And let’s not forget about…
A few more things about the Texas school shooting
(1) Commenter “cb” has a good question: where did Ramos get the money for the guns? They wouldn’t be cheap.
(2) “cb” also wonders whether this story from 2018 might have involved Ramos. Strangely enough, it’s written by someone whose last name is also Ramos, but that’s a pretty common name, especially in areas with a high percentage of people of Hispanic origin. Here’s what happened back in April of 2018, when Ramos would have been 13 (depending on his exact date of birth, which was recently):
In the press release, Uvalde Chief of Police Daniel Rodriguez said that a Morales Junior High School student, 14, and a former Morales student, 13, had specifically targeted numerous students in what they described as a plan to perform a “mass casualty event against the school.”
Authorities said the students were motivated in large part by the Columbine shootings:
“The investigation revealed that the students were infatuated with the Columbine High School shootings and identified themselves to the shooters. The investigation uncovered that the students even referred to themselves using the Columbine shooter’s names.”
This seems like a somewhat different m.o., in that it targeted high school students rather than grade school students, and seems to have been more elaborately plotted. Also, although Ramos’ grandfather said his grandson hadn’t attended high school this past year, the high school he’d dropped out of is listed as Ulvade High School (Morales is the junior high school). The again, the 13-year-old who was arrested in 2018 was a “former Morales student.” If I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably not Ramos but might have been.
(3) I’ve also read that Ramos didn’t get help for his emotional problems. Quite obviously, he didn’t get effective help. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t get some help; I haven’t seen that issue addressed anywhere. In addition, if he was a psychopath, it is highly unlikely that any help would have helped.
(4) The photo most published of Ramos (you can find it towards the top of this article) looks like a mug shot to me, with that cold-eyed stare. Maybe it’s not, but if it is it might mean he has some sort of record – perhaps a juvenile one (they’ve said he has no adult record)?
(5) Ramos posted warnings on Facebook 30 minutes before the school attack. That’s too late to be a cry for help, except a veiled and ineffectual one. Maybe representing some mild ambivalence? Or perhaps just bragging about what he was about to do. Also, they were private one-on-one messages and therefore not public.
“I’m going to shoot my grandmother,” Salvador Ramos wrote about 30 minutes before his rampage at Robb Elementary School, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday.
Ramos made good on his vow, writing minutes later that he’d “shot my grandmother.” His last message foretold of his final act of unspeakable violence: “I’m going to shoot an elementary school,” he wrote about 15 minutes before he arrived on campus.
As far as motive goes, this is what I’ve seen:
The messages mirror texts Ramos reportedly sent to a 15-year-old female acquaintance in Germany, who then shared them with CNN, in which he indicated he erupted because he was annoyed his grandmother took issue with his phone bill.
That’s very much in line with psychopaths, in that it’s the sort of thing most teens have to deal with and don’t react to by becoming homicidal. However, psychopaths can become homicidally enraged if crossed even in minor ways.
There’s a great deal more information in that article, much of it very chilling. One piece of information I’d been curious about is answered: apparently his grandmother is alive and in the hospital. Apparently he also was angry at not having graduated from high school with what I assume were his previous classmates.
(6) Ramos did purchase two AR-15s legally (shortly after his 18th birthday), but I’ve not found any definitive word on whether he used those weapons in the killings, although most people seem to assume it. The official word I’ve found, however, seems equivocal:
Two law enforcement sources told CBS News that the suspect had a handgun, an AR-15 assault weapon and high capacity magazines.
When I try to find a transcript of Governor Abbott’s address on this, I keep getting articles about O’Rourke’s appropriation of the moment to start shouting at him. O’Rourke is running against Abbot for governor, and this was his attempt to grandstand for political gain. I don’t know that his efforts really won over many Texans; I certainly hope not.
Here’s the video. I’m with the Uvalde mayor, who calls O’Rourke a “sick sonovabitch.”
ADDENDUM:
…[A] police officer employed by the school district “engaged with the gunman” — but the shooter was able to enter the school through a back door, then a classroom where he opened fire with an AR-15 rifle. It’s unclear whether the school officer and the gunman exchanged gunfire…
[Then the gunman barricaded himself into a class and started shooting children and teachers]…
Law enforcement officers arriving on the scene could hear gunshots inside the classroom, Olivarez said. Officers tried to enter the school, but the shooter fired on them, hitting some of the officers, Olivarez said. At that point, police officers “began breaking windows around the school” in an attempt to evacuate children, teachers and staff, he said.
