Red flags: protection vs. liberty
Omar Mateen was adorned with red flags, absolutely festooned with them.
We already know that law enforcement was warned about Mateen, investigated him, and decided there was nothing they could do because he had not acted on his beliefs.
But were you aware of this?:
According to Omar Mateen’s fifth-grade classmates, the 10-year-old future terrorist was once suspended for two weeks after he threatened to bring a gun to school and kill all of his classmates.
Leslie Hall ”” one of Mateen’s classmates at Marisopa Elementary School ”” told TMZ that Mateen was a bully and frequently harassed both students and teachers.
Mateen reportedly told a group of students that he planned on bringing a gun to school to kill everyone there, a threat which “was not received as a joke.” Multiple former classmates confirmed the incident to TMZ.
Or his high school behavior?:
Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s troubled school days included an incident where he was charged with battery and another where a school official said he was suspended for cheering the Sept. 11 attacks two days after they took place.
On Thursday, the Martin County School District released records showing Mateen was suspended 15 times when he attended junior high and high school from 1999 until 2003. At least two of those suspensions were the result of violent incidents.
Mateen’s final suspension was on Sept. 13, 2001, and was issued by a school administrator named Evelyn Stettin. In a conversation with Yahoo News on Thursday, Stettin said Mateen was suspended for celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which occurred two days earlier.
He was very pleased to see it happen,” Stettin said of the attacks. “We took him out of class, and we were trying to, you know, talk with him, and we had a school psych present, but basically he didn’t show any remorse. Nothing. I mean he was pretty happy it happened.”
Stettin said school officials discussed Mateen’s reaction to the terrorist attacks with his parents. She suggested Mateen’s parents were unconcerned by the incident.
“We spoke to the parents and they didn’t really do very much about it, let’s put it that way,” Stettin recounted.
And this guy Mateen was later accepted to become a prison guard, and then a security guard:
When he applied for the Department of Corrections job, Mateen had to explain a 2001 criminal charge for battery and disturbing a school function.
In a one-page handwritten letter to prison officials, Mateen said he was charged following a May 2001 fight with another student in his math class at Martin High School. The letter, dated Sept. 26, 2006, says the disruption charge was later dismissed and that he received probation for the battery charge.
Mateen was later let go for other reasons. And I suppose that, in the absence of other evidence, that note of his could have been convincing. It does happen, after all; people do reform, they do see the light. But put it all together—which no one did—especially the 9/11 cheering, and you get a very bad picture of an explosive human ready to go off, and already in sympathy with Islamic terrorists.
And he later fulfilled that early potential through action, with terrible consequences.
The problem is that, even knowing all this, it’s unclear what could have been done to have prevented it. We don’t do preventive detention for thoughtcrime or speech in the absence of criminal acts. Mateen was born here as a citizen and could not be deported. You might say that his parents should not have been let into this country back in the 80s (that’s the ideological test for immigration that I’ve suggested before), but once it had already happened it couldn’t be remedied without violating his rights as a citizen.
Whether it’s a terrorist or a “regular” mass murderer, when you look back there are almost always these sorts of signs, often beginning in childhood. For example, how often do we hear of a mass murderer that he had long been perceived as a dangerous person, and yet until he (it’s most often a “he,” so I’m not being sexist here) acts out some violence there is little to be done that wouldn’t compromise liberty, because any proactive remedy is likely to be overused and/or misused against others.
Remember how the Soviets misused their mental health system to incarcerate dissidents.
How do we separate the truly dangerous from those who are verbally threatening but won’t do much? How can we do it without compromising our basic liberties? We must figure out how to protect ourselves, but protection and liberty are often at odds, and it can be very difficult to know where and how to draw the line when a threat of this magnitude presents itself. But the threat is to liberty itself, in the end.
Quite a conundrum.
Maybe his parents were some of those Muslims who cheered 9-11. The ones the MSM tells us don’t exist.
Cornhead:
Yes, I’m pretty sure they cheered it.
But the MSM didn’t tell us they didn’t exist. They said that there were no broadcasts that showed thousands of them celebrating on roofs, as Trump had claimed he saw broadcast on TV.
Here.
I have no disagreement with the claim that the MSM has minimized Muslim pro-terrorist sentiment in this country. But I’ve not seen a claim by the MSM that no Muslims here might have privately or even publicly expressed approval of 9/11. The correction was to Trump’s specific claim of broadcasts of thousands on Muslims visibly celebrating in NJ.
As I.understand the Countering Violent Extremism policy no federal officer may initiate any investigation of any Muslim unless there has been some complaint or warning by an accepted member of the Muslim community, e.g. an imam or other spokesperson properly vetted by CAIR.
Nolanimrod:
I don’t think there’s any question that the investigation process is too restrictive re Muslims and too respective of PC considerations, a direct result of Obama’s presidency.
