uvalde Memorial Hospital on May 27th when I heard the narcissist of Montecito👸came in with her bodyguard, photographer, and the Netflix crew. ..... The Texas Highway Patrol providing security at the hospital escorted Meangan and her troupe out, with the suggestion that if she wanted to help? Go donate blood with directions to the senior center. Onward, the circus went to Robb Elementary so photos could be taken of Meangan in mourning.😢 Uvalde is a small community with a strong sense of family. So here she was, in the midst of the most horrific thing that could ever happen. An ego profiteer.😁 .... When in reality? There were no trays of sandwiches from H-E-B (grocery store). Just three small vending machine sandwiches that were tossed out. The drinks and chips were all courtesy of South Texas Blood❣️ for their donors. I know, I get the Doritos nacho cheese.

Highlighted comments from Bubblegum_yum_yum can be found in "The backlash is growing, so the BuzzFeed article about Meghan’s visit to Uvalde was edited" [RoohsMama post]

As a member of the media, I must say: SHE DID NOT AVOID THE MEDIA. THE MEDIA AVOIDED HER BECAUSE WE ARE NOT HERE TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS OF HER AND WRITE ARTICLES ABOUT HOW SHE BROUGHT CHIPS TO A COMMUNITY CENTER AND FLOWERS TO ONLY ONE OF THE CROSSES. She laid flowers at the “youngest victim” for clout She could have - and should have - laid flowers at every single cross. She can afford it. The role of the media is not to document unaffiliated people flying in for photo ops. Our role here is to tell the stories of the children whose stories will never be complete because they were tragically and disgustingly killed at 8, 9, 10 years old. ....

more comments from BGYY "She just kind of walked in with her crew ...." [HillyBeans post]

Yes. She did. I’m here as part of a press team and this entitled brat shows up with a team of several people and is trying to make it a godd*** spectacle! A Texas Ranger told her team to fuck off because it’s the site of a literal massacre, not a celebrity photo op I’m going to be very frank because this situation is extremely real and raw and beyond what words can describe: It’s time for HER to ask EVERYONE HERE if they’re okay! Don’t bring them chips and shitty sandwiches and show up with an entire media crew here for YOU and not for actual media coverage of what is happening! She’s also fucking it up for us actual reporters on the scene. There are such strict protocols and the relationship between the media and officials is predicated on such a fine line that having a fucking unauthorized media crew show up sets every other journalist back! ....

After the pap walk it was revealed that Meghan wrote a letter to Moms Demand Action and it was shared on social media by Shannon Watts

Photo 14: Meghan's letter to Moms Demand Action

The Archewell Foundation also funded a new KABOOM! playground in Uvalde in October 2022.

“It has been an honor to support the children and families in Uvalde design and build this amazing space where the community can come together,” said James Holt, Executive Director of Archewell Foundation, in a statement. “Our hope is that this special project can help the community heal, and be home to imagination, games and play for many years to come.”

Kaboom still organises fundraisers giving shoutouts to the Sussex Squad like on 4th May 2023 https://x.com/kaboom/status/1654206812587974656

Photo 15: Archewell funded Kaboom playground see their logo

Master Post link

author: Negative_Difference4

submitted: September 10, 2024 at 07:34AM via SaintMeghanMarkle on Reddit

[fuckyeahtx]

I love Where I Am From But FUCK

On Saturday, a 33-year-old, Nazi-sympathizing gunman armed with an assault rifle killed eight people and wounded seven others at a popular shopping mall in Allen, TX, a suburb of Dallas. Among the victims were two elementary-school students. A mass shooting is typically defined as the killing of four or more people. Texas has seen almost one a month in the past year. What have Texas Republicans been doing in that time? Making guns even more accessible, not less.  

Less than a year has elapsed since the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, TX, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at the local elementary school. Months later, the state senator representing Uvalde was told to stop bringing up gun-control legislation or face being barred from speaking at all. Multiple mass shootings have occurred in Texas in the intervening months, as gun control remains a non-starter in the GOP-dominated State Capitol.   

Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has made a big display of attending vigils for victims of each massacre, while simultaneously ensuring that gun massacres remain a uniquely American (and especially Texan) horror. He again said he would not regulate firearms and justified it with the false claim that mass shootings have no relationship with the strictness of a state’s gun-control laws, insisting that the “root cause” is “mental health problems.” As a nation, we’re forced to go through this whole disgusting song and dance every couple of months: A mass shooting occurs, Republican politicians offer their hollow “thoughts and prayers,” do nothing to tighten gun control, blame mental-health issues, then do nothing to address mental-health issues either. Abbott has cut over $200 million in funding from the state agencies that provide mental health services. 

[beardedmrbean]

The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday released a withering report into the hundreds of Texas law enforcement officers’ fumbled response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, finding “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”

The long-anticipated 575-page report detailed the many failures of the May 24, 2022 response, but concluded the most significant was that officers should have immediately recognized that it was an active shooter situation and confronted the gunman, who was with victims in two adjoining classrooms.

It noted that since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, American law enforcement officers have been trained to prioritize stopping the shooter while everything else, including officer safety, is secondary.

“These efforts must be undertaken regardless of the equipment and personnel available,” the report found.

Instead, officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect, even as children and teachers pleaded for help with 911 operators. It took 77 minutes for officers to confront the shooter. Nineteen students and two teachers died that day and 17 others were injured in one of the country’s worst school shootings.

The federal review by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services was announced just five days after the shooting. It was led by Orange County Sheriff John Mina, the incident commander during the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre in Orlando. In that incident, officers waited three hours to take down the shooter who had barricaded himself with victims in a bathroom.

A Justice Department and National Policing Institute review of that Florida law enforcement response was far less critical than the Uvalde report. It found that Florida officers mostly followed best practices, although it stated the law enforcement agencies in Orlando should update their training and policies.

In the Uvalde review, the federal team reviewed more than 14,100 pieces of data and documentation, including policies, training logs, body camera footage, audio recordings, interview transcripts and photographs.

The team visited Uvalde nine times, spending 54 days there, and conducted more than 260 interviews with people from more than 30 organizations and agencies, including law enforcement officers, school staff, medical personnel, survivors and victims’ families.

The Uvalde report’s release comes two months after ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and PBS’ Frontline published an investigation into the response after gaining access to a trove of investigative materials, including more than 150 interviews with officers and dozens of body cameras.

The material showed that the children at Robb Elementary followed active shooter protocols, while many of the officers did not. It detailed how officers treated the situation as a barricaded suspect rather than an active threat even as evidence mounted quickly that children and teachers were injured and with the shooter.

ProPublica and the Tribune have also revealed that some officers were afraid to confront the gunman because he had a deadly AR-15 rifle. With the Washington Post, the news organizations found that the medical response also was flawed and that two children and a teacher were still alive when they were rescued more than an hour later, but then died.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland is expected to discuss the federal report at an 11 a.m. press conference.

[xjoonchildx]

.

i know this is a place most of us come to chill out and relax. tumblr has been such a great escape for me, too. that's why i really, really try to keep this space limited to things that fulfill that purpose. but then there are days like these and it feels like i'll explode if i don't get these thoughts out.

exactly one year ago today, at 11:38 AM, an 18 year old armed with a semiautomatic rifle walked into robb elementary school in uvalde, texas. for one hour and fourteen minutes, he proceeded to execute children while the so-called "good guys with guns" waited outside. they just stood there with their hands in their pockets and let this maniac have his way with terrorized kids for 74 minutes. 4440 seconds.

when it was all said and done, that gunman killed 19 first graders and 2 teachers. let me repeat: first graders. little kids with pokemon backpacks and rainbow high lunchboxes.

and the entire country was horrified. and we cried and we cried and we watched story after story on the news about what happened to those kids. and we said what was appropriate at the time: how appalling! how awful! think of those children! what a tragedy!

and then we just moved on.

just like we did after columbine.

just like we did after sandy hook.

just like we did after parkland.

just like we did after orlando.

just like we did after virginia tech. and buffalo. and las vegas. and el paso.

on and on and on, we move on.