Officers were eventually able to force their way into the classroom and kill the shooter, who wore a tactical vest, Olivarez said.
Entrapment redux?
When I heard that an Iraqi man living in the US had recently been arrested for plotting to assassinate George W. Bush, my first thought was possible entrapment.
It didn’t used to be that way for me. Although I often did think “entrapment?”, it was way down the list of theories rather than my initial thought. I’d been familiar with the concept from law school, though, and I had been very wary of it ever since because of that exposure.
So I don’t discount this sort of article at all:
Well over 20 years into our War on Terror, so-called “terror plots thwarted by the FBI,” with rare exception, are pushed along by, funded by, and materially supported by the FBI—which, more often than not, is simply stepping in at the eleventh hour to stop Potemkin plots of its own making.
Important qualifier here, so there’s no confusion: Very often with these “terror plot” cases, whether they be “ISIS” or “domestic terror,” the person at the core of the plot very much has dangerous ideological beliefs, and their interaction with law enforcement is often preceded by threats or extremist online chatter. The degree of responsibility exists in a spectrum. Sometimes they are mentally unwell dupes who would have otherwise posed no real threat, and the plot is almost entirely of the FBI’s creation. Sometimes they play a more central role, and while the plot may not have happened without FBI assistance, it very well may have. It’s difficult to know at first blush—and without access to the actual affidavit or response from the accused legal counsel—where the latest “foiled FBI” plot falls on the spectrum. But given history and the details we do know, our media, as a rule, ought to be much more skeptical before announcing scary FBI-curated headlines about dastardly plots.
Earlier today, Forbes broke a story about the FBI stepping in to “break up” an assassination plot by Iraqi national Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab to take out former President George W. Bush, supposedly as revenge for the Iraq War…
Further inspection of the details, however, reveal that the “plot,” like most “ISIS/al Qaeda” plots the FBI “thwarts,” was likely moved along by and facilitated by FBI agents and well-paid FBI informants. (Forbes doesn’t say how much these informants were paid, but in some previous thwarted plots it has been as high as six figures.) The only actionable thing the suspect did other than supposedly trying to recruit people in WhatsApp was surveil George Bush’s Dallas residence. An FBI informant paid for the flight, picked up Shihab, and ushered him to the residence, according to NBC News. “After traveling to Dallas with the informant to take video of Bush’s residence,” Forbes writes,” the accused took more footage at the George W. Bush Institute.”
Please read the whole thing.
That article only deals with the “war on terror” cases connected with Islamic fanaticism. It doesn’t go near the evidence for entrapment in the Whitmer kidnapping plot in Michigan as well as the January 6th “insurrection”.
By the way, the government is re-trying the Whitmer defendants after the jury was hung in their previous trial. It doesn’t surprise me; the prosecutors will not give up on this unless the men are acquitted outright, and even then perhaps they’ll come up with some other charges against them if they can manage it.
More on the Texas school shooting, and the perpetrator
It is depressing in so many many ways.
First and foremost, there are the victims, now listed as 19 children and 2 adults. The cold-blooded killing of children is evil personified, and most human beings are especially revolted and outraged by it.
But beyond that, there is the sameness of it. It’s a theme we’ve seen before, with variations. One of those variations is the political use of such things by Democrats to demand a crackdown on gun owners that would virtually never have prevented it. Another is the portrait of a disturbed person as perpetrator (sometimes a very young one, as in this case of an 18-year old).
As is so often the case with these incidents, I find that the most early information is often available in the British press:
Neighbors and classmates say his behavior spiraled into the bizarre and macabre as he entered his later teenage years, with one friend telling Good Morning America: ‘He had scars on his face and someone asked him, ‘Are you ok?’ and he just said with a smile ‘I did it myself, I liked how it looked.’
He began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed…
The would-be mass murderer lived with his grandmother on Hood Street…
According to Ramos’ neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, the shooter and his mother would often have screaming matches, with police being called to the home on multiple occasions.
