Eyewitness testimony to Giffords shooting
I’m listening to an interview on Fox with a Dr. Steven Rayle, an emergency room physician who was an eyewitness to the shooting. He reports that the shooter was only a few feet from Giffords when he suddenly began to fire, and then after he shot her he fired rapidly into the crowd at random, 15-20 rounds from what Rayle believes to have been a semi-automatic weapon. He reports that the firing only lasted 8-10 seconds before the shooter was tackled, he thinks by an aide of Giffords’s. No one fired back at any point, according to Rayle, who played possum till the firing was over, and then got up and ended up being one of the people who helped to hold the shooter down.
Rayle also reports that most of the people who were attending the gathering were shot. Being a doctor, he afterward rendered aid to the stricken. He said that Giffords herself was conscious after the shooting, which he found to be an encouraging sign.
[NOTE: The hospital spokesperson reporting on Giffords’s condition said he is very optimistic about her prognosis. That is very good. I recall that when I was a teenager, an across-the-street neighbor of mine was shot point blank in the side of the head (temple, I believe) and recovered fully. In that case, it was a small caliber gun, but it surprised me that it was even possible to survive such a thing.]
[ADDENDUM: Some of the victims are being identified, according to Fox. In addition to Judge Roll, who was apparently there just by chance to do some shopping and came over to say hello, one of the slain was Gabe Zimmerman, a 30-year old staffer engaged to be married. The 9-year old girl who died was Christina Taylor Green, who was brought there by a neighbor in order to see government in action.]
Another leftist/muslim monster commits mass murder and like clock work the left comes out to justify and cover up their complicity in political violence. 200 million dead in the last century by the left, I’m sure they are hoping to top that number in this century.
God. This is horrible.
Hey, Neo, doesn’t the shooter’s You Tube stuff look like word salad?
Anyone hear the press conf w/Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik – a Democrat, spouting off about how AZ has “become the capital, the mecca for prejudice and bigotry, ” and that anti government sentiments “may have encouraged” the shooter. As usual, blame it on the Big Bad Man. Sheriff Clarence is (oh what a surprise) against the AZ immigration law, calling it “stupid.” He should keep his trap shut along with his opinions and do his job.
Jane, he really pissed me off, after stating so many times he couldn’t comment or speculate, he sure thought it was ok to spout off about the vitriol when he had no evidence. It is coming clear that he (shooter) was a lefty loon.
JaneLK: yes, I heard it and thought his remarks very inappropriate for someone in his position.
My God the more I read about this and the more I learn about the victims the more devastating it gets. If by chance there is a history of violent mental illness by this man that was passed over by doctors then I think it says more about out mental health system that about so called “gun control”.
They are looking for a second man involved: white, in his 50s is what I read.
Mentally ill people should be in long-term residential care once they have shown a tendency to violence. But their rights are greater than ours and so they dwell among us until someone dies for the killer’s freedom.
Reading his web postings, it’s quite clear that the shooter was seriously ill. I’m not a psychiatrist but I recall from first year psychology that psychosis is characterized by a disconnect from reality.
More recent stories indicate he’d been banned from his community college. He is also alleged to have been a pot smoker.
Sad that so many are attempting to give the shooter a political position. The left would like to have him identified as a card carrying tea-partier or military vet. The MSM is searching hard for any hint of right wing affiliation and that sheriff has an axe he’d like to grind as well.
This is a sad day for all involved, including our democracy, as it will put even more barriers between our elected representatives and the people they serve.
Has anyone noticed that the guy seems to be obsessed with the syllogism? I read some of his stuff aloud to my girlfriend and, incidentally, it sent chills up her spine. In any case, I have never seen anything like the stuff the shooter wrote – an almost obsessive compulsive use of the syllogistic form of argument, with seemingly arbitrary content filled in.
It reminded me of nothing more than Chesterton’s description of the perfectly rational man in his great book, Orthodoxy.
I would be curious if neo or anyone else who frequents this sight has ever seen anything like that before (pardon me if my ignorance of some common phenomenon is showing too clearly).
