GUNS, GUNS, GUNS, Mass shootings in America

What we know about the MSU shooter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/02/14/msu-shooter-anthony-mcrae/



This combination of images from surveillance video provided by Michigan State University Police and Public Safety show the suspect in the shootings at the university late Monday in East Lansing, Mich. (MSU Police and Public Safety via Associated Press)

The gunman who targeted two buildings at Michigan State University on Monday night, killing three students and critically wounding five, was previously arrested for carrying a loaded firearm without a concealed-weapons permit in 2019 but served no prison time.

Anthony Dwayne McRae, 43, was not affiliated with the university in any way before Monday’s shooting, Chris Rozman, MSU’s interim deputy police chief, said in a news conference. Authorities are still working to determine McRae’s motive.

Five of the wounded students remain in critical condition at Sparrow Hospital, and some of them have undergone surgery, hospital spokesman John Foren said Tuesday.

Text messages told MSU students to ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ as shooting began

Rozman said Tuesday that authorities were trying to determine where McRae was living. Public records show he had lived on East Howe Avenue in Lansing since November 2017. Authorities said in the news conference that there was a police presence at Creston Avenue and East Howe Avenue, but they did not confirm whether this address was connected to the shooter.

At the time of the incident Monday night, McRae was wearing dark trousers, red shoes and a denim jacket. Much of his face was shielded — an item of clothing pulled up past his lips and a baseball cap pulled low. Police shared images of him on social media and said it was a citizen’s tip that led police to McRae.

McRae later shot and killed himself, and his body was found by officers off campus, police said.

MSU shooting live updates: Tip led police to gunman; all 3 killed were MSU students

Corrections records obtained by The Washington Post on Tuesday show that McRae was previously arrested on a weapons charge. On June 7, 2019, he was questioned by police when he was spotted near an abandoned building after leaving a Lansing store at 1:30 a.m., according to the Michigan Department of Corrections. McRae admitted to police that he had a gun but did not have a concealed-weapons permit, records show.

“He claimed he left home to walk to a store buy cigarettes and feared for his safety, so he took his gun,” Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Corrections, said in a statement to The Post.

McRae was arrested and pleaded guilty to possession of a loaded firearm. But he never served time in prison, records show. He was sentenced to 18 months’ probation on Oct. 24, 2019, and was discharged on May 14, 2021, according to the agency.

“He did not have any issues while on probation and never had a positive drug test,” Gautz said.

McRae also faced four counts of driving on a suspended license between 2006 and 2008, all of the violations occurring in Lansing or Eaton County, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Nashville school shooter who killed 6 was former student, authorities say

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/03/27/nashville-shooting-covenant-school/




Children run past an ambulance near Covenant School in Nashville after a shooting there March 27. (WKRN-TV/Reuters)

NASHVILLE — A 28-year old woman armed with two rifles and a handgun killed at least three children and three adults at a private Nashville grade school where she was previously a student, authorities said Monday. The shooter is also dead after being “engaged” by police.

Monday’s mass killing is unusual in several respects: It occurred at a private school, the school serves elementary school-age students, and the suspected assailant was a woman.

Nashville police on Monday identified the six victims in the Covenant School shooting as Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all 9, and Cynthia Peak, 61, Katherine Koonce, 60, and Mike Hill, 61.

“Our schools should be places of comfort and safety where children come to learn, not worry about getting shot,” U.S. Conference of Mayors chief executive Tom Cochran said in a statement Monday. He implored federal lawmakers to pass gun safety legislation to prevent “senseless slaughter,” adding that local ordinances are “often preempted by state legislatures.”

Christian schools have long understood that they could be victims of a mass shooting, but also have felt a sense of protection due to the culture of their communities, a leader in the Christian school community said Monday.

The shooting Monday at the Covenant School in Nashville was a rare instance of a shooting at a Christian school. Only 6 percent of all school shootings have been at private schools of any type since 1999, according to Washington Post tracking.

It was not known what security measures were in place at the school. A spokesman for the Nashville police said the shooter entered the school through a side entrance and killed multiple victims as she moved from the first floor to the second. He said authorities were working to determine exactly what happened.

Most Christian schools have tried to harden their campuses, for instance by funneling visitors through one locked central entrance, said Jeff Walton, executive director of the American Association of Christian Schools, which has about 700 member schools. He said that where it is legal, many schools have staff members who carry weapons on school grounds. And he said the topic of school security is on the agenda at every conference he attends.

But Walton also said parents and school administrators have felt a sense of security in the belief that they were not likely to be victims of the sort of violence that occurred Monday.

“There are really, really deep cultural divides and cultural issues in American culture — kids who feel worthless and kids who feel that their life hasn’t got purpose or meaning, kids who feel unvalued, and adults who feel the same way,” he said. “And one of the things offered in Christian education is that in Christ, your life has purpose and you are a person who has value and you are loved. … All of those things help to create a culture in our schools — it’s not perfect by a long ways — but a culture that is far less inclined toward the kind of violence we see in the culture in general.”

The shooter — whom police have not identified — was a 28-year-old woman who lived in the Nashville area and had attended the Covenant School at some point, Nashville Police Chief John Drake said during a news conference Monday.

He said he was unsure about the years when she was a student there.

She had three guns with her when she killed at least three children and three adults, according to authorities.

A law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the weapons included two semiautomatic rifles, with at least one of the rifles identified as an AR-15-style weapon.

Armed groups on the right and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol: The radicals’ rifle

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-armed-extremist-militia-groups/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f001

DURHAM, N.C. — The five friends had spent the morning stalking through the trees and crossing a creek in military formation.

Now, D’s reluctant embrace of the AR-15 adds one more foot soldier to the volatile mix of armed movements that have proliferated over the past decade, a predominantly right-wing mobilization whose violence has fueled far-left “community defense” organizing in response.

Confrontations have erupted in Texas, Oregon and elsewhere in recent months as leftists with long guns protect LGBTQ gatherings from armed right-wing agitators who baselessly smear trans people and drag-show artists as “groomers” and pedophiles. Such scenes look ominous to extremism analysts who warn of an elevated risk of political violence from vigilantes who wield the AR-15 as both tool and symbol.

Militants say they favor the AR-15 for all the same reasons mainstream enthusiasts do — it’s easy to handle, affordable and customizable — but they also exploit the fear surrounding the weapon.

“It’s just a tool, an inanimate object, but it is polarizing, and it’ll make people treat you differently,” said Cody, 26, a member of an anti-government militia group near Norfolk, who spoke on the condition that his full name be withheld for security reasons. “It will make people treat you differently if you are armed with an AR-15.”




Cody, 26, a member of an anti-government militia group in southeastern Virginia, cleans an AR-15 rifle in his home in September. “It will make people treat you differently if you are armed with an AR-15," said Cody, shown here displaying his collection.


The AR-15’s image as an instrument of domestic terror has been crystallized in recent years by its use in a string of hate-filled mass shootings. AR-15-wielding extremists targeted elderly congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Jewish attack in U.S. history; Jewish families on the last day of Passover in Poway, Calif., in 2019; and, last year, Black customers at a supermarket in Buffalo, to name a few.

Other far-right factions throughout the country have shown up with AR-15s to intimidate voters and local officials, harass Muslims outside of mosques, and stand as self-appointed guards at pro-Donald Trump rallies. Anti-government militias also have brandished AR-15s in armed standoffs with federal agents, such as the one in 2014 led by rancher Cliven Bundy in Bunkerville, Nev. “Boogaloo” extremists, part of a right-leaning movement calling for violent revolution, have made the AR-15 a core part of their look, sometimes adorning their weapons with coded symbols.

“It is one of several ways they are articulating that what they are doing is warfare,” said Kathleen Belew, a historian at Northwestern University and author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” “The AR-15 remains the emblematic cultural weapon.”

Two armed groups — one on the far right, one on the far left — agreed to allow a Washington Post reporter and photographer to document training sessions on two weekends last fall, on the condition that identifying details be withheld. The gatherings were a rare look at how militants on opposing extremes of American society are arming in anticipation of unrest, and overlap in the belief that civilians with rifles — and specifically, AR-15s — provide an important check on federal powers.

There is no parallel, however, when it comes to the use of violence by the extreme right and left. FBI and Homeland Security officials repeatedly have called far-right extremists the most urgent domestic terrorism concern; the White House strategy document on domestic terrorism specifies that white supremacists and violent militia groups “are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”

By comparison, attacks by militant leftists are almost never deadly, according to attack records, and typically involve “melee violence” at protests rather than the premeditated mass shootings or standoffs carried out by the far right. Far-left violence in the past decade, according to a report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, “pales in comparison” with other categories of extremism, though the report warns that “ongoing trends in American society could lead to increased frequency and lethality.”