So was the mother at the grandmother’s house too? The article goes on to say that he had recently moved from the mother’s to the grandmother’s house. There also was a grandfather present in that home:
In since deleted Instagram videos, Ramos had allegedly filmed his mother interacting with police.
Classmate Nadia Reyes claimed: ‘He’d call his mom a b***h and say she wanted to kick him out… He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.’
Flores, meanwhile, told the Washington Post how he had tried to be a father figure to Ramos but that the situation at home only worsened as he got older.
So a neighbor had tried to be a father figure.
Jeremiah Munoz, an alumnus from the local high school who used to play Xbox games with Ramos, also told the New York Times he would often hear him arguing with his mother through the microphone – and his mother would scream back at him, telling him he needed to go to school and he was doing nothing with his life.
Munoz said Ramos would often leave his mother’s house and stay with his grandmother for several days after a big fight – and over the past year he has been spending more and more time with his grandmother.
Ramos’ grandmother, who owned the house on Hood Street, was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday’s killing spree. Flores said Ramos had moved into his grandmother’s home across town some months earlier.
There, his grandfather, Ronaldo Reyes, 72, said he lived in a front room and slept on a mattress on the floor. Reyes told ABC News he had no idea his grandson purchased two AR-15s nor that he kept them in the house.
Perhaps not all of this is accurate, but the British papers have a good track record. The article goes on to add that the grandfather was a convicted felon.
This type of thing is a classic story among disturbed teens. We used to see this sort of family quite often at the clinic where I got my training. Fathers sometimes were absent but not always, but whether present or somewhat absent they often were violent and/or abusive as well.
Not all of these kids grow up to become murderers or criminals – very fortunately. Some are even helped by the mental health system, or grow out of it in some way. But some, like Ramos, go out in a blaze of ignominy which they interpret as glory.
RIP to the victims.
Open thread 5/25/22
Horrific school shooting in Texas [scroll down for UPDATES]
There has been another school shooting, this time in the town of Uvalde, Texas. Fourteen precious and innocent elementary school children and one teacher are dead. The shooter was named Salvatore Romas (or probably Ramos) and was apparently killed by police after barricading himself in the school.
Reports are also that Ramos shot (and perhaps killed?) his grandmother first. But I didn’t find much about that in a quick perusal of the news.
I plan to write more about this later tonight when further facts emerge, but I wanted to put up a quick thread for you to talk about it.
UPDATE 8:25 PM:
More information on the shooter can be found here. I’ve found in the past that the source, heavy.com, tends to be first with these things and tends to be fairly accurate although not entirely so.
Here are a few excerpts:
An Instagram page with pictures of guns appears to belong to the shooter. Although it has not been publicly authenticated by authorities, it was removed shortly after the shootings. The page followed Uvalde High School students, and people who knew the gunman have posted about it on social media…
The Associated Press is reporting that a border patrol agent who was nearby rushed in without backup and killed the gunman…
Abbott said the gunman was an U.S. citizen…
“It is being reported that the subject shot his grandmother right before he went into the school. I have no further information about the connection between those two shootings,” the governor said in the news conference.Gutierrez said on CNN that the grandmother is clinging to life. He said Ramos bought the firearms on his birthday, legally, from a dealer. He said the gunman crashed his car near the school before going inside and opening fire. According to Gutierrez, Ramos was originally from North Dakota…
ABC News reported that the gunfire occurred inside the school, debunking early reports that the shooting occurred outside.
UPDATE 10:35 PM
The death toll is now 18 children and 3 adults. There are many wounded as well.
Roughly 90% of [the school’s] students are Hispanic. About 80% of the children attending come from families who are struggling financially.
The students who were killed are reported to have been second, third, and fourth-graders. This was an act of great evil.
Many of the newspaper articles refer to Ramos as the “alleged” shooter. But at this point, I see no indication that there is any doubt that he was the shooter. And since he is dead, the word “alleged” certainly isn’t being used to protect his rights at a future trial. Perhaps to protect his family? We haven’t heard much if anything about them yet, except for the grandmother he supposedly shot (although that’s not clear, either).
Biden made the usual pro-gun-control speech.
