Texas church shooting
This is still a breaking story, and I imagine we’ll learn much more tomorrow, but an especially vicious and deadly shooting has occurred in a Texas church:
An armor-clad gunman opened fire inside a rural Texas church on Sunday, killing more than two dozen people in the largest mass shooting in the state’s history, officials said…
We are dealing with the largest mass shooting in our state’s history,” he added.
The shooter is also dead, officials said.
Law enforcement officials identified the gunman on Sunday evening as Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, of neighboring Comal County. Officials were preparing to search his home. Texas officials would say on the record only the shooter was a “young white male.”
Children and a pregnant woman are among the dead, including the pastor’s 14-year-old daughter.
Kelley seems to have been the proverbial bad apple:
Ann Stefanek, a spokeswoman for the Air Force, confirmed that Kelly was court-martialed in 2012 on two charges of assaulting his spouse and their child. He was confined for a year, reduced in rank to airman basic E-1 and given a bad conduct discharge in 2014, Stefanek said.
So far we know nothing about motive. Maybe the gunman left an explanatory note. Or maybe he will continue to be a mystery, just as the Las Vegas shooter Paddock has remained so far. My personal opinion is that at least part of Kelley’s motive was some sort of competition to be the biggest, baddest shooter ever.
It seems that he was planning to kill more, but was stopped by another Texan with a gun:
A local resident confronted the gunman after the shooting began, “grabbed his rifle and engaged that suspect,” Martin said.
The gunman dropped the rifle and then fled with the resident in pursuit, he said.
As law enforcement responded, the suspect ran off the road in his car at the Wilson-Guadalupe county line and crashed, Martin said. The suspect was found dead in the vehicle.
“We don’t know if this was a self-inflicted gunshot wound or if he was shot by our local resident who engaged him with gunfire,” he added.
I imagine we’ll hear more about this “local resident,” too.
What a horror show. I am sure many prayers are going out tonight for the dead and wounded and their families.
These events are undoubtedly news but I fear that we just create more of them with the coverage.
Some random “forest from the trees points”:
1. Violent crime has been collapsing in he US since approximately 1980. Here is one widely reported metric from a highly respected academic source.
2. As you can see, the drop begins around 1980, at around the same time that income inequality starts to widen. This flips the left-wing assumption on the relationship between he two.
3. Violent crime continued to fall during the Great Recession and early years of the Obama Recovery. This (I think) is the first time in history we have observed such a phenomena. Crime has always risen during a recession.
4. I find it depressing that America’s RWing Party does not celebrate this more, and has elected a celebrity who spends his time babbling on about “American Carnage” like a freakin’ Bolshevik or something.
Terrorism does not appear to be part of the story, nor is race. This really is as mysterious as the Las Vegas shooting. I wonder if we’ll ever find a motive that “makes sense” in some twisted way.
Thank you, Manju, for the observation on crime statistics.
This was an attack by a nut on people of faith, Christians in particular, and is supported by the popular culture. This is the harvest that was sown by liberals. You can even hear them now, mocking prayers for the victims. They are on the same side as the shooter but are too fanatical to notice.
Politics can wait. My heart goes out to the victims and their families… and thank God for the locals who chased off the gunman.
Texas has quite a few people like the two guys who pursued the killer. I’m reminded of an incident back about 1980 where a hunter and his son were on their way home from a hunt. They saw a policeman get shot down by a guy the cop had pulled over. The father took his rifle from the rack behind him, loaded it, got out of the truck, and nailed the killer with one shot.
IIRC, the local DA decided to take it to a grand jury. The jury voted to give the father a commendation. A reporter who interviewed the son, who was 11 or so, told how the boy wasn’t upset at all, and felt quite certain he could have made the shot himself had it been needed.
The elephant in the room is conservatives and Christians are being targeted by CNN/MSM radicalized progressives/commies terrorists nowadays. republican Baseball practice shooting, Las Vegas country music festival, assault on Senator Rand Paul and the latest church massacre, the common denominator of all these tragedies is the clear motive of the perpetrator to hurt conservatives, there is clearly a pattern. You can argue all you want about Paddock’s motive and potential targets but the one thing that can be confirmed with no objection is that he finally chose a venue with perhaps the most young conservatives that any shooter could find to commit the act. atheists like to preach that religion is obsoleted since moral can exist without a spiritual authority like god, but without spiritual morality fail-safe mechanism like the belief of heaven and hell, unhinged atheists can achieve much worse atrocities than people who believe in hell and eternal suffering because there is no spiritual constrain. If progressives can cause guns to be banned by committing many mass shootings that is incentive enough for them to continue. They can kill the evil conservatives they hate, they can stop the suffering of depression with suicide by cop, and as a bogus they can get all guns to be banned from the conservatives they hate, to them it is one stone and three birds. you will see more and more incidents like this until liberals collectively finally go through a self reflection.
democrats and progressives are becoming more and more like muslims, only a very few commits terrorist attacks but most of the moderates cheer them on.