I’m talking about a more general problem involving predicting dangerousness and finding remedies in the absence of actionable offenses, by Muslims re terrorism or anyone else re violence.
this was the red flag that appeared to me,
http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/06/17/nyu-paid-orlando-jihadis-trip-saudi-arabia/
re ryan, the reality that’s he’s up to funding the cve claptrap,
now he could say trump’s plan could do with fine tuning, but no he went for the easy soundbite,
There will have to be some truly awful “man-caused disaster” to reconcile those Americans who have grown up believing America is evil and that any perceived underdog is always “good” — to reconcile them with what will undoubtedly be unfair collateral damage wherein “good” Muslims will be victims if and when the United States is ever truly de-Islamicized like Germany was de-Nazified after WW2. No such process is ever pretty, or “fair”, or sans human error.
The Islamists get it that the war between civilizations is now fought on the level of emotions, and inducing shame, and they feel no shame vs the infidel while we are still fighting ourselves.
Since there’s no practical way to “predict dangerousness”, all we can do is protect ourselves. In this case, the Florida statutes prevented both the patrons and management from carrying firearms for protection. That’s just absurd. It’s time those (and similar) statutes were changed everywhere.
Couldn’t they have required a psciatric evaluation or family therapy sessions after his early outbreaks? It might have been very helpful to have te results in his record. We really need to rethink some of our mental health policies. Certain types of juvenile records should not be sealed, and parents should be able to have their over-18 children sent for exams. Also we should think about whether a person can be retained for treatment even if they don’t pose an imminent threat to themselves or others. Allowing investigators access to this kind of info might keep investigations open for more than 6 months. We do have sexual offender registries.
This is another example of how parents raise their kids the way they were raised. It is why there are so many second generation terrorists.
We also have to get CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood organizations out of government advisory positions.
6th word is psychiatric
Well, some countries limit the amount of damage he could do by limiting the type of weaponry available to do it with.
He’d have been hard pressed to kill that many without a military weapon.
But, hey, America has it right on gun control and pretty much every other country in the world is obviously wrong.
Who will instigate a Reign of Terror in non-performing Federal bureaucracies and get rid of the soul-destroying and neutering rules of engagement and PC crap?
Who will laugh at and issue creative executive order end runs around activist Federal Judges?
Who will understand that words are words and actions are actions, and facts are facts — precisely because he is too uneducated and unintellectual to have had his brain damaged by the disastrous detours into unreality that our high culture has taken?
Some Milquetoast dredged up by Romney and pals in a backroom?
Chester Draws:
Let me know how your plans to outlaw and reverse the Industrial Revolution proceed. Good luck.
This, from the Daily Mail.
“Doctor listed on psych-evaluation carried out on Omar Mateen by G4S says she never saw him and was not living in Florida at the time it was conducted”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3647779/Doctor-listed-psych-evaluation-carried-Omar-Mateen-says-did-not-him.html
Some of you would go do well to go read the Diplomad blog. Jewish guy who has lived in the real world and seen how the sausage is made.
Well worth reading.
the problem didn’t start with obama, of course, recall gitmo under rumsfeld, focused on a very narrow cadre of propagandists, direct action specialist, but the levick group whitewashed them all, including effendis shehri, (behind the underwear bomber plot, bin qumu, (behind benghazi) and
sharbi (the subject of that last discovery in april)
take this msn excerpt, please:
In what was the first such known interview in connection with the nightclub shooting, two federal agents met with the man at the mosque for about 30 minutes ahead of Friday prayers, according to Omar Saleh, a lawyer for the Council of American-Islamic Relations who sat in on the session.
RebbelYell —
Thanks for reminding me of Diplomad. I read him all the time a few years ago. Once when my computer crashed I lost many “favorites” and then just forgot the names.
Okay, the government can’t/won’t protect us. So we need to be disarmed.
Chester Draws,
Are you forgetting Paris? Or purposely ignoring it?
Some of the toughest gun laws in the world. No access to military weapons. Much higher death toll.
Note: AR-15 is not a military weapon.
Some Milquetoast dredged up by Romney and pals in a backroom?
Do the job yourself, instead of expecting politicians to save you. Do you seriously expect the political class, of whatever stripes, to fight this war for you.
Essentially permanent liberal/leftist SCOTUS entrenched. … Illegal immigration doubles. Path to citizenship established. Resulting in permanent one party political rule. … Muslim migrants tripled. … ISIS gets nukes. … TPP starts to erode national sovereignty. … Hate speech laws enacted. … Military fully ruled by political correctness. … Leftist indoctrination extends into pre-schools. … Reparations to non-whites for white privilege. – GB
I was hoping for what would realistically happen in the next four years.
Of these, only changing the balance in SCOTUS is something that is real, as we know that one seat must be filled, but that alone does not lead to permanent entrenchment of a liberal SCOTUS. Liberal for the next four years. True. Permanent – needs something else than one election cycle.
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How SCOTUS will decide specific cases and the legal implications it may have beyond the case itself, IDK.