Experts say there is no firm count of armed extremist groups in the United States on the left or the right.

These groups “repeatedly form, splinter into separate units and dissolve, as members’ interests wax and wane,” writes militia researcher Amy Cooter of Middlebury University’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism.

More concerning, analysts say, is that the violent rhetoric of once-fringe movements has now seeped into the Republican mainstream, with extremists exploiting white-grievance politics and anti-LGBTQ bigotry at all levels of political office. In 2022, according to an Anti-Defamation League report, more than 100 candidates who expressed extremist views ran in local, state legislative and congressional races, including at least a dozen with documented connections to far-right militant groups.




An armed leftist group stands guard against right-wing activists who were protesting outside an all-ages drag show in January at BuzzBrew’s Kitchen in Dallas. (Photos by Mark Felix for The Washington Post)


After federal prosecutions of extremist groups involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, several far-right factions dissolved or went underground, saying they were unsure of how far the crackdown would extend. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group, says at least 56 far-right, militia-style groups were active in 2022, a decrease from 83 in 2021, and 159 in 2020.

Militant leftists, a tiny fraction of armed movements that have been documented nationwide, likewise are impossible to count because of the fluidity of groups and the secrecy involved in the organizing, analysts say. Even among other racial justice activists, armed antifascists have been viewed skeptically for years; groups sometimes were asked to leave by Black Lives Matter protesters who insisted on gun-free events.

The picture has changed since, with wider tolerance from other leftists and liberals whose faith in state protection has eroded after law enforcement failed to prevent the Capitol attack or stop the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Tex. For months during the unrest of 2020, Americans watched racial justice demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest in which the police either intervened with violence or left protesters feeling vulnerable to attack by right-wing provocateurs.

The scenes prompted wider interest in the militant left, with more visibility for independent local networks, some of them organizing under “John Brown Gun Club,” named after the militant abolitionist who was executed in 1859.

“We deserve to be able to defend ourselves, and whether that is against the state or against other folks that would come at us, it’s defense,” said a 33-year-old anarchist organizer who spoke on the condition that they be quoted using only their gun-club nickname, “Paper.” The activist, who identifies as queer, owns two AR-15s and offers firearms training for marginalized communities, including the cohort with D in North Carolina.

D said that at this stage in life — a 40-something parent with a professional job — they never expected to be in the woods learning how to cross a creek in a simulated ambush.

“I view these tools and this training for situations when it is life and limb,” D said. “And I don’t view that as remote.”

A few weeks after that prediction, on a Saturday night just before Thanksgiving, a gunman with an AR-15 opened fire inside an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding 18 others.

The bloodshed only reinforced D’s decision to get an AR-15, though they were reluctant to just go out and buy one. Instead, D said, they eased into the idea by building their own rifle, ordering the components in stages starting in late fall.

“I’m picking up the lower receiver from my gun dealer later this week,” they texted.

The next month, on the same evening as a drag performance that far-right groups had tried to stop, a mysterious attack on electrical substations in Moore County, N.C., knocked out power for tens of thousands of people. Though investigators have yet to make arrests or describe a motive, social media posts speculating that the drag event was the target went viral.

D was a longtime fan of one of the performers; they’d hung out in the same drag scene around Durham. This attack was close to home, just a couple hours from where D lives.

Within days of the Moore County incident, D texted a photo of a shiny black rifle lying on a table.

The AR-15 was almost ready.

One sunny day this past fall, members of an anti-government militia group leaned their guns against tree trunks and huddled in the same wooded patch of southeastern Virginia where revolutionaries fought British forces more than two centuries ago.

“This is where the Founding Fathers were,” one member, 28-year-old Harrison, told the others. “I don’t know if y’all can feel it, but I do.”

The men view militia training as an extension of that legacy, preparation to defend the republic from radical leftists and “tyrannical” federal authorities. They see their AR-15s as modern-day muskets, though the rifles shoot 30 times faster, from distances up to 10 times farther.

“It gives you your voice,” Harrison said. “It’s the surest guard to freedom that I can think of.”

Beyond zero tolerance for gun control and deep suspicion of the federal government, there’s little ideological cohesion among the members. The six men who met for training that day — five White, one of Puerto Rican descent, ranging in age from their 20s to 40s — expressed libertarian stances mixed with influences from Christian nationalism and the “boogaloo” movement’s call for violent revolution.

Three military veterans were among the group. One, a former soldier, engraved his AR-15 with a favorite piece of scripture: “Blessed be God, my Rock who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” The other two are former Marines, one of whom said he was discharged a year ago after refusing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The gun is a point of bonding. All but one owns an AR-15; most have at least two.

“Even if it sits in your closet,” Harrison said, “the government still knows there’s someone out there with a rifle, and if they go too far, that person may be there.”

The men took turns recording one another running the course, leaves crunching under boots and gunfire interrupting birdsong. Harrison said a neighbor complained recently that the area was beginning to sound “like Afghanistan.” The men laughed.

They believe that something dangerous is bubbling within American society, that a conflagration is coming, even if the battle lines aren’t quite clear yet. That’s what brings them back to the woods with their rifles. Just in case, they said.

“A lot of people think militia groups fantasize about the police coming down on their house and they get into this big shootout and they’re martyred. That’s the last thing I want,” Cody said.

Cody sported a yellow T-shirt paying homage to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who successfully argued that he acted in self-defense when he killed two people with an AR-15 during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020. In right-wing circles, Rittenhouse’s acquittal was celebrated as a Second Amendment victory. The Rittenhouse case, Cody said, convinced people who were unsure about buying an AR-15 for self-defense “what you can use that rifle for under stress.”

Members of the group first met in online gun forums and coalesced around Second Amendment activism. They no longer use a formal name, they said, partly because of the post-Jan. 6 federal prosecution of militia groups and partly because they don’t fit a single ideology. Cody said he sought out the group after leaving Oath Keepers and Three Percenter formations that he considered “too racist.”

They describe themselves as a “constitutionalist militia,” their term for what terrorism analysts consider an anti-government armed group promoting Second Amendment extremism. The group’s argument — which runs counter to decades of court rulings — is that ordinary citizens should have access to the same weapons as the government.

The men balk at being lumped in with white supremacists under the “far-right extremists” label, noting that they’ve marched alongside armed black nationalists in Richmond. Manny, who expressed pride in his Puerto Rican heritage, said he wouldn’t have joined a racist group: “Gun rights are civil rights.”

Members said their vetting of recruits includes intense questioning to weed out “St. Dylann crap,” a reference to racist fans of the neo-Nazi mass shooter who attacked a historically Black church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. They say they also reject applicants who seem eager for violence, a way to filter for undercover informants or mentally unstable people.

“I don’t wish to have a war against my government, but if it comes, hopefully I got the right group of people around me,” said a member who goes by Hoss.

“Be honest with yourselves; we’d be out,” one of the former Marines said.

“But there’s 300 million firearms in the United States,” Hoss countered.

“That’s if the country can manage to come together,” the former Marine said. “There’s a lot of division right now.”

“That’s why you find your group before s--- falls apart,” Harrison said.


TEXAS Governor Greg Abbott holding his beloved gun showing you what he loves most.




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Part 2 of 2

Armed groups on the right and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol: The radicals’ rifle

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-armed-extremist-militia-groups/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f001

The five far-left activists in North Carolina who met for shooting practice did not match the conservative media’s depictions of antifa as masked, black-clad youths burning down American cities.

They were White, middle-aged, college-educated professionals. Three of them identify as queer, and some said they have spouses or children of color whose safety is a primary reason they were in the woods learning Army Ranger techniques for moving in formation.

“We don’t know where the country is going,” said Paper, the firearms instructor. “Jan. 6 was crazy. We came that close to things going in a different direction, and who knows how things would’ve spiraled out from that, which is why we do the training.”

They started in the morning with replica guns as they crept through the foliage on simulated patrols, training on how to react if they came under fire. Scenarios they talked about — rescuing pinned-down comrades at a protest, escorting patrons to a drag brunch — were ripped from recent headlines. After a midday break, they began target practice with real AR-15s and handguns, their own or borrowed from the trainers.

Along with Paper, a co-organizer of the session was Dwayne Dixon, who teaches in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina. Dixon was the only participant comfortable with being fully identified — his activism has long been public, drawing repeated right-wing attempts to get him fired.