and in a way, i kind of get it. i try not to think about what happened to those kids in uvalde because if i stop to think about it -- to really think about the kind of terror they endured at the end of their far too short lives, i might lose my mind.

if i really stop to consider how disrespected these children were in life and in death, how nearly 400 police officers stood outside that classroom and school and listened to little kids being gunned down, i don't know that i could justify living for another day in this country.

shame on america.

shame on every single american who's allowed the gun lobby and GOP to bamboozle them with bullshit stories about transgender boogeymen coming for their kids. they happily turn a blind eye to the very real boogeymen with high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons of war walking into schools, synagogues and grocery stores every few weeks.

in this country, it's harder to buy cold medicine than it is to purchase a weapon capable of mowing down dozens of people in seconds. they'll tell you that the second amendment is the only thing protecting you from the culture wars they fabricate and y'all buy it over and over again, elect these pieces of shit over and over again.

do you want to live in a country where an assault-style rifle has more rights than a six year old?

if not, then fucking do something about it.

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

Who Is ‘Prayer Man’?

On the day of JFK’s assignation, Dave Wiegman and Jimmy Darnell, two of the news cameramen travelling in the motorcade, began filming when they heard gunshots. For several decades, the significance of their two films was thought to lie in their portrayal of the spectators along Elm Street and the cars in the motorcade. More recently, attention has been drawn to the films’ depiction of the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository, and in particular to a previously ignored figure who, according to some observers, may have been Lee Harvey Oswald. In several frames of the two black–and–white news films, a figure is visible in the western corner of the TSBD doorway. From the cameras’ point of view, the figure is standing to the left of the man in the Altgens photograph who has been identified as Billy Lovelady. The figure’s right arm appears to be raised across its chest, which has earned it the name ‘Prayer Man’. The figure is unlikely to have been praying, but it may have its arms crossed, or it may be holding an object up to its chest. Although the figure in the currently available versions of the films is insufficiently distinct to permit a definitive identification, it appears to be a white man, dressed in a loose, dark–toned shirt with an open neck and either short or rolled–up sleeves. The figure does not appear to be wearing a white shirt or a tie, as would have been customary for male office workers in the early 1960s. Its short hair and light skin tone strongly suggest that it is neither a woman nor a black man, although the lack of definition in the images does not completely rule out either possibility. The figure’s head and hairline are not inconsistent with Oswald’s appearance.

Could ‘Prayer Man’ Have Been Oswald?

Lee Oswald claimed to have been on the first floor at the time of the assassination. There is certainly very little evidence to support the official doctrine that he was on the sixth floor of the TSBD. An unreliable witness, Howard Brennan, described the gunman as looking somewhat like Oswald, and a handful of other witnesses gave vague descriptions that matched Oswald along with any number of other young, white men. On the other hand:

Every witness who described the gunman’s clothing, including Brennan, claimed that it did not match Oswald’s clothing.

Oswald was seen on a lower floor about 15 minutes before the shooting, at the same time as a spectator saw a gunman on the sixth floor.

Oswald is known to have been on the first floor, in or near the domino room, about five or ten minutes after this.

Reports in the Dallas Morning News and the New York Herald Tribune, both published on the morning after the assassination, state that Ochus Campbell, the vice–president of the TSBD company, and a policeman saw Oswald very shortly after the shooting in a “storage room on the first floor”

The currently available evidence of Oswald’s location at the time of the assassination does not preclude him from being Prayer Man.

When Marina Oswald (who has maintained her husband’s innocence) was shown by researchers pictures of the "prayer man" from the films taken by Dave Wiegman of NBC-TV and Jimmy Darnell of WBAP-TV during the assassination, an unprompted Marina told Ed LeDoux that the “Prayer Man” was Lee.

[readingsquotes]

"For 77 minutes while a gunman massacred fourth-graders at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school in 2022, members of the Texas Department of Public Safety roamed school hallways. Not once during that time did they attempt to open the doors to the classrooms in which the gunman was killing children and teachers.

On Wednesday, however, the Texas DPS took a different approach to campus safety. Dressed in riot gear, the state police force descended on the University of Texas at Austin, aggressively detaining protesters and tackling a television cameraman at a nonviolent pro-Palestine protest, leading to at least 30 arrests."

