There is a great thread in Free Republic here on the Planned Parenthood shooter. There is a possibility that he wasn’t a traditional mass shooter, or an activist of any sort. From a comment at the link:
What I was told by my daughter who lives there, and what the Utah news were saying yesterday was:
He went to rob the Chase Bank, something happened, they haven’t said what yet, he ran down the road 1/4 miles away and took cover in the PP site…he killed 3 people, one was an officer, the other two they won’t say until after artopsies…for some reason…they asked the lady that runs that PP site if anyone was killed and she said NO not from here…
He is mentally ill, no question…but the national news is trying to make this out as a PP shooting and it isn’t…obuma wants it that way so he can gather up our guns before he gets his butt booted out of the United States for good!!!.
There is some initial info he may have had something happen at a bank down the street, maybe a robbery attempt that failed, maybe just him being emotionally disturbed. Police responded and there was a shooting in front of a vision center as cops engaged, after which he ducked into Planned Parenthood for cover. Per the link, Colorado Police have denied the “No more baby parts” story, and told everyone to confirm information through them before running with it.
This would explain three glaring inconsistencies. One is why a committed ideologue walked into an unarmed gun-free zone full of rabbits whom he ideologically opposed, and ended up shooting more police than leftist “baby killers.” The second is how a guy with no electricity and no running water living in isolation from everyone else is up on the latest Planned Parenthood videos on the internet. The third is why a K-strategist ideologue who didn’t want babies killed would shoot and kill fellow K-strategist cops who responded to stop him, and were wholly innocent of any evil he might have perceived. There should have been a strong emotional block preventing him from doing that, and it would have taken a lot of crazy to overcome that.
Part of me thinks as Trump drives leftists ever crazier, they may become capable of anything from mere lying to much worse. Trump is the ultimate amygdala hijack, and he is happening at a time of peak r. What the left is capable of at these extremes, is anybody’s guess.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
The cop that is innocent of evil does not exist. All cops do evil on a daily, if not hourly basis. To even want to be a cop shows a man to be of suspect morals and low character.
I disagree completely. Policing involves taking power. It is what you do with it that counts. I’m as libertarian as can be, and I could see myself fill that role in a moment, and not do evil. In a different life, I would probably be there.
It is kind of like this movie I watched a while back. Jet Li was some guy who was adopted as a kid by a crime lord and taught to fight. He finds out the crime lord killed his mom, and the climax is him deciding not to kill the crime lord, and choosing pacifism. For the writer, there was the killer (bad) and the pacifist who won’t kill (good), and each was the opposite of the other. In my view, the writer was too feeble minded to see the difference between guys who kill for evil, and those who kill for good.
It is not like that writer thought at all. Life isn’t violence or pacifism, it is good vs evil. As you grow older, you realize just how real, and tangibly evil, evil is. It really is the inverse of good. At one end of the good/evil spectrum is the guy who will kill for evil, and at the opposite end of the spectrum is the guy who will kill for good. In the middle is the mushy muddle, whose members aren’t driven enough in either direction to take action, or even hold a belief. They tell themselves they are better than each side, but it is mostly to assuage their cowardice, apathy, intellectual weakness, and inability to figure out which side to take.
I think in most places a lot of good people choose to do policing because they want to do good, join a brotherhood, and maybe risk or sacrifice a little safety in the process for loyalty. Once they get in, it is mostly filling our forms and when it isn’t, it is showing up at car accidents and medical emergencies. But every so often a guy like this officer who was killed get’s in a pinch he can’t get out of, because he ran to help his compatriots in their time of need.
That said, I can’t rule out a corrupt department or agency taking hold somewhere, and if you’ve run into that, my sympathies. It happens. But this cop burned in for his buddies, and that is something to revere. Evil just doesn’t run to the gunfire to do that. He was a rock star among K-strategists, even with the ice-dancing.
Power corrupts. That’s an axiom by which I live, and even a little bit of power (I worked while a student for Campus Police) caused me to indulge in petty abuses of power I now find more than embarrassing.
That said, I’ve known some incredible guys who were local cops. Once, my youngest son’s car was disabled when a bolt fell out of a front brake caliper and one of those guys stopped to see what was up (he was able to pull off into the parking lot of, of all things, a gun shop closed for the day.) The cop actually went back to a busy intersection, turned on his lights, quartered the area on foot and FOUND THE BOLT!
The problem is that we do hear about the one-off abuses. They are real, and the Blue Code of Silence means that as with physicians and many other professions, the Bad Eggs are protected by their fellows.