RIP Roger Angell
Roger Angell, noted baseball writer for The New Yorker, has died at the age of 101. I had no idea he was still alive, but I used to read him regularly during the thirty or so years when I had a subscription to that magazine, before I finally canceled because The New Yorker became more and more political – and stupidly (although still somewhat elegantly) political at that.
Even before that happened, though, I increasingly found it hard to keep up with new issues, although it was always a treat when they arrived, glossy and sleek, in the mail. It was a weekly and I read almost everything in it for years and years and years, and it was hard to keep them from piling up as my life got busier.
Angell had that graceful, understated, and entertaining style for which the magazine used to be known (I almost wrote “style the magazine used to be known for,” but the long-departed editors of those days would not have liked that construction). Angell’s mother was at the magazine for ages as well, and his stepfather was well-known author E.B. White.
Those days are so long gone, but it was always fun to get the spanking new issue with its usually-clever cover and amusing cartoons. My favorite cartoons had these captions: “Does my body make me look fat?”; “You have his masterpiece. But then you know that, of course”; and “Mighty good eating for the [few] pennies it cost.”
Through the magic of the internet I can find those first two: this and this (scroll down for the 1976 one by Everett Opie). But I can’t find the third, which featured a strange spiked Dr. Seuss-like creature being displayed by the proprietor of a food store.
Here’s an example of the style of Angell’s baseball writing:
“Baseball is not life itself, although the resemblance keeps coming up,” Angell wrote in “La Vida,” a 1987 essay (as reprinted by ESPN). “It’s probably a good idea to keep the two sorted out, but old fans, if they’re anything like me, can’t help noticing how cunningly our game replicates a larger schedule, with its beguiling April optimism; the cheerful roughhouse of June; the grinding, serious, unending (surely) business of midsummer; the September settling of accounts … and then the abrupt running-down of autumn, when we wish for — almost demand — a prolonged and glittering final adventure just before the curtain.”
The curtain has finally come down on Roger Angell. RIP.
I suppose this is an RIP for The New Yorker, as well, even though it’s nominally alive.
Lying for rhetorical advocacy
On the judicial nominee front:
Nusrat Choudhury, Biden’s pick for a New York City federal trial court, allegedly claimed during a 2015 panel that police shoot unarmed black people every day in the United States. Choudhury defended the statement in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in April. But on May 11, Choudhury told the committee she had never made such a statement.
“I did not make this statement. I strongly disavow this statement, and I regret not disavowing this statement during my hearing,” Choudhury wrote in a letter obtained by the Washington Free Beacon…
Republicans have yet to defeat one of Biden’s judicial nominees, and Choudhury’s unexplained turnabout presents their best opportunity yet. A second hearing would prolong the confirmation process and heighten pressure on the nominee.
Choudhury is a career ACLU lawyer whom Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has championed for the bench. She participated on a panel at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs in 2015. A representative from a school alumni group live-tweeted the event and reported that Choudhury claimed unarmed black people are shot by police on a daily basis.
There is no record of Choudhury’s statement apart from the tweet. But when pressed by Sen. John Kennedy (R., La.) about the claim at an April 27 hearing, Choudhury said she had been “engaging in rhetorical advocacy” three times and never disavowed the false claim.
It’s hard to sort this out, but whatever’s going on, it’s another depressing story. “I strongly disavow this statement, and I regret not disavowing this statement during my hearing” – what does that sentence even signify? Why would a person who is accused of making a false and incendiary statement – accused in an official public forum – try to make excuses for the statement rather than simply saying, “I never said that!”, and then suddenly much later on claim that he or she actually had never made the original statement? Are we to imagine that it had just slipped Choudhury’s mind to let us know she’d never said it? That doesn’t pass the smell test.
Choudbury is a “career ACLU lawyer.” The ACLU has turned into a leftist organization, and “rhetorical advocacy” would indeed be common among its lawyers. But it is not a recommendation for someone who would be a federal judge. And yet the bench is loaded with such people.
The lie that unarmed black people are shot by the police “every day” (or often) is a falsehood that has done a remarkable amount of damage, from riots to property destruction to killings of police officers. It’s financially and politically enriched a lot of people as well, most particularly the BLM officials who siphoned off a lot of the money they collected by peddling the lie. The false “narrative” has also fed a great deal of hatred and paranoia, and it’s been repeated and repeated and repeated by people who should know better and who probably do know better.