...

These escalations against students are a choice. Police can be patient, even passive. The Texas DPS proved that when they loitered outside the ongoing slaughter of grade-schoolers. Indeed, data shows that police are not primarily crime-fighters, devoting a small percentage of their stops to suspected crimes and a much greater percentage to things like racially biased traffic stops. Their work, by the numbers, is foremost the enforcement of order and inequality along race and class lines.

...

“Shit, if only they’d have moved like that when my son was being murdered,” the father of a murdered Uvalde child tweeted above footage of Texas DPS officers in riot gear storming toward unarmed students at UT Austin. “But what do I expect….1 AR-15 keeps 376 officers at bay.”

...

The police response on college campuses does little for public safety or protection of Jewish students. Statistically, police have seldom filled this role. The same Texas DPS that made mass arrests at UT Austin on Wednesday also shoved away students who protested a speech by open antisemite Richard Spencer at Texas A&M University in 2016, and handcuffed Uvalde parents who demanded DPS save their children from a school shooting.

...

These students are calling for ceasefire. America’s militarized police forces are bringing the war home.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette :: @JRDuquette:: The US is a gun fetish cosplaying a country not overtaken by the death fantasies of inadequate men.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

June 14, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUN 15, 2024

Today, former president Trump turned 78. For his birthday, Representative Greg Steube (R-FL) introduced a bill to name 4,383,000 square miles of the coastal waters off the United States over which the U.S. has sole authority, a region called the exclusive economic zone, the “Donald John Trump Exclusive Economic Zone of the United States.” 

A less welcome present was that the chief executive officers who attended a meeting with Trump in Washington yesterday told reporters they found him uninformed and unfocused. Christina Wilkie and Brian Schwartz of CNBC noted that the attendees dislike the Biden administration’s enforcement of antitrust laws, its price caps on drugs and medical products, and its promise of progressive tax policy and like Trump’s promise to slash regulations and cut taxes, so they went into the meeting hoping to support him.

One CEO left the meeting with the takeaway that “Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” and several, Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC reported, said that he “was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map.” He could not explain how he planned to accomplish any of the policies he was proposing. When asked why he had chosen a policy of bringing the corporate tax rate down to 20%, he allegedly answered: “Well, it’s a round number.” 

No one applauded Trump, attendees reported, in striking contrast to reports of the enthusiasm of Republican lawmakers yesterday. This difference underscores that Trump likely intended yesterday’s grandstanding to send a political message that Republican members of Congress support him despite his criminal convictions, while the lawmakers themselves were trying to show party unity at a time when they are bitterly divided. 

Also today, the Supreme Court handed down the Garland v. Cargill decision, which considered whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) correctly determined that a device that dramatically increases the speed at which a semiautomatic weapon fires bullets, called a bump stock, could be prohibited under the law, originally passed in 1934, that outlawed machine guns. 

By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court said the ATF did not make that decision correctly and that bump stocks were not banned under the law.

After the Parkland, Florida, shooting of February 14, 2018, when Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and injured 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, then-president Trump told reporters that he had been studying the issue of gun safety. This was his first articulated policy on that issue, and although the Parkland shooter did not use a bump stock, Trump said he had told then–attorney general Jeff Sessions to write regulations to ban bump stocks in October of the previous year, after a gunman using them had fired up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes, killing 58 people and wounding about 500—two died later—at a Las Vegas music festival. 

By the time the ATF finalized a new rule on December 18, 2018, Sessions was gone and it was Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker who announced that bump stocks would be classified as a “machinegun” under federal law. The rule went into effect on March 26, 2019. People who owned bump stocks had to get rid of them, either by destroying them or by taking them to an ATF office. The ATF estimated that about 520,000 bump stocks needed to be destroyed. 

A Texas gun store owner, Michael Cargill, handed over his two bump stocks under protest and then sued the ATF, saying it did not have the authority to reclassify bump stocks. 