In the case of the 9th’s ruling, they effectively punted it back to the states to decide concealment laws, and did not comment on open carry, nor the right to bear arms. Unfortunately, the Heller case was limited to the home, leaving the door open to such an interpretation.
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The rest is nearly as much a speculation as we have about what Trump would do better.
How we get to doubling and tripling the population of groups, permanent one party rule (non sequitur, if we never bother to make the case for conservatism), all the way to pre-school “indoctrination” (don’t like the added social expenditure, but calling it that, really?) and reparations (seriously, in your books this is highly likely?), all happening in the next four years, when, if it were so easily so, is something that Obama could/would have done? IDK.
Certainly a move leftward on all fronts, that I find troubling, but does it necessarily lead to all these?
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There is still the House of Representatives, that, even if Trump loses, is likely to remain in GOP hands. As much as we would have liked the GOP to be more vigorous and public in its opposition, it has been able to put a bit of a damper on Obama (Neo had some good articles on how many have under-recognized what has been done). Much of the above speculation assumes that there is a complete acquiescence. If anything, I’d expect renewed vigor following a Trump loss.
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To trade a certainty for Autocracy (your assessment) against the speculation of permanent one party rule to reparations is a lopsided one.
Meanwhile, it may well be looking lopsided to a great many others, if the polls are any indication.
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We are wasting time defending Trump for the indefensible and unpredictable, and asking people to see something more than there is to see about Clinton, who is easier to understand and predict, even if unlikable and untrustworthy to them all.
Forget the sunk cost and move on to something that might have a chance to beat Clinton.
The door is open unlike any other election year in our lifetimes, where both major party candidates are very unsatisfactory to a large proportion of the population.
“He’d have been hard pressed to kill that many without a military weapon.”
HappyLand Fire
Far, far more damnig:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/orlando-shooter-turned-gun-store-suspicious/story?id=39901107
And just in case there’s any doubt….
http://www.infowars.com/dhs-insider-obama-blocking-terrorist-probes/
Perhaps one of the first steps in this direction would be for investigations into potential jihad threats to be on a different footing than straight-ahead crime investigations. Because the US is ‘at war’ against (jihadi) terrorism, the investigation and concomitant powers should have powers to forestall acts of ‘war’
I am related to a woman whose son went from treatment to jail to treatment to lousy life to jail to treatment to suicide in jail.
She and others in her situation have been pushing for new legislation. Their view is that an individual who isn’t competent enough to walk in asking for treatment, or who, like her son, figures everybody else is the problem, needs to be treated anyway.
This brings up the questions of personal liberty, unaccountable ‘crats with month-end coming up and empty beds, people with grudges “reporting”. Apparently there will be some kind of court proceedings. But not like criminal proceedings. We’ve agreed to disagree–which is to say not discuss–the civil liberties issue.
The best strategy for tackling this admittedly difficult problem is a combination of (1) reducing Muslim immigration to reduce the number of potential terrorists; (2) permanent electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists; (3) professional sanctions for investigators who miss these red flags; and (4) frequent FBI stings where the targets are approached in person or online by agents acting as ISIS recruiters. This last one may get close to entrapment but is the best way to separate the talkers from the doers.
All good points Neo. And it IS worth remembering how the Soviets used their “mental health system” to go after political dissenters.
We’ve already seen how the bureaucrats that are only suppose to be concerned with collecting taxes have been used to stifle political dissent in the USA; do we really want to see doctors and other healthcare professionals do the same?
Do we want to see the US healthcare system (Obamacare aside for a minute) become a political arm of the US government?
Just how concerned will your doctors be about your health if they are also looking over their shoulder to see if they should be doing more than just treating you illness?
But, hey, America has it right on gun control and pretty much every other country in the world is obviously wrong.
That is correct. In the late great USSR gun ownership was prohibited but they had an overall murder rate twice the US rate. Some of the republics had murder rates like Chicago.
Richard Aubrey:
See this and also this.
Richard Aubrey:
This is mostly OT from the this thread, but what you are describing as your friend’s “solution” sounds like what we used to have – state-run mental hospitals where many people were warehoused without a lot of due process. This was attacked from both the left and right for different reasons and has been greatly diminished. But it did cover up a lot of societal problems. A discussion for another thread, I think.
My comment overlapped neo’s link, yes that is exactly what I am talking about. I agree with Coulter that the push to close the institutions came mostly from the left but the right did not resist too much because 1) libertarianism and 2) gov’t spending.
FOAF:
The de-institutionalization push also came with a promise to replace larger institutions with more halfway houses and smaller venues. A kinder, gentler mental health system. For the most part, that fell by the wayside.
Big Maq,
Just stopped by briefly to see any responses. I can easily cite evidence in support of my claims and will do so tommorrow. It being father’s day, I have other priorities.
No-fly list. No-buy guns list. Involuntary treatment protocols. Connecting them is a good idea, or a bad idea, depending on a couple of things. Most important is do you trust the government.
GB – will be out of pocket for better part of two weeks.
Also, looks like I messed up by posting to wrong tab / article. Apologies.