Be that as it may, this is a disaster (man-caused, of course). And I agree with those here who noted what a disgraceful act that police chief put on today. If he wants to see home-base for what he called “bigotry,” he should check out the anti-semitism currently overtaking the leftist party he clearly pledges allegiance to.
His You Tube postings seem to indicate a classic schizophrenic. He’s the right age, too. You wonder if his parents ever tried to get him help and as an adult with our current laws he refused. I also wonder if he’ll ever go to trial.
“an almost obsessive compulsive use of the syllogistic form of argument, with seemingly arbitrary content filled in.”
This is the best description of how a mind of paranoid schizophrenic works. Obsession with grammar belongs to the same category. I have read texts written by such guys: there is no content except for synthax. A grandiose logical scheme filled with absolute trash. There is no reason to look for his polical affiliation: sometimes nut is just a nut.
Reefer Madness
Because of the desire for legalized pot, the correlation between marijuana and schizophrenia is never discussed. But just watch, pot will be legalized and guns will be criminalized. As Mark Steyn has said over and over again; our real freedoms are being replaced with pseudo freedoms. The Left’s desire is that we’ll be too oversexed and drugged to even care.
I just saw a comment on another blog that said that the NY Times website has 1100 comments, with about half of them blaming the Tea Party.
The leftist propaganda machine is in full swing. The goal is to delegitimize the opposition. The facts don’t enter into it. All they have to do is plant that seed into enough peoples’ minds.
To pevent such tragic incidents it makes more sense to hospitalize violence-prone schizophrenics rather than ban guns.
I suggest there is a qualitative difference between officialdom’s response to this shooting of one of their own, and the muslim massacre at Ft. Hood in Nov. 2009.
As an example, it has derailed the Congressional legislative calendar, and the wounded Giffords has not died.
I wish (do I ever!) it were possible for me to once again view the American future with optimism.
Forty years ago, I worked at the State Hospital while was a University of Texas student. Outfits like the Mental Patients’ Liberation Project (A Scientology front organization?)were just warming up. The ACLU was also making a lot of noise about the deprivation of rights of people who were hospitalized with mental illness. I could see, every night on the wards, that these people had no idea that could connect with the reality of mental illness. Twenty years later, when I was in nursing school, I worked in the local Crisis Stabilization Unit, which took care of people living in the community, who needed to check in every time their meds got out of whack. (i.e. They stopped taking them, and became more paranoid so that they thought the meds were poison pills. )
I don’t do much psyche nursing any more, but, when I did, the psychotics, once their meds had been stabilized enough to allow them to carry on a conversation, were pretty clear that marijuana was a form of cheap self-medication. Also, tobacco enters the picture, because nicotine is a sensory stimulus blocker, and, especially for the schizophrenic, the stimuli are coming too hard and heavy for the brain to sort them out.
I used to joke that marijuana is lethal, because pot smokers will bore you to death. It may be a while before I make that joke again.
The gist, for me, the constant every-day reality, is that, as we learn more about diagnosis and treatment of psychotic patients, which means that we are much less likely to lock up Joan of Arc, but more able to save lives, we are less and less willing to provide the compassionate and expensive care that these people need. This is a tragedy beyond the loss of innocent life in Arizona. This is thousands of lives lost every year, whether it’s the person freezing to death under the bridge, or the one who jumps off it, to end the pain.
Studying anthropology years ago, we heard about, iirc, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was that the structure of the language you grew into structures your thought process. The evidence, if it could be called that, was that the Hopi could understand the Theory of Relativity because of the way their language handled the concept of time. I don’t understand relativity and I don’t speak Hopi. So I don’t know.
But if this clown had run across S-W or something related, he could get a good paranoid buzz going. Not that he actually needed S-W, of course.
The little girl who was killed was born on 9/11/01.
RIP Christina Taylor Green: Born on 9/11, Died today by a gunman’s hand
The media is putting out so much hysteria and hypocrisy that it’s overplaying its hand. They are preaching to a choir that is becoming more rejected, isolated and desperate. Everyone wants to know the facts about Loughner. Those facts will show the failure of the left.
Probably the two most successful (and heinous) attempts to spin will be on the gun control issue and using Gifford as a “rally” point. Something like, “The tea party tried to stop her, Loughner tried to kill her, but she survived and so shall we.”