Today, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court dove deep into the mechanics of bump stocks to try to establish that they were not physically machine guns and that because of differences in the mechanical operations between true machine guns and bump stocks, the law did not prohibit bump stocks. ATF officials thus had no business defining bump stocks as they did in 2018, and those who want them can own them.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote: “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.” 

Indeed, if Congress truly reflected the will of the people, it would have acted on this issue years ago. A Pew poll from June 2023—when bump stocks were illegal—showed that 64% of Americans want assault-style weapons banned altogether, as they were between 1994 and 2004. But Republicans have increasingly fetishized guns as a symbol of individualism, and Republican senators have kept most gun safety legislation at bay by weaponizing the filibuster, which means that any legislation must have not simply a 51-vote majority to pass the Senate, but 60 votes.  

In other Supreme Court news, yesterday Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) released documents showing that Justice Thomas accepted at least three more trips from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow than had previously been known. 

And in other news concerning our nation’s horrific history of mass shootings and the political meaning of guns, today a federal judge ordered the liquidation of the personal assets of conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones to begin the payment he owes to the families of those murdered at Sandy Hook. For years, Jones told his followers that the shooting was a hoax to encourage restrictions on gun ownership, prompting harassment of the victims’ families. 

A jury in Texas and a jury in Connecticut awarded the families $1.5 billion in damages for defamation; Jones owns about $9 million of personal assets but will keep his $2.8 million home in Texas. The judge threw out an attempted reorganization of Jones’s company, Free Speech Systems, saying Jones’s creditors would recover more money in state courts. The families have sued Jones for hiding millions of dollars in assets. 

Reacting to the news of the Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill, gun safety advocate David Hogg, who survived the Parkland shooting, wrote: “Ah yes because who doesn’t need the ability to freely turn a semiautomatic AR-15 into what in effect is a machine gun. This is f*cking insane.”

“We know thoughts and prayers are not enough,” President Biden said in his own statement about the Supreme Court’s decision, referring to the usual response of Republicans after a mass shooting. “I call on Congress to ban bump stocks, pass an assault weapon ban, and take additional action to save lives—send me a bill and I will sign it immediately.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[dailyunsolvedmysteries-movedd]

Who Is ‘Prayer Man’?

On the day of JFK’s assignation, Dave Wiegman and Jimmy Darnell, two of the news cameramen travelling in the motorcade, began filming when they heard gunshots. For several decades, the significance of their two films was thought to lie in their portrayal of the spectators along Elm Street and the cars in the motorcade. More recently, attention has been drawn to the films’ depiction of the doorway of the Texas School Book Depository, and in particular to a previously ignored figure who, according to some observers, may have been Lee Harvey Oswald. In several frames of the two black–and–white news films, a figure is visible in the western corner of the TSBD doorway. From the cameras’ point of view, the figure is standing to the left of the man in the Altgens photograph who has been identified as Billy Lovelady. The figure’s right arm appears to be raised across its chest, which has earned it the name ‘Prayer Man’. The figure is unlikely to have been praying, but it may have its arms crossed, or it may be holding an object up to its chest. Although the figure in the currently available versions of the films is insufficiently distinct to permit a definitive identification, it appears to be a white man, dressed in a loose, dark–toned shirt with an open neck and either short or rolled–up sleeves. The figure does not appear to be wearing a white shirt or a tie, as would have been customary for male office workers in the early 1960s. Its short hair and light skin tone strongly suggest that it is neither a woman nor a black man, although the lack of definition in the images does not completely rule out either possibility. The figure’s head and hairline are not inconsistent with Oswald’s appearance.

Could ‘Prayer Man’ Have Been Oswald?

Lee Oswald claimed to have been on the first floor at the time of the assassination. There is certainly very little evidence to support the official doctrine that he was on the sixth floor of the TSBD. An unreliable witness, Howard Brennan, described the gunman as looking somewhat like Oswald, and a handful of other witnesses gave vague descriptions that matched Oswald along with any number of other young, white men. On the other hand:

Every witness who described the gunman’s clothing, including Brennan, claimed that it did not match Oswald’s clothing.

Oswald was seen on a lower floor about 15 minutes before the shooting, at the same time as a spectator saw a gunman on the sixth floor.