Dixon, 50, said his radical politics emerged from reading about the Holocaust and apartheid-era South Africa as an adolescent. By adulthood, his belief in armed civilian resistance was cemented, but the idea of owning an AR-15 came much later, in 2013 during a trip to visit anarchist friends in Philadelphia. He recalled being stunned by their weapons.

“Who would’ve thought these dudes — punk kids from South Jersey and Philly — would end up owning ARs? It was kind of like a mind bend,” Dixon said. “This has moved into ‘You might get attacked by the government.’”

Later that year, Dixon decided it was time to buy his own rifle, inspired by his deep mistrust of the government and police coupled with a rise in far-right violence. He said he didn’t publicly carry an AR-15 until four years later, in 2017, when he was in Charlottesville during the deadly Unite the Right rally.

Dixon and Paper, the anarchist organizer, said they had been among roughly 20 antifascists with long guns who showed up at the request of a local anarchist group. Racists with tiki torches had just rampaged through town and were poised to come back for a second day. Dixon recalled their group struggling to sleep that night, clear-eyed about the risks of an armed encounter: “We thought we were going to get killed.”

They rose early and stood guard outside a local park where an anti-racist demonstration was to be held. Soon, a column of white supremacists marched toward the park, heading toward Quaker volunteers who were there early to prepare food, Dixon recalled.

Adrenaline was “so high,” Dixon said, as the activists with rifles waited for the white supremacists to spot them. When they did, he said, there was visible shock, then a retreat.

“They stopped and turned around and went back,” Dixon said. “They clearly got more than they expected by seeing armed leftists.”

Any sense of relief was short-lived.

That afternoon, a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd of racial justice protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding 19 other people. The horror, captured in photos of bodies tossed in the air, catalyzed far-left organizing throughout the nation — with armed backup becoming a presence at some public events.

After Unite the Right, armed leftists say, a surge of recruits signed up to fight against the “fascism” unleashed in the Trump era. Groups pooled money for weapons and grew more disciplined in training. Dixon was invited to speak at Harvard about Charlottesville; he used the stipend for body armor.

“Heather Heyer’s murder solidifies the stakes. This really is about life and death,” Dixon said. “There are people here who are ideologically motivated to kill. It’s not abstract any more; it’s very real.”

Though still only a sliver of antifascist activism, armed leftist groups are becoming increasingly visible, especially on social media, where some borrow and subvert the right-wing militia aesthetic, showing off their tricked-out rifles and bullet-riddled targets. When they face off against far-right groups in public, sometimes the only visible differences are the patches on their clothes and gear — rainbow flags and “FCK NAZIS” vs. Gadsden flags and “Antifa Hunter.”

A John Brown group carried AR-15s on armed patrols of a self-declared police-free zone that Seattle activists briefly held during the protests of 2020. The year before, an early member of that group, carrying a home-built AR-15, died in a fiery standoff with authorities at an immigration facility where he was protesting Trump-era family separation policies.

The growing popularity of guns in segments of the far left has drawn criticism from some liberals, who cite gun violence statistics and argue that more armed vigilantes will only make matters worse — particularly for people of color who are often the victims.

But with those communities facing targeted attacks, the nonviolent movement’s language is being drowned out by a call and response at protests: “Who protects us? We protect us!” And militant leftists say the stakes are now too high for complaints that the embrace of AR-15s will cost the moral high ground.

“It took us awhile to get appropriately militant on this issue,” a Connecticut-based John Brown group tweeted in December. “Folks wrung their hands over ‘optics’ and we came to realize they didn’t want community defense, they wanted us to die first. We don’t always open carry, but we no longer go out just to be martyred.”

Paper and Dixon, who met in early 2017 at a community defense meeting, built one of the country’s earliest John Brown formations. They said they were intentional about not copying the right-wing militia model. No command hierarchy, no Second Amendment worship, no fetishizing of the AR-15.

The North Carolina activists said they picked the AR platform simply because it’s cheaper and “there’s a million YouTube videos” to teach new shooters the ins and outs of the rifle. Paper’s first was a Ruger AR-556 that they said cost around $450.

For a time, the group was part of a national network of leftist organizers before dissolving and reconstituting with a focus on local, low-profile work. These days, their circle has no formal name or regular meetings.

They were leery of allowing observation of the training, worried it would look like an “armed insurgency” and reinforce the idea of two equal extremist threats. In their world, they said, the rifle is a last resort, not a rallying point.

“The AR is not at the apex of people’s capacities,” Dixon said, citing civil rights demonstrations of 2020 and earlier, Native-led protests against an oil pipeline in the Midwest. “People have a real capacity to make physical, material change in the world that’s really disruptive. And they don’t need an AR to do it.”

Anne, a 35-year-old academic and activist, said she started out as an ordinary liberal protester calling for the removal of Confederate statues in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South. By speaking out publicly, Anne landed in the crosshairs of white supremacists and, later, members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence.

The men relentlessly harassed her with threats of rape and death, according to screenshots and messages she provided. They yelled out her home address when they saw her at rallies and have posted photos of her car and apartment, forcing her to move two times in the past three years. In 2021, she bought her own AR-15, not long after posing on Twitter with a friend’s rifle as a warning to her stalkers.

“Nazis get very arrogant and think that because they have AR-15s, they can do anything or kill anyone who disagrees with them,” she said. “When I posted that photo, they can tell that I’m serious about defending myself and they should think twice before trying to murder me.”

Real threats prompted her to buy an AR-15, Anne stressed, not the far right’s hypothetical scenarios of gun confiscations or a communist takeover. Two of her harassers, according to the materials she provided, are Proud Boys who have since pleaded guilty for their roles in the Capitol attack.

Until they stormed the Capitol, Anne said, the Proud Boys targeted her and other leftists with impunity. She recalled spending hours taking screenshots of the threats so that there would be a record in case they attacked her and she was forced to use her rifle.

“I was in favor of banning guns for a long time and still think the world would be better without them,” Anne said. “But now I’m more practical."

Why do Americans own AR-15s?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/american-ar-15-gun-owners/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f001

The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners why they own the rifle

The AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, industry figures indicate. Almost every major gunmaker now produces its own version of the weapon, which dominates gun dealers’ walls and websites.

Critics claim that the military-style gun has no legitimate civilian use — yet about 1 in 20 Americans own one. So who chooses to buy an AR-15, and why?

The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners to explain their reasons for having the weapon, what they use it for and how often they fire it.

The survey found that AR-15 owners come from red, blue and purple states. Compared with Americans as a whole, AR-15 owners are significantly more likely to be White, male and between the ages 40 and 65. They’re also more likely to have higher incomes, to have served in the military and to be Republican. And AR-15 owners are more likely to live in states former president Donald Trump won in 2020 than adults overall.

Self-defense was the most popular reason for owning an AR-15. Other popular answers included recreation, target shooting and hunting, while some pointed to owning an AR-15 as their Second Amendment right.

Why people own AR-15-style rifles

Second Amendment/
It's my right/
Because I can
12%

Target shooting/
Take to range/
Competition
15%

Self-defense/
Protect home/
self/family
33%

Recreation/
Fun/Sport
15%

Hunting
12%

Like the way it looks/
Like it/
Because I want to
9%

Other
reason
5%

n case of chaos/
Government tyranny
3%

Angers liberals/
People want to ban them/
They make other people afraid
2%

The Post-Ipsos poll is one of the most detailed nationally representative surveys to date focused on the opinions of AR-15 owners.

The gun industry estimates there are about 20 million AR-15s in circulation. There is no way to independently confirm that number, but polling can estimate how many Americans own them.

National surveys by Ipsos in 2022 found that 31 percent of adults own guns. The Post-Ipsos survey of AR-15 owners estimates that 20 percent of gun owners own an AR-15-style rifle. Taken together, the polls find that 6 percent of Americans own an AR-15, about 1 in 20.

The data suggests that with a U.S. population of 260.8 million adults, about 16 million Americans own an AR-15.

At least 5 dead, 8 injured in shooting at Louisville bank building, police say

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/10/louisville-active-shooting-bank-downtown/

A shooter killed four people at a bank in downtown Louisville, police said Monday morning. Police fatally shot the assailant, authorities said, but it was unclear whether the person died of a self-inflicted wound.

Two officers were injured, with one in critical condition. Another victim is also in critical condition, authorities said. There is no active danger, authorities said.


Footage from the scene captured a series of gunshots, sirens blaring, and law enforcement officers running and shouting, “Active shooter!”

The footage, shared online shortly after the incident, began with at least three gunshots. Officers hurried across a downtown street, yelling at drivers to get out of their cars while warning about the gunfire.

8 hospitalized, including 2 in critical condition
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By Marisa Iati
Eight people are being treated at University of Louisville Hospital after the shooting, including two in critical condition, police said.