Nonetheless, there is an opportunity here and that is merely continue playing and win the game. The way to lose here is to show too much “respect” for the dead and not fight, with everything we’ve got, the lies and smears and innuendo. It will be no disrespect to the dead to report the truth and place it in context. Those who died have a right for the truth to emerge about their deaths. They have a right that their deaths should not serve the scumbag liberal media and the socialists/fascists who coldly want to exploit their deaths and destroy America.
History does, in a way, repeat itself.
Look back about 16 years.
We had a Democrat president who had just overplayed his hand with health care reform. (In that case it failed, but just barely.) This was followed by a stunning defeat in the 1994 congressional elections when the GOP took control of the House for the first time in over 40 years. (I remember left-wing media pundits terming it a “2 year-old temper tantrum” by the electorate.) Nearly everyone was saying how poor Bill Clinton had been soundly thrashed at the polls and would in just a couple of years become a one term president.
Then, just a few months later, “right-wing nut jobs” Timothy McVeigh and his cohorts perpetrated the OKC bombing.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left-wing media reached a fever pitch. Everyone even slightly on the right was implicated in the press, and got painted with that wide, tarry, brush of domestic terrorism. Talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh came in for special criticism even though in neither word nor deed did he have anything to do with it.
The upshot was that in 1996, the “one term” president was reelected handily.
Anyone else see any parallels unfolding with this incident in Arizona?
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I am not trying to implicate anybody in the administration or on the Democrat side of the isle in this incident. Responsibility for that lies with the shooter alone. But if you think the left won’t use this to try and neuter the tea-party or any other conservative cause in order to get “the won” reelected, then you are sadly mistaken.
My understanding is that it’s not willingness to provide care but rather the legal difficulty of Involuntary commitment following the Supreme Court’s decision in O’Connor v. Donaldson:
I remember this period well, because Berkeley had suddenly became inundated with lunatics (even more than usual) following a California law and state supreme court ruling (IIRC) that presaged the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Contra liberals, who commonly blame conservatives’ parsimony for closing mental institutions, it was in fact a liberal-inspired law that closed them in California by undercutting the legal basis for holding lunatics against their will. I was dating a psychiatric nurse at the time (I did not meet her in a professional capacity, I hasten to add) who’d lost her job when this happened, and who said that they’d recommended that released patients move to Berkeley so that they would fit in. (True story.)
We recently had a nutjob shoot up a nearby elementary school (fortunately, not wounding anyone seriously). It turns out he had a long history of ranting, raving, arguing with neighbors, and generally bizarre behavior. Locals were incensed; why didn’t the police do something about him? Their answer: they couldn’t. They had no legal basis to arrest him until and unless a psychiatrist attested that he posed an imminent danger to himself and/or others.
72 hours for psychiatric evaluation? Folks, get real. 14 days is a minimal period for this to accomplish. In some cases, even longer time is needed. These laws need to be changed. Every psychotic patient is a clear danger to himself and to the others. If not involuntary commitment, at least periodic monitoring of troubled persons by specialists is required. They should be obliged to come to ambulatory re-evaluaton once or twice a month, and failure to do so should be the reason for hospitalization.
The problem, Sergey, is how in effect to reverse a Supreme Court decision, which was based upon the Fourteenth Amendment. I see only two ways: changing the composition of the Court and then readjudicating the issue, or further amending the Constitution (which the Supreme Court, in these days of unfettered judicial activism, might nevertheless still throw out. Lawyers, is that true?)
Occam’s, I was living in Alameda, CA when the California mental institutions were opened up. The wife of one of my co-workers was hospitalized and he was frantic because she was so unstable he knew she would end up living under a bridge. He managed to get her into an assisted living home where he paid for her therapy, meds, and living expenses. In spite of all he could do, she eventually committed suicide.
The emptying of the mental institutions was a sad day for California and later, for the whole country.
75% of the homeless are mentally disturbed or addicted. Here in Seattle we have a large tent city of homeless. The garbage, crime, drug abuse, and nuisance factors around this “home” for the homeless ends up in constant moving of the tents and inhabitants to new locations because of citizen complaints. No one has gone on a shooting spree yet, but there are constant knifings, beatings, overdose hospitalizations, robberies, public indecencies, and more.