Oswald is known to have been on the first floor, in or near the domino room, about five or ten minutes after this.

Reports in the Dallas Morning News and the New York Herald Tribune, both published on the morning after the assassination, state that Ochus Campbell, the vice–president of the TSBD company, and a policeman saw Oswald very shortly after the shooting in a “storage room on the first floor”

The currently available evidence of Oswald’s location at the time of the assassination does not preclude him from being Prayer Man.

When Marina Oswald (who has maintained her husband’s innocence) was shown by researchers pictures of the “prayer man” from the films taken by Dave Wiegman of NBC-TV and Jimmy Darnell of WBAP-TV during the assassination, an unprompted Marina told Ed LeDoux that the “Prayer Man” was Lee.

[follow-up-news]

A grand jury has indicted two former Uvalde school police officers in the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary school that left 19 children and two teachers dead, two Texas state government sources with knowledge of the indictment told CNN Thursday. Former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arrendondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales were named in the indictments, which represent the first criminal charges filed in the school massacre. The two officers face felony charges of abandoning and endangering a child, Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell told the Uvalde Leader-News, and one of them was expected to surrender later Thursday. The indictments were not immediately available from the Uvalde County District Court clerk’s office. Family members of the victims have been meeting with the DA’s office to discuss the results of the months-long grand jury investigation, according to Brett Cross, the guardian of 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, one of the fourth graders killed in the shooting rampage. Earlier this year, the US Justice Department released a damning report that concluded law enforcement officers had many opportunities to reassess their flawed response to the May 24, 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School. Bursts of gunfire, reports a teacher had been shot and then a desperate call from a student trapped with the gunman could – and should – all have prompted a drive to stop the bloodshed far sooner, said the report. Instead, it took 77 minutes from when the 18-year-old shooter walked into Robb Elementary School until he was stopped. The carnage remains among the deadliest episodes in America’s ongoing scourge of campus shootings.

[meret118]

Police officials who responded to the deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with “no urgency” in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday that identifies “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of the massacre.

The story, authored by McIntyre, relays the horrific allegations of a 17-year-old girl who says she was repeatedly raped while at a party with the police chief’s stepson and two other individuals in May 2023.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wilfred Reilly

Published: May 18, 2023

There has been a good deal of talk in the US over the past few weeks about ‘Hispanic white supremacy’. The idea itself sounds darkly funny, but its widespread prominence says something serious about the mainstream media’s embrace of race essentialism.

The recent prompt for all this talk was the mass shooting at an upscale outlet mall in Allen, Texas, on 6 May. Nine people were killed, including the perpetrator, and another seven were badly injured. Almost immediately, the national media looked beyond the tragic reality of the murders themselves to focus on right-wing activism and, more specifically, on white supremacy.

The Washington Post’s first social-media post addressing the shooting read: ‘The gunman who opened fire on an outlet mall in a Dallas suburb… was a man in his early 30s who may have had white-supremacist or neo-Nazi beliefs.’ Meanwhile, Salon seems to have simply assumed that the shooter was a white supremacist, asking in a headline: ‘When a mass shooter is a white supremacist. Does it even matter?’ The UK-based Independent similarly honed in on a potential white-supremacist motive, running a long piece on the gunman’s ‘white-supremacist social-media footprint’.

One important detail was rarely mentioned, however – namely, that the Allen mall shooter, Mauricio Martinez Garcia, was actually Hispanic.

Yes, it is true that Garcia��displayed a fondness for elements of the radical right. He was active on 4chan-style websites, like the obscure Russian platform ok.ru, where he posted photographs of swastika tattoos, ‘praise for Adolf Hitler’, a range of incel gibberish, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – ‘complaints about the state of his mental health’.

However, Garcia does not seem to have dreamed of an all-white society (which he would presumably be excluded from). His rambling writings suggest that he actually believed Latin Americans to be the planet’s superior race. Nevertheless, several major publications tried to square the circle by running headlines like the Nation’s unforgettable ‘White supremacists don’t have to be white’.