One of the two in critical condition is a police officer who was shot, Louisville Metro Police Department Deputy Chief Paul Humphrey told reporters. He said at least one other officer was also struck by gunfire.

Humphrey said police received a report of the shooting at 8:30 a.m. and that the shooter was still firing when officers arrived.

There is no longer any danger to the public after the shooting at Old National Bank, 333 Main St., police said Monday. The bank is on the ground floor of a building that houses businesses and residences.

At least five people were killed Monday morning and six others injured and transported to University of Louisville Hospital, Lt. Col. Paul Humphrey of the Louisville police said. The shooter is confirmed to be dead at the scene, although Humphrey did not give the circumstances of the death. It’s not known whether the shooter was included in the death toll.

4 dead, at least 28 hurt in shooting at teen’s birthday party in Alabama

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/16/dadeville-shooting-alabama/





DADEVILLE, Ala. — A small town in Alabama became the latest American community to reckon with gun violence, after four people were killed and at least 28 were injured in a shooting that authorities said occurred during a teenager’s birthday party.

The shooting happened just after 10:30 p.m. Saturday near Broadnax Street, said Sgt. Jeremy Burkett of the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency. Burkett declined to take questions or identify the victims or the perpetrator during a news conference late Sunday afternoon.

Burkett said “a wide variety of injuries” were sustained by 28 people, and “some of those injuries are critical.”

Authorities have been tight-lipped about providing information concerning the shooting, which rocked the town of 3,000 people in Tallapoosa County, roughly 50 miles northeast of Montgomery. Burkett said the scene is safe and there is no risk to the public at this time. He asked for people to provide authorities with tips via phone or email.

“We can confirm that it was tied to a birthday celebration,” Burkett said. “The investigation will be a long and complicated process.”

The party for a 16-year-old girl had been uneventful until the girl’s mother told the crowd of about several dozen people that she had learned somebody there had a gun, said Keenan Cooper, who was hired to DJ the party at the Mahogany Masterpiece dance studio in downtown Dadeville. The mother asked them to leave, Cooper added, but no one did.

“I should have shut it down,” Cooper told The Washington Post on Sunday, standing outside the police tape blocking off the scene of the shooting. He was waiting for police to release his DJ equipment.

The shooting came an hour later. Cooper said he quickly dropped to the ground, then grabbed six kids and pushed them under his DJ booth. He described it as 5 minutes of “nonstop shots.”

Pastor Ben Hayes, who serves as the chaplain for the Dadeville Police Department and for the local high school football team, told The Post that he was present at the hospital Saturday night and that most of the injured were teenagers.

“What we know is that a shooting took place. Four of our friends are dead. Twenty or more wounded,” Hayes said at a vigil Sunday afternoon attended by hundreds. “We’ll never be the same.”

One of those killed was Philstavious “Phil” Dowdell, Hayes said. Phil was a high school senior who planned to attend Jacksonville State University on a football scholarship, the Montgomery Advertiser reported.

“He was a great young man with a bright future. My staff and I are heartbroken and hope that everyone will support his family through this difficult time,” Jacksonville State Coach Rich Rodriguez said in a statement Sunday.

Save for the one block buzzing with police, some news vehicles and people driving by to view the scene, downtown Dadeville was quiet Sunday afternoon. A lone police officer was climbing a ladder toward the roof of Mahogany Masterpiece. And authorities were power washing the sidewalk and front door of the dance studio using a fire tanker.

On Sunday morning, the community reeled. Hayes gathered with dozens of residents at the First Baptist Church and prayed for the first responders and hospital staff dealing with the tragedy. “Some were injured from gunshots and others from falling while running away from the shooter,” Hayes said.

Bobby Presley said a frantic call from his 16-year-old daughter woke him up at 10 p.m. Saturday. Shakaya Presley had just escaped America’s latest mass killing. She was shot twice through both her thighs, her father told The Post on Sunday.

Presley said he rushed to the hospital and found a chaotic scene. “People were in an uproar trying to find their child,” he said. His daughter is now recovering at home and will see an orthopedic doctor in the coming days to check for nerve damage. Presley, who coaches girls sports, said he’s seen many of the injured teens grow up.

“I’m just emotionally torn apart,” he said. “You don’t expect it to happen to a small town — to Dadeville, Alabama.”

Heidi Smith, a spokeswoman for Lake Martin Community Hospital in Dadeville, said nine of the teenagers treated there were transferred to other hospitals to receive a higher level of care. Five of them were in critical condition, Smith said, adding that there are only a couple of “small rural hospitals” in the county.

The hospital is now offering counseling and mental health services to the distraught community and the victims’ families.




Dadeville firefighters clean blood off the sidewalk the day after a shooting in Dadeville, Ala. (Cheney Orr/Reuters)

Superintendent Raymond Porter said schools in the area will be providing counseling to children on Monday. “This [incident] does not represent our children and who we are as a community,” Porter said at a Sunday morning news conference.

State officials also issued statements on the shooting.

“This morning, I grieve with the people of Dadeville and my fellow Alabamians. Violent crime has NO place in our state, and we are staying closely updated by law enforcement as details emerge,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) said on Twitter.

President Biden was also briefed on the shooting, according to a note from his team. He and the White House are monitoring the situation and have been in contact with law enforcement officers and local officials to offer support, per the president’s team.

Chris Hand, the Dadeville High School principal, was out of town when he heard the news of the shooting. He’s been in shock since, he told The Post.

Hand also coaches the track team, a sport Phil Dowdell excelled in. Hand was last with Dowdell Friday night at a track meet in Troy, Ala. Dowdell finished first in the 100-meter dash and had even stepped up to fill in for a teammate who couldn’t compete in another race.

“‘Whatever I can do for the team, I’ll do it,’” Hand recalled Dowdell telling him Friday. “It’s just unreal to me. … If there’s a best representative of the school, it was him, athletically, academically.”

This weekend’s gun violence in Dadeville is the latest of a staggering number of mass killings this year that have ravaged the nation and left an immense toll.

Less than four months into 2023, there have been 163 mass shootings that have killed 228 people and injured 638, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive. The group defines mass shootings as those in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed.

The tragedy in Dadeville has shaken a city that residents and authorities say is unaccustomed to shootings. However, data shows gun violence is pervasive across the state. With a rate of 23.6 deaths per 100,000 people, Alabama has the fifth-highest rate of gun violence in the United States, according to EveryStat, a site that collects and analyzes data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The rate of gun deaths has increased 54 percent from 2012 to 2021 in Alabama, compared with a 39 percent increase nationwide.

At the vigil in Dadeville on Sunday afternoon, the hundreds of attendees listened to local community leaders and prayed. Intermittent hands rose toward the sky as pastors prayed before the crowd of people gathered in the parking lot of First Baptist Church Dadeville. Members of the crowd sniffled and wiped away tears. Others stood perfectly still.

A youth pastor, Hunter Baker, closed out the vigil. “Lord help us to love people we haven’t got along with,” Baker said. “Life is just a vapor. It’s here today and gone tomorrow.”

Gunman who killed neighbors with AR-15-style rifle still at large, sheriff says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/29/cleveland-texas-gunman-kills-five-8-year-old/



A man killed five people, including an 8-year-old boy, with an AR-15-style weapon Friday night in an angry response to his neighbors’ request that he stop shooting in his yard while their baby was trying to sleep, Texas authorities said Saturday. The suspect was still on the loose as of Saturday afternoon, authorities later said at a news conference.

Instead of heeding the request, the man allegedly took the gun, went to the neighbors’ house and killed half the people inside. He then fled, sparking an overnight manhunt around Cleveland, Tex., that continued through Saturday afternoon.

“He could be anywhere right now,” James Smith, special agent in charge of the FBI Houston office, told reporters Saturday afternoon. “We believe he’s on foot but we don’t know.” Smith added that the suspect could be somewhere within a 10-20 square mile radius but that dogs lost his scent. Authorities located the gun allegedly used in the killings but are unsure if the suspect is still armed.

The mass killing of a family in their home was the latest act of retaliatory gun violence to traumatize an American community. The shooting renewed calls from gun control advocates for a federal ban on assault weapons, which have a unique ability to destroy the human body. It was at least the seventh incident this month in which an armed American shot people in response to regular, everyday interactions.

The family in Texas had lived on Walter Drive for about two years.

Police released the names of the victims: Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 8.

Their neighbor, Francisco Oropeza, 38, was charged with five counts of murder, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told The Washington Post. Authorities believed he was about two miles from the area Saturday afternoon and were working to apprehend him, he said.