Was Choudhury one of those people who knew better? I think the evidence tends towards the conclusion that she most likely was.
Open thread 5/24/22
Seems to me there’s a reason that most of these are less common:
The Aussie election
Australia recently had an election in which the far left won. I hadn’t followed it at all till I heard the news, but the BBC calls it a “great shock to the system”:
Victory belongs to Anthony Albanese, only the fourth Labor leader since World War Two to oust a Liberal prime minister, but the 2022 Australian election was primarily a rejection of Scott Morrison and the brand of politics he has come to personify.
A politics that denied, and sometimes even mocked, the seriousness of the climate crisis – as Treasurer, Morrison laughingly brandished a lump of coal in parliament.
A politics that many female voters especially found bloke-ish and boorish…
Tumbling down have come the walls of conservative citadels. Parliamentary seats where Liberals had for generations dominated now look like barren lands.
The shoreline of Sydney Harbour, which is home to the most expensive real estate on the continent, is a case in point. It has been overwhelmed by a “teal” wave, the colour adopted by the swathe of independents who have had such a transformative effect on the country’s political geography.
Remarkably, the Liberals no longer control any harbour-side seats that stretch from the Opera House to the ocean…
It is akin to San Francisco, another great harbour city, losing all its Democrats.
That’s the BBC, of course, which considers this a Good Thing. And I often get confused by Anglosphere politics outside the US: the parliamentary systems and the nomenclature by which “liberal” supposedly means “conservative” but actually by US standards is usually decidedly nonconservative.
So, what really happened there?
More:
A party that has become fixated in recent decades with attracting working class battlers in traditional Labor strongholds has lost touch with Tesla-driving professionals in blue-ribbon seats.
For the first time in more than a decade, the electric car nudged out the coal train.
The rise of the teal independents has shattered the main party duopoly in the major cities – urban Australia accounts for 86% of the country’s population.
Before you express shock at that last figure, it may surprise you to learn (as it surprised me) that the percentage of urban dwellers is similar in the US. However, in the US it’s been quite some time – if ever – that conservatives have found much support with “Tesla-driving professionals.”
It’s the climate-change emphasizing Greens that seem to have turned the tide, with neither of the main parties (Liberal or Labor) drawing all that many votes. There’s that parliamentary system complexity again:
There was always a none-of-the above feel to the head-to-head between the main party leaders. That has been borne out in the results.
Anthony Albanese, then, has achieved an ambiguous victory. There was no great groundswell of support for Labor. Indeed, its primary vote was actually 2% down from 2019, a meagre 32%. Although he is certain to emerge as prime minister, we still do not know whether he will stand at the head of a Labor majority government.
Albanese has promised to make Australia a “a renewable energy powerhouse.” Good luck with that.
This election apparently was all about climate change, at least according to the MSM:
One topic dominated Australia’s election: climate change.
Following a string of climate-related catastrophes in recent years, Australian voters this weekend returned the opposition Labor Party to power, with incoming Prime Minister Anthony Albanese vowing to “end the climate wars” and turn Australia into a “renewable energy superpower.”…
Oquist pointed out that although Albanese’s Labor Party had won a narrow majority to form the next government, it was the Greens and the so-called teal independents — both of whom campaigned on strong climate action — who received the biggest bump in support.
“Parliament now effectively has a ‘supermajority’ in support of climate action, which can’t be ignored,” he said.
Were people also just plain tired of Morrison, who had been PM since 2018 (which includes all of the COVID years, among other things)? Perhaps. Here’s a clue, I think:
Morrison drew near unanimous condemnation for taking a holiday during Australia’s 2019–20 bushfire season and for his government’s response to the disaster…
Morrison was heavily condemned for his government’s response to the 2022 Eastern Australia floods; criticism was levelled against him for campaigning in Perth instead of being present in New South Wales, causing a relief package for flood victims to be delayed, with many critics suggesting that Morrison was prioritising marketing over the flood response.
I’m not so sure anything about Australia is transferable to the US, and vice versa. But when the far left gets in the driver’s seat (literally), bad things tend to happen.
I have some things I have to do this afternoon…
…and probably will be posting again in late afternoon or early evening.