I fail to see why homelessness is considered superior to institutions where these people are safe, well fed, and have at least some mental health care. Yes, it costs money, but so do policing and ER visits.
Rather than gun control, we need to figure out how to get these mentally disturbed people back into a better environment for them and the public in general.
I just watched the German TV report: totally predictable. Giffords is Jewish. Sarah Palin’s targets were mentioned. Police are looking for an acccomplish. Shooter was a member of a right-wing radical group (hence the importance of Giffords’ religion). And the sheriff was pictured.
I assume the reporter lives a rather cushy life in DC, but I could have done a better job from my sofa.
BTW, today, the Left had their yearly remembrance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht. Thousand turned up.
Occam’s, I remember some of the people in Philadelphia who were “given their rights” thanks to the ACLU et al. The self-righteous do-gooders didn’t give a s**t about them, but then do-gooders rarely care about people caught in their grand schemes.
J.J., remember when the leftist slogan was “care in the community?” (It was the one before “redlining,” which led to the CRA and ultimately to our present predicament.)
It’s things like this that make me wonder if leftists are simply and cynically trying to drop a monkey wrench in the works, an echo of neo’s perennial fool or knave question.
(OT: I take it you were stationed at Alameda NAS? I learned to swim there as a boy. The Navy provided a launch that took a number of us kids from Hunter’s Point across the bay to Alameda for swimming lessons during the summer. Fond memory!)
SF is struggling with a massive homelessness problem, and spends a fortune on shelters and other programs for the homeless, but characteristically fails to grasp the fundamental issue: most of the homeless are mentally ill, as you point out.
Shelters and programs don’t accomplish much for them because they won’t accept the requisite restrictions on their behavior (e.g., no drugs or alcohol). They’d rather live on the streets, and do whatever they want. SF’s solution: provide more for them.
Byron York is contrasts the way the MSM treated the Maj Hasan shootings at Ft. Hood and teh way they are approaching this shooting. At Ft. Hood they “could not jump to conclusions” that there was a connection to Islam. In this case the connection to Palin and the TEA Party is widely and eagerly expressed.
Read it all here:
http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/01/journalists-urged-caution-after-ft-hood-now-race-blame-palin-afte
(OT Yes, Occam’s I was stationed at NAS Alameda -1963-68. One of my best tours of duty.)
My brother ‘ran’ a half-way house in California a couple of years back…
The typical guy shunting through was dead in 24 months, regardless of age, by relapsing straight into the grave. The actual roll call of the dead was striking, well over 60%.
As you might imagine a hefty percentage had/have serious mental problems that drove their habits.
Meth is a mind destroyer, period.
Those able to kick it remain permanently damaged — typically paranoid/ perpetually anxious.
Hence, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to find out that this fellow was on a cocktail of meth/pot/booze.
——-
ONE trait I’ve seen common to the ex-meth heads I’ve known is the persistent use of the right-hand lane of the freeway — even when it makes zero sense and causes them to weave relentlessly past slower traffic.
**** changed lanes over 80 times driving up from San Jose to SFO. Half of his time was spent staring at the rear view mirror in abject fear. Naturally, he was unable to hold any job at all. He ‘lost’ the car to the cops by not registering it in his name: he’d received it as a gift for nothing — but it needed fresh tags. Estimated value at the time $3,500 bucks.
His prior automobile was his ‘house’ and he destroyed its engine, they do need oil from time to time.
And to compound his problems, he burns every friend he comes across, steals from his immediate family time and time again, and generally profiles as a VERY mental case.
Yet, it is impossible to get him committed.
There are millions like **** out there.
Prison guards can tell you, most of their charges are mental cases/ incredibly stupid. It didn’t take Columbo to bag them. Prison is a terrible place to treat mental illness.
And to compound his problems, he burns every friend he comes across, steals from his immediate family time and time again, and generally profiles as a VERY mental case.
So what district does he represent?
The Left’s desire is that we’ll be too oversexed and drugged to even care.
More Soma! (as always, Eric Blair pegged it)