Ten people, all family members, were in the home during the shooting. Five survived, including three children. Three women and a man were killed, along with an 8-year-old boy who died later at a hospital, the sheriff’s office said on Facebook.

Two of the women who were killed were found lying on top of the surviving young children in a bedroom, “trying to protect them,” Capers told The Post by phone from the scene.

All five victims were shot in the head, Capers said.

“It’s horrific,” Capers said. “No one should ever have to look at this scene, the blood, the trauma that went on in that house.”

Authorities were searching for Oropeza in a wooded area near the neighborhood Saturday afternoon, Capers said. The FBI said Saturday afternoon that it was assisting the county sheriff’s office in the search and referred further questions to the office, which was leading the investigation.

Oropeza frequently shot his AR-15-style weapon in his yard, Capers said, and was doing so Friday when his neighbors asked him to stop about 11 p.m. He allegedly became angry after they said their baby was trying to sleep and, after the conversation, went to their home. Authorities saw video footage of Oropeza walking to the victims’ front door before going inside.

“The neighbors walked over and said … ‘Hey man, can you not do that, we’ve got an infant in here trying to sleep’ or whatever,” Capers said. “They went back in their house and then we have a video of him walking up their driveway with his AR-15.”

Vianey Balderas, who lives across the street from the family, said she first heard gunshots that night when a few people were outside. About 20 minutes later, Balderas heard about five more gunshots, then another 10, she told The Post.

“When I heard those gunshots, I didn’t think anything of it because in this neighborhood everyone has guns. Every weekend you hear gunshots,” she said in an interview in Spanish.

“People shoot in their backyards, after they drink alcohol, men take out guns at house parties and shoot the ground.”

Minutes later, Balderas, 27, heard a truck pulling away. She then saw one of her neighbors — the father of the children, she said — outside, begging for someone to call an ambulance. She said the family and Oropeza had quarreled before.

Law enforcement officers went to the home after receiving a report of “harassment” around 11:30 p.m., Capers told reporters. They found the four adults dead and took the 8-year-old to the hospital. The three surviving children also were taken to a hospital, Capers said, but they were not injured.

The victims had moved to Cleveland from Harris County, where Houston is located. Cleveland is about 40 miles northeast of downtown Houston.

They lived in a “regular country neighborhood” known as Trails End, Capers said. All of the victims were from Honduras, Capers said.

In a tweet in Spanish, Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina demanded that authorities apply “the full weight of the law” against the killer and expressed condolences for the family’s relatives.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had not publicly responded to the news of the shooting by late Saturday afternoon.

Balderas, who has lived in the neighborhood for three years, described the family as happy. They moved in about two years ago, she said. The children’s father, an electrician, helped her around the house, and the family aided Balderas when her father died, she said.

“They were a very happy family. Christian. They were kind,” she said. “They would never say no to us. They were always helping us. … They were always there.”

Balderas said she stayed up until 5 a.m. in fear because the gunman had not been apprehended.

“It hurts a lot, because I did love the family a lot. I am now afraid to be at home,” she said. “This shatters the sense of safety of being in your own home, especially because they are neighbors whom I see every day. … [He] went in to shoot people who were getting ready to go to bed.”

This was the year’s 19th U.S. shooting to kill at least four people, not including the shooter, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks U.S. shootings.

The killings drew calls from gun control advocates for a federal ban of AR-15-style weapons, whose sale is banned in a few states. Washington became the latest on Wednesday, when its Democratic governor signed a ban into law.

President Biden urged Congress to pass a federal assault weapons ban after a shooter killed six people with an AR-15-style weapon at a Nashville school last month. Republicans in Congress have dismissed the idea of such legislation.

After Friday night’s shooting, Kris Brown, president of the Brady gun control organization, said AR-15s “have no place in civilian life.”

“These weapons of war were designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible, which is why they are the weapon of choice for America’s mass shooters — and why Congress must ban them immediately,” Brown said in a statement.

Texas has some of the least restrictive gun laws in the country, according to the nonprofit Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which supports stricter firearms laws. There are some restrictions, though, including a state law barring people from displaying “a firearm or other deadly weapon in a public place in a manner calculated to alarm.”

Texas gun rights advocates, meanwhile, said the shooting did not highlight any problems with the state’s firearm-friendly policies.

“It’s a tragedy but we need to get away from blaming guns which only answers the question of how and start asking the question why these shootings take place, why people feel the need to settle differences with violence and murder,” said C.J. Grisham, legal and policy director for Texas Gun Rights, a Second Amendment advocacy group.

Grisham said the gunman’s use of an AR-15 style gun was “meaningless” because “he could have killed those people just as easily with a handgun.”

The killings add to a growing list of recent shootings carried out by armed Americans who have fired in response to what could have been normal, everyday interactions.

This month, an Illinois man was fatally shot by a neighbor angry about his leaf blower; a 20-year-old woman was shot and killed by a New York homeowner after accidentally pulling into the wrong driveway; a 6-year-old and her father were shot by a neighbor in North Carolina after the child’s basketball rolled into his yard.

Those violent confrontations followed the April 13 shooting of Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager who was picking up his siblings and was shot by a White man when he accidentally rang the doorbell of the wrong home.


TEXAS Governor Greg Abbott holding his beloved gun showing you what he loves most.

Texas gunman’s white supremacist views eyed as possible motive

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/07/texas-allen-outlets-shooting-dallas/

Investigators found a patch on the dead man’s chest that said “RWDS," an acronym for Right Wing Death Squad.





ALLEN, Tex. — The 33-year-old gunman who opened fire on an outlet mall in a Dallas suburb Saturday, killing at least eight people, had an apparent fascination with white supremacist or neo-Nazi beliefs that are now being examined by investigators as a possible motive for the attack, people familiar with the investigation said Sunday.

Mauricio Garcia, a local resident, had multiple weapons on him and five additional guns in his car nearby, said people familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing probe.

Authorities have not released a motive, but a patch on his chest said “RWDS,” an acronym that stands for Right Wing Death Squad, according to people familiar with the investigation. The phrase is popular among right wing extremists, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, they said, and while there is still a great deal of evidence to analyze and authorities have not reached any conclusions yet, investigators are approaching the shooting as a possible hate crime.

Witnesses said the gunman’s tactical vest was also packed with ammunition clips, indicating just how much carnage he hoped to inflict at one of the most common places for Americans to gather on the weekends — a shopping mall. Panicked video from the scene showed adults running as fast as they could to get away from the crack of rifle fire, their shopping bags flapping around them as they sprinted across the parking lot. One young boy in a red t-shirt ran away while screaming “run,” a look of terror on his face.

The shooter also injured at least seven people before a police officer who happened to be at the mall on an unrelated call fatally shot him at about 3:30 p.m., Allen Police Chief Brian Harvey said Saturday. Authorities believe that the gunman acted alone and that there were no further threats, Harvey said.

At least one of the victims was a child, according to officials and witness accounts. A person wearing a security uniform was among the dead, according to several witnesses, but it was unclear whether the guard was on duty at the time. A witness described finding a young boy alive under the corpse of his mother, who died protecting him.

The assailant was living in a Dallas-area hotel at the time of the shooting, according to the people familiar with the investigation. Since the gunman is dead, a major focus of investigators is whether anyone knew what he planned to do or helped him do it. The gunman’s parents have been cooperating with authorities, these people said.

Six victims were found dead at the scene, and nine people who had been injured were taken to hospitals by the local fire department, Allen Fire Chief Jon Boyd said Saturday. Two of them died at the hospital. At least three people remained in critical condition as of Sunday morning, police said.

The victims being treated at Medical City Healthcare trauma facilities ranged from 5 to 61 years old, said Kathleen Beathard, a spokeswoman for the hospital system.

Sherry Tutt was shopping at Victoria’s Secret on Saturday when she heard booming sounds. People started rushing onto the store, she said, and someone yelled, "‘They’re shooting!’”

Tutt and her fiancé hurried into a storage area with a few dozen other customers, hiding among boxes. She said panic spread when the group had trouble getting through to 911. One woman was crying.

After about an hour, police escorted the group out of the store, telling them that if they had kids, they should cover their eyes. Passing Fat Burger, Tutt glimpsed two bodies — a sight she described as “something I will never unsee.”



At the Allen outlet mall, all the stores were closed Sunday, and police blocked entrances to the center of the complex. The parking lot in the center of the mall was packed with cars, which shoppers and employees had not been allowed to retrieve by mid-Sunday.

In a statement, Allen Premium Outlets said it was “outraged by the violence that continues to plague our country,” and thanked the police response.

“We are thankful for the police officer’s heroic actions and for the support of all the first responders,” the statement read.



Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) told “Fox News Sunday” that he was going to Allen on Sunday. The Dallas FBI office said it is assisting the investigation.

Biden ordered flags flown at half-staff through Thursday in recognition of the shooting victims. In a statement, he expressed condolences for the victims and called on Republican members of Congress to support a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, among other changes to gun laws.

“We need more action, faster to save lives,” he said. “Too many families have empty chairs at their dinner tables.”

Aerial footage of the scene, about 25 miles northeast of Dallas, showed what appeared to be bodies underneath white sheets on the ground outside an H&M outlet, where much of the violence was concentrated.

Steven Spainhouer pulled up to the mall minutes after his son, an H&M employee, called and said a shooter was inside the store. Spainhouer, 63, who said he was an Army and law enforcement veteran, arrived to find people running on the freeway and the streets. Police and paramedics were not yet on scene.

Spainhouer described trying to help people who were shot outside H&M. He started with a girl who was in a “praying position” in the bushes outside the store. “I felt for a pulse,” recalled Spainhouer, who now works in risk management. “There was none. I pulled her head back. There was no face."

Helen Bennett said she and her daughter were in the HanesBrands store when the manager saw someone in the parking lot exiting a car with a weapon. Everyone inside locked themselves in a storeroom, where they hoped fervently that bullets would not fly through the walls. A mother rocked her baby to keep the child from crying.

“As soon as we got in the backroom, we heard the shots — BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!,” Bennett said.

Colin Palakiko, a 36-year-old cook, said had gone to the mall to do some shopping for an upcoming vacation to Hawaii. He was in a Tory Burch shoe store with his mother when a girl ran in and said there was a shooter outside.

After taking shelter in the store for 45 minutes, the police led them outside in a single file. He heard a woman screaming frantically -- she was saying another vehicle that was shot up was her boyfriend’s.

“That was the most horrifying sound I ever heard,” Palakiko said.

Then Palakiko started seeing bodies. There was a person Palakiko thought was a mall security guard on the ground in a white security uniform -- he had been shot in the front of his body and was laying face down.

Deirdra Gordon, who was visiting from Arkansas, said she wept as police led her and others out of Banana Republic after the shooting. She and her husband, Bobby Gordon, said they saw several bodies, including a person in a security uniform and someone they thought was the shooter.

Nearby, a police officer helped a man with a leg wound exit a restaurant. The Gordons also saw bullet holes in store windows and the windshield of a gray sedan.

“It was just a beautiful Saturday,” Deirdra Gordon said. “It was just nice, and then all of a sudden, no one wanted to believe that that’s what was happening.”

A local mother, Sonia Ali, whose son was working at the mall during the shooting told The Post that many of her son’s fellow high school students work in the mall. Ali’s son was not physically harmed by the shooting. The school has emailed students, offering to help those experiencing trauma from the shooting, she said.

Abbott told Fox that his priority in response to mass killings is to address mental health crises, rather than tighten gun regulations. (Research shows that stricter gun laws could lessen the severity of mass killings and may decrease overall gun violence.)

“We’ve got to find a way in this country where we can once again reunite Americans as Americans and come together in one big family and in that regard, find ways to reduce violence in our country,” Abbott told the TV network.

Last year, Texas had the most mass killings by gun of any state, with six. This year it has had three.

Less than two weeks ago and 240 miles south of the Allen shopping mall, a man killed five of his neighbors after they asked him to stop shooting his AR-15 style rifle near their home in Cleveland, Tex. The politics of gun violence and gun control are still being debated in the state, which is about to mark the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex. that killed 19 children and two teachers.

In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 4,613 firearms-related deaths in Texas. The state’s annual death toll from guns has increased steadily since 2014.

Led by Abbott, Texas has moved in recent years to loosen restrictions on firearms. In 2021, the state began allowing permitless carry so residents can carry handguns in public without a license. The state “does not specifically put restrictions on who can carry a long gun such as a rifle or shotgun,” according to a Texas government website.

Weakened gun laws put Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on the defensive

Rep. Keith Self, a Republican congressman whose district includes Allen, told The Washington Post Sunday: “The immediate aftermath is not the time for politics.”

Instead of limiting gun rights, Self said local governments need to be free to better defend public spaces from armed criminals. He called proposals to restrict gun rights, such as raising the age at which people can purchase AR-15-style weapons, “a knee-jerk reaction that does not stop criminals.”

Still, gun-control advocates called for a substantive response. Shannon Watts, founder of the advocacy group Moms Demand Action, lamented how such killings have become commonplace in the United States. She noted that she’d gone to school in the county where the latest incident took place.

“If you haven’t been impacted yet by gun violence, God bless you. But sadly, it’s coming — to your state, community, school,” Watts said.

Mushtaq Abdullah, 38, said he walked past multiple bodies while exiting the mall Saturday. He was still anxious the next day. His car remained at the mall, and he had heard authorities were checking vehicles left there with bomb-sniffing dogs.

This morning, when he took his family to brunch, he brought a gun for the first time.



TEXAS Governor Greg Abbott holding his beloved gun showing you what he loves most.

'Now it’s God’s fault': Texas Republican slammed for claiming 'the almighty' controls shootings

https://www.alternet.org/texas-state-rep-almighty-shootings/?utm_source=123456&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=14268




A gunman, who is now dead, opened fire at an outlet mall in the town of Allen, Texas, Saturday afternoon, taking "multiple" peoples' lives and leaving nine people hospitalized.

CNN's Paula Reid interviewed Texas State Rep. Keith Self (R-Allen) on Saturday night to get his reaction to the shooting, zeroing in on what Self believes the next steps should be.

"Now, you know, congressman, that is a common refrain after these incidents, after mass shootings, but many people argue that prayers aren't cutting it, prayers are not preventing the next mass shooting. What is your response to that criticism?" Reid asked.

Self's answer was to double down.

"Well, those are people that don't believe in an almighty God who, who has, who is absolutely in control of our lives. I'm a Christian. I believe that he is. We have people though, with mental health that we're not taking care of since this nation made the decision that we were gonna close the mental health institutions. Many of these situations are based on that, uh, and the people that say, and, and I really, I would like to stay away from the politics today because I wanna focus on the victims. Today we should be focused on the families," Self said. "Prayer is powerful in the lives of those people that are devastated. I know people want to make this political, but prayers are important and they are powerful in the families who are devastated right now."

The frustration on social media was palpable.

Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts: "Texans own among the most guns per capita of any state. If more guns and fewer gun laws made us safer, Texas would be the safest state. Instead it has high rates of gun suicide and homicide, and is home to four of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in the US."

MeidasTouch: "What an absolute disgrace. If you're not willing to actually do the work to stop these senseless killings, then get the hell out of the way for the people who are."

Ford News: "Republicans will lose the House, lose more seats in the Senate, and President Joe Biden will be reelected. They aren't listening to the majority of Americans."

Charles Adler: "So if we are to go with what this Republican pol is saying, God wants disturbed people to have easy access to guns in the US, but not in the rest of the world. Apparently God wants Americans to be sacrificed. Who believes these pig droppings? Apparently, multiple millions do."

Chidi: "If their almighty god demands we live in a society that values guns over lives and lets people kill innocent men, women and children on a daily basis, then their god is cruel. I don't understand the type of Christianity these people are practicing."

Paul Griffiths: "What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? - James 2:14"

Machine Pun Kelly Redux: "So it's God's fault children are getting shot?"

JoeyBonnano: "I don't remember billionaires using prayer to get tax cut welfare, they demanded action to get welfare, but kids and people getting gunned down, no action needed"

Alvina McHale: "Rep. Self wants to take away women's control over their own bodies and limit people's voting rights but he thinks Almighty God is in the driver's seat when it comes to gun violence."

@RebeccaRebelCan: "Are You Kidding Me? Now it's God's fault."

Adrienne Quinn Martin: "Texans stop electing these people! They are going to kill us all. If your personal religious beliefs prevent you from doing your job … resign!"


https://twitter.com/i/status/1654993928574074881


TEXAS Governor Greg Abbott holding his beloved gun showing you what he loves most.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/12/texas-mall-massacre-guns-shooter-race/

Opinion  How to reckon with the cult of the gun

By Karen Attiah

May 12, 2023 at 10:00 a.m. EDT


Happy Friday …

… I guess.

The French-Cuban writer Anaïs Nin made a number of astute observations about the character of the United States. In her famous diaries, she wrote about America’s love of argumentation, of competitiveness, and its lack of regard for art and culture.

This week, I find myself thinking once again of this quote from 1940: “America is in even greater danger because of its cult of toughness, its hatred of sensitivity, and someday it may have to pay a price for this, because atrophy of feeling creates criminals.”