The media line that this pro-Latino Hispanic lunatic was actually a white supremacist would simply be a curiosity if this were an isolated example. But it isn’t. In fact, a growing number of right-wing ethnic minorities are now finding themselves accused of believing in ‘white supremacy’. Take, for example, the attacks against Larry Elder, the popular black conservative radio personality. During Elder’s Californian gubernatorial campaign in 2021, the LA Times referred to him as ‘the black face of white supremacy’.

What do these accusations mean in practice? At the root of ideas like black or Hispanic white supremacy is an essentialist view of race. Many wokes and even liberals now believe that different races are immutably linked to specific cultural traits. Within this rather insidious framing, racism and conservatism are said to be ‘white’ traits, and so black racists or even just black conservatives must therefore be ‘white’, too.

This is no exaggeration. In 2020, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture published a list of what some prominent staffers considered to be distinctive ‘white’ traits. Among them were a stable ‘family structure’, ‘objective, rational… thinking’, the belief that ‘hard work is the key to success’ and showing up on time for work.

Similarly, more than a few American liberals appear to believe that academic performance is a proxy for whiteness. A past column of mine for spiked dealt with a novel technique devised by at least one major US school district. To explain the high academic performance of ‘oppressed’ Asian and West African students, the school district simply labelled these overachieving ethnic-minority students as ‘white’.

This sort of essentialism is remarkably racist. It implies, for example, that being hard-working, or being objective and rational, are natural predispositions for whites, but not for blacks. Such claims are nonsensical and dangerous. Believing that certain characteristics or traits automatically attach to members of any racial group is the very definition of racism. Some members of minority groups can be radicalised to the political right, but the fact that they are right-leaning criminals or terrorists does not make them white. Acts of violence committed by black or Hispanic people that have a racial component – the Waukesha Christmas parade attack comes to mind – must be understood for what they are. They should not be ignored or shoehorned into a box that does not fit them.

More broadly, it is important to recall that people do not behave as they do because of their race. Mass shooters kill people mostly because they, specifically, are disturbed. And immigrant kids do well in school not because they are acting ‘white’, but because they tend to study hard. When analysing people at either of these extremes or in between, it’s generally a good idea to put aside the labels and focus on that smallest of minorities – the individual. Otherwise, we risk reviving a very ugly and divisive form of racial thinking.

==

“Another aspect of the construction of whiteness is the way certain groups have moved into or out of that race. For example, early in our history Irish, Jews, and Italians were considered nonwhite—that is, on a par with African Americans. Over time, they earned the prerogatives and social standing of whites by a process that included joining labor unions, swearing fealty to the Democratic Party, and acquiring wealth, sometimes by illegal or underground means. Whiteness, it turns out, is not only valuable; it is shifting and malleable.”

-- Delgado/Stefancic, "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Third Edition)"

“Reflecting on the social and economic advantages of Whiteness, critical race scholar Cheryl Harris (1993) coined the phrase “Whiteness as property.” This phrase captures the reality that being perceived as White carries more than a mere racial classification. It is a social and institutional status and identity imbued with legal, political, economic, and social rights and privileges that are denied to others.”

-- Sensoy/DiAngelo, "Is Everyone Really Equal?"

Critical Race Theory regards "whiteness" as property. Not simply in the "helium has the property of low density, high thermal conductivity" sense. But in the sense of an exclusive club you can be either born into or buy your way into, like a country club. In effect, it means someone can be disavowed as a "sellout" ("acting white," "race traitor," "internalized racism"), who sucked up to the members to gain their favor and admittance to the club. Because race essentialism, as Reilly touched upon.

[tieflingkisser]

Six in 10 Americans in a new survey say controlling gun violence is more important than protecting gun rights. 

The NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll found that 60 percent overall think it’s more important to control gun violence, which NPR notes is the highest in 10 years. Forty percent of people who own guns report feeling the same. 

Broken down by party, 88 percent of Democrats think reining in gun violence is more important, while 67 percent of Republicans say protecting gun rights is more important. 

The poll’s release on Wednesday comes exactly one year after 19 children and two teachers were killed by a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

Just over half, or 57 percent, of Americans report feeling the schools in their local communities are safe from gun violence — down from 65 percent in February 2019.