I live in Texas, where gun culture is extraordinarily seductive. I could go this weekend for a fun day at a range and shoot an AR-15 with friends. Gun shows are family-friendly events. And I have to say, shooting guns is fun. And like any hobby, it gives people, men especially, a sense of identity and community.

In the United States, the holy symbol for our cult is the gun, and its sacred text is the Second Amendment. So how do we combat the cult of toughness? How do we stem the creation of criminals?

These were the topics under discussion at a conference I attended last weekend at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society, where researchers, lawyers, historians and movement workers grappled with the role of firearms in American life.

One interesting idea, brought up at the conference dinner, was how religious communities, particularly churches, could act as centers of spiritual resistance to America’s cult of gun death. As a former evangelical Christian, I grew up seeing people renounce all manner of things to deepen their faith in God. I remember seeing people bring empty alcohol bottles to church, pledging to give up drinking. Others testified to giving up drugs. What if prominent pastors and spiritual influencers were to begin renouncing guns?

After all, the Bible says, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you.” And holding a gun in that hand, having guns in a household, makes it easier for people in a household to violate (intentionally or accidentally) the sixth commandment — “thou shall not kill.” This being the case, simple deductive reasoning raises a question: Shouldn’t guns be cast out of Christian homes?

What if conservative, gun-owning pastors were to set an example, give up their guns to honor God and challenge their congregations to walk in faith, not in a spirit of fear?

I was thinking this over after the conference, on my flight back to Dallas. When I landed, a news alert hit my phone.

“Gunman reported at Allen Premium Outlets: Multiple Casualties.”


Home Front: Mass shootings, race matters
My column this week was a dispatch from the Allen Premium Outlets, a day after the gunman, identified by police as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, opened fire at the busy shopping mall. He killed eight people and wounded seven others. It was the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States this year.

I wrote that I grew up going to the Allen outlets with my family, and since moving back to Texas, I’ve shopped there again. It’s profoundly shocking to think that a place that brought joy to North Texas families is now the site of such a horrific tragedy.

Here in Dallas, people have expressed frustration at law enforcement authorities’ slowness to release information. But what we do know is that authorities have said that Garcia, who was of Hispanic descent, expressed neo-Nazi sympathies, a hatred of women and white-supremacist views. Officials are treating the shooting as a case of racially motivated violent extremism.

Allen, and North Texas as a whole, is becoming increasingly diverse, with Asians being the fastest-growing group. At least half of those killed in the Allen massacre were of Asian descent.

All of this has led to the question: Can people of color be white supremacists?

Of course, y’all know my answer is a big “yes.” Over at the Nation, Joan Walsh tackles this idea head on in a piece headlined “White Supremacists Don’t Have to Be White”:

"Just like rape is not about sex, but power, white supremacy is all about power. It’s sad but it shouldn’t be shocking that a troubled 30-something named Garcia might want to grab that power for himself. He has company: Look at Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, convicted last week of seditious conspiracy for his role on January 6, or anti-Semitic incel Nick Fuentes. Both have Hispanic heritage."
— Joan Walsh

One thing I predict, though: Garcia isn’t going to get the post-massacre sympathetic treatment from the media that White mass shooters do.

A 2018 study from Ohio State University found that “white shooters were 95 percent more likely to be described as ‘mentally ill’ than black shooters,” and that White shooters were more likely to be described as victims of society in some way — isolated, under stress, and so forth.

A Frontiers in Psychology study published last year found that perpetrators racialized as Black were more likely to be covered in ways that flatly situate them as “violent threats to the public,” while White male shooters were more likely to receive more nuanced and sympathetic coverage, and to be characterized with more complexity.

So far, I’ve not heard many attempts at compassionate coverage toward Garcia, and I doubt we will. Of course, I don’t think he or any deranged killer deserves the “but he was such a nice boy” type of coverage. But I do think that as this country grows more diverse, this is surely not the last time a non-White mass killer will slaughter people in the name of white supremacy. Ultimately, we should disavow hate and violence, no matter the killers’ origins or color.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/12/us-gun-violence-deaths-cause/

Opinion  There’s no mystery about why the U.S. has so many gun deaths

By Fareed Zakaria
The tragic mass shooting last weekend in a Dallas suburb took place as I was leaving the country to visit Britain. I might as well have taken one of Elon Musk’s rockets and landed on a different planet. The Allen, Tex., massacre means that, so far in 2023, more than 15,000 Americans have died from gun violence. In 2021, the last year for which we have complete data, there were 48,830 gun-related deaths, of which 20,958 were gun homicides. In England and Wales, there were 31 gun homicides. Even accounting for its larger population, calculating deaths per 100,000 people, the United States in 2019 had roughly 100 times as many gun homicides as the United Kingdom.

A comparison of suicides is equally depressing. In 2021, 26,328 Americans took their own lives using guns. About half of the people who kill themselves in the United States use guns to do it. In the U.K. in 2019, that number was 117, and of all suicides, death by firearm is one of the rarest methods. With 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has about 44 percent of the world’s gun suicides.

Britain is actually a useful point of comparison. In cultural terms, it is this country’s closest relative, the mother ship that created the colonies from which the United States of America sprang. It has strong traditions of individualism, rights and liberty that prefigure America’s. Even the more violent strains of American culture — the Scots-Irish tradition in parts of the South — owe their origins to the British Isles.

Editorial Board: These people did not have to die

And yet, with regard to contemporary gun violence, Britain looks like most other advanced industrial countries. The United States, meanwhile, might as well be on another planet.

Perhaps because it draws on the same history of liberties and rights as America, Britain was not always exempt from the problems of gun violence and mass shootings. In fact, British gun laws changed substantially after two mass shootings: in 1987 in Hungerford and then another in 1996 in Dunblane. In the latter case, a man entered a primary school in Scotland armed with four handguns and 743 rounds of ammunition. He entered a gym full of children and opened fire. In just a few minutes, he caused the deaths of 17 people and then turned the gun on himself.
After those two massacres, it was Conservative governments that passed gun control laws, significantly restricting the use of firearms. When Tony Blair swept into power in a landslide in 1997, his Labour government expanded on those laws, and today there’s an almost total ban on handguns, as well as automatic and semiautomatic weaponry, in most of the U.K. Britons were given a few months to hand in their weapons in a government buyback program. These laws remain in place today, and gun violence of all kinds has declined markedly over the past 25 years across Britain. A similar gun ban and buyback took place in Australia after a gruesome massacre there in 1996. (It was also enacted by a Conservative government.) Since then, gun homicides and suicides have declined in that country, as well.

One study by the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety suggests that U.S. states that have strong gun control laws are much safer from gun violence. For example, the gun-death rate in New York state, which has some of the strongest gun control laws, is only a fraction of the national average. Overall, the states with the most permissive gun laws have almost triple the gun-death rates of those with the most stringent. According to the Nationhood Lab, living in the Northeast means you have a much lower likelihood of gun-related homicides or suicides than in the Deep South.

It’s true that some states with strong gun laws, such as Illinois, don’t reap the full benefits of these laws because of neighboring states that are more lax. But you also see the equivalent phenomenon in reverse. States such as New Hampshire, with weak gun laws, have low gun deaths, helped by the fact that their neighboring states have enacted tougher measures.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, true to form, pulled out an old cliche in his response to the mass shooting in Allen. “People want a quick solution,” he said. “The long-term solution here is to address the mental health issue.” Abbott has it almost exactly backwards. The quick nonsolution is always to talk about mental health. But do people in the United States have 100 times as many mental health problems as they do in the U.K.? The United States has a rate of gun violence 18 times higher than the average rich country. Does that mean it has 18 times the rate of mental disorders? Texas has almost triple the rate of gun deaths as the state of New York — yet Texas doesn’t have three times as many mentally ill people as New York.

All these statistics can have the effect of deadening our sensibilities to what is going on in the United States. But let me try one last set to try to jolt us all into awareness. Every day in America, more than 200 people are wounded by guns; 120 are killed by them. Of these 120, 11 are children and teens. The leading cause of mortality among children in America is now death by a gun. The same number of deaths — 120 — will happen tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, every day, until we come to our senses and do something about it.

New Mexico shooting suspect, 3 people dead with multiple injured

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/15/farmington-active-shooting-new-mexico/




An 18-year-old gunman who killed at least three people and injured several more on Monday in northern New Mexico fired from at least three weapons, including an AR-style rifle, police said.

Police arrived to a “chaotic scene” where the suspect was “actively firing upon individuals” before officers killed him, Farmington police said at a news conference.

Speaking in a later video update, Police Chief Steve Hebbe said authorities are still trying to piece together a motive but it appeared the attack was random, with the shooter firing seemingly indiscriminately at people, houses and cars across a quarter-mile distance.

Two officers were shot during the incident. A New Mexico State Police officer was in stable condition at San Juan Regional Medical Center, and a Farmington officer was treated and released.

Gunman fired 3 weapons including AR-style rifle, police chief says

The 18-year-old gunman fired three separate firearms during his rampage through a northern New Mexico neighborhood on Monday, Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe said.

One of the firearms was an AR-style rifle, Hebbe said in a video statement posted to the department’s Facebook page Monday evening.

The gunman, who was not identified, was fatally shot by police after officers responded to reports of a shooting, Hebbe said. The gunman shot three people fatally and injured six more, he said, including two officers.

A motive was not immediately clear, Hebbe said, adding that it appeared to be “completely random” with “no schools, no churches, no individuals targeted.”

At least six homes and three cars were shot as the gunman “roamed” through the neighborhood and “randomly fired at whatever entered his head to shoot at,” Hebbe said. He added that authorities are still trying to piece together information about the shooter and any potential motives.

Farmington Police Deputy Chief Baric Crum said “officers responded to the area to find a chaotic scene,” where an 18-year-old man was “actively firing upon individuals in that neighborhood.”

Four officers confronted the man and “were able to stop his actions at that time. The subject is deceased,” Crum said at a news conference.

Three people were killed and nine people were injured, he said. Among those injured were two officers, one from Farmington police and another from state law enforcement. Both officers are receiving medical treatment and are in stable condition.

Police had no further details regarding the suspect or his motive. The investigation is ongoing, Crum said.

A man helping deer cross the street shot to death by ‘scared’ driver

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/09/14/deer-street-shooting/





A man who was trying to slow traffic in his neighborhood because deer were crossing the street was shot and killed by another man who was driving past, authorities in western Washington state said.

Dan Spaeth of Snohomish, Wash., was outside his home with his wife on the evening of Sept. 7, trying to alert passing cars to deer that were crossing the road, Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office Det. Kendra Conley wrote in an affidavit of probable cause filed in court.

He was shot once by a man driving by, who later told authorities that seeing Spaeth and his wife in the street made him afraid and he fired the shot to scare the couple, according to the affidavit.

After a search for the car, police detained Dylan Picard, 22, of Lake Stevens, Wash. He is charged with second-degree murder. Picard told detectives he did not know Spaeth or his wife.

Spaeth, 37, was a correctional officer with the state Department of Corrections, said spokesperson Chris Wright. He had a 7-year-old son and was married to his teenage sweetheart, Alissa, said friend Jeff Perkins, who spoke to The Washington Post on behalf of the family.

Spaeth enjoyed playing outdoors with his son, helping his wife with her horses and shooting at gun ranges. He was a military history buff and appreciated antiques at the gun shows he frequented. The couple hosted a Fourth of July celebration every year, and Spaeth was “an amazing grill master,” Perkins said.

“Everybody loved Dan like a brother,” Perkins said. “If you needed money, he’d help you. If you needed a ride, if you needed anything, he was there, and a lot of times you didn’t even have to ask.”

Spaeth grew up in the Snohomish area and met his wife as a teenager. He traveled with his wife to support her hobby of showing horses and participating in rodeos, Perkins said, describing his wife as “his world.”

“If he wasn’t at work, he was playing with his son; if he wasn’t playing with his son, he was making his wife happy cleaning out the horse stalls,” Perkins said.

Spaeth’s death becomes another in a growing list of killings by Americans who have shot people in seemingly innocuous situations, from a 9-year-old killed by a neighbor while riding her scooter to a woman fatally shot by a homeowner for pulling into the wrong driveway.

The suspect allegedly fired his gun “in response to a routine situation with no reasonable indications that he was in danger,” the detective wrote in the court filing.

The Post could not immediately determine whether Picard, who was jailed in Snohomish County, had a lawyer.

According to the affidavit, Picard told investigators that he was driving on the road past Spaeth’s house when the Jeep in front of him slowed down. He said he saw a man and woman in the street and said the man appeared to yell at the Jeep and hit the car with his hands.

Picard said he became “scared,” according to the affidavit, and grabbed the loaded gun he had in the car. When the Jeep drove on and Spaeth approached his car, he said he thought he saw Spaeth’s wife reach into a bag. He said he fired one shot out of the open passenger window “to scare the male and female,” the affidavit said, and said he didn’t know whether he had hit someone. He drove away.

There was no indication in body-camera footage or in interviews with Spaeth’s wife that she had a bag with her, authorities said. Picard allegedly “acknowledged he could have” driven around the couple instead of firing his gun, according to the affidavit.

Spaeth had been a correctional officer for about a year and a half. He worked in construction before joining Perkins, also an officer, at the Department of Corrections. Wright, the spokesman, said the department had been shocked by the loss.

“Dan has been described as someone always willing to do whatever it took to get the job done in what can often be a challenging work environment,” Wright said. “He was killed in what appears to be a senseless act of violence. It’s tough to make sense of.”

Texas boy, 13, convicted for killing Sonic worker with AR-style rifle

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/11/texas-sonic-murder-boy-rifle/





A 13-year-old Texas boy has been found “the equivalent of guilty” in the murder of a Sonic restaurant worker with an AR-style rifle after the child’s uncle got into a fight with the employee, according to authorities.

The boy was arrested on May 13 after police received calls about a shooting at the Sonic Drive-In in Keene, Tex., about 30 miles southwest of Fort Worth, according to the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office. The boy, who was 12 at the time of the shooting, was found “delinquent,” which is the equivalent to guilty in juvenile court, of a murder charge on Oct. 5. The boy, who is from Fort Worth but hasn’t been publicly identified because of his age, was convicted after nearly seven hours of deliberation, the sheriff’s office announced Sunday.

The boy is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday, the sheriff’s office said. A juvenile convicted of murder in Texas could face up to 40 years in prison, according to state attorneys.

Police say the incident unfolded when the boy’s uncle, Angel Gomez, started urinating in the parking lot of the Sonic on the night of May 13. Matthew Davis, a 32-year-old Sonic employee, confronted Gomez, 20, for “being disorderly in the parking lot,” and the argument between them got physical, according to the Keene Police Department.

Then, Gomez’s nephew, who was sitting in the back seat of the car, retrieved an AR-style .22 rifle and shot Davis at least six times, according to police.

“A confrontation between two adults became physical at which point the 12-year-old boy got out of the vehicle and fired multiple shots, striking the victim,” the sheriff’s office said on Sunday.

Davis was airlifted to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

By the time police arrived at about 9:40 p.m., the boy, Gomez and the boy’s aunt had fled the scene, according to the sheriff’s office. Gomez later returned to the scene of the crime and was arrested, the Keene Police Department said in a news release. Authorities found the boy in Rio Vista, Tex., about 13 miles south of the Sonic in Keene, and took him into custody.

Gomez is also charged with murder. It’s unclear whether he has an attorney, and court records were not available to determine the status of his case. If he’s convicted, Gomez could face a sentence of five to 99 years in prison.

It’s unclear whether Gomez had a concealed-carry permit. Since September 2021, it is legal in Texas for most people over the age of 21 or over to carry a handgun in a holster without a permit both openly or concealed. While Texas law does not specifically put restrictions on who can carry a long gun such as a rifle or shotgun, some people are prohibited from owning or possessing any firearm, according to state law.

The boy’s trial at Johnson County Court lasted three days but was not open to the public because of the boy’s age.

“Please understand there is much more than what we can speak of due to the suspect being a minor and additional charges and trials possible in the future,” the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office said in a Sunday news release.

A Sonic spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement on Wednesday that the fast-food chain was “saddened to learn about the tragedy involving a franchised team member in Keene, TX,” and that the franchisee was cooperating with authorities.

Davis is survived by a fiancée and his 10-year-old son, Trystyn, who lives in Louisiana. When Davis was killed, his family started a GoFundMe to help pay for his funeral expenses. The GoFundMe had raised more than $27,000 as of Wednesday morning.

Family members told KDFW, a Fox affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth, that Davis had just moved to Keene and started working at Sonic shortly before the shooting. Joyce Hardge, a family spokesperson, told WFAA, an ABC affiliate in Dallas-Fort Worth, in May that Davis was making money at Sonic to buy an iPhone for Trystyn so they could FaceTime together.

“He tried to make sure he did things right,” Hardge said.


TEXAS Governor Greg Abbott holding his beloved gun showing you what he loves most.