We live in a time of competing fears. I fear the chaos of marauding orcs far more than I fear the occasional Bad Cop, and I fear that the current scheme of de-policing (Youtube effect) is increasingly rendering the Good Cops both impotent and vulnerable.
I often consider going to the local police station to inquire about establishing a cop/community meet-and-greet to enhance and embed the individual cops into the non-cop social milieu. I haven’t done it for fear it might boomerang due to its “oddness,” but if the perception of cop vulnerability gets much worse it may become essential.
As a libertarian I regard policing (which is a relatively modern invention going back to the 1850s) as suspect, mostly because it often infringes on individual liberty; and we have a large, tyrannical, corrupt central government which to some extent police are upholding. I’m thinking mostly of DEA agents using violence to stop people from exercising their right to determine their own health (i.e. smoking cannabis), or else shooting people’s dogs every 98 minutes, or the ones who shot the homeless camper in New Mexico. These are clear infringements on individual liberty. To a large degree it’s K’s being bossed around by r’s, and I’d rather not be bossed around by either.
At the same time, I do recognize that most of the media frenzy lately is simple race baiting (e.g. Michael Brown was clearly the aggressor, not the cop). And a lot of it is driven by federal funding of local police departments, who obviously don’t need tanks to stop criminals. Cops used to be more like Andy Griffith, but in the last 50 years there are a lot few of the good cops left who got into it for good reasons like wanting to help their community or stop crimes that have actual victims.
I think Mike from Breaking Bad put it well when he said cop, criminal, it doesn’t matter. There are bad cops and good cops, bad criminals and good criminals. Whether you’re good or evil is up to you and your choices.
I’ve known quite a few local cops, and the one’s I’ve known personally were all good guys and got in for the right reasons, but it is possible that is location or agency-dependent, I really can’t say. My gut says it is like crime. You hear about the bad cases, and it skews your perspective, because you never hear about the guys who keep their heads down.
Waco was terrible, but I knew two ATF guys and they were like funny uncles in a family – just easy-going jokers. They spent their days trying to gin up cases on gangs like Bloods and Crips for running guns across state lines, and my impression was they could have cared less about somebody law-abiding with a T-grip forearm on a pistol. I can’t say if all ATF are like them, but I suspect shit like Waco happens when the politicians who rise to the top of those agencies stick their noses in the business of the rank and file, who just want to take scumbags down, or when Lois Lerners get a bit of power once in a while. I know everybody in should rebel when that happens, but I can see how tough that is when you have family to support.
I exempt LE intel from my assessments though, because at least some agencies seem to have a policy of breaking laws and operating illegally, which seems a bad position for an LE agency to start from – and I see troubling indications the elites have figured out how to use them for harassment of normal citizens, and maybe even conservatives especially. My guess is they are recruiting differently from the investigative/tactical wings, so those guys I don’t even begin to vouch for – they are trouble.
Truer than I think many people know. I am increasingly eyeing paths I may need one day when I’m on the lamb from fedguv. There is no way to tell what is coming, but there are ominous signs everywhere.
“What the left is capable of at these extremes, is anybody’s guess.”
What we do know is that noisy left-collectivists no longer seem to care that their overt lies (substituting video “news,” editing recordings to obviously alter content, etc.) are being outed.
The MSM now behaves like a guy I knew in college who spouted a continuous stream of overt falsehoods, an entire false life history (he was the football star, recruited by the Marines until an injury prevented his enlistment, homecoming “king,” etc., etc.) despite the fact that a guy with whom he graduated was sitting there listening to the whole thing.
There’s delusional, and there’s “delusional!”
We appear to have entered a time when the false dogma is so viciously defended that overt, readily recognized lies are propagated and then spread in viral fashion, and anyone who notes the Emperor’s New Clothes is practically lynched (see Peter Duesberg or James Watson for examples, of course. From Slate: “Jim Watson is one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. He is also a peevish bigot.” This, for simply telling the truth about the intellectual disability bequeathed by African ancestry.)
I still connect this to a manic social mood a la socionomics.net. When people are in the throes of a social mania they will believe damn near anything.
We see this illustrated today wherever we choose to look.
When social mood eventually, inevitably inverts from this decades-long lurch into madness, I strongly expect the overshoot of the mean will lead to pessimism-laced, rage-fueled violence on a scale not seen for centuries.
Nathan: “Cops used to be more like Andy Griffith, ”
And much of the U.S. used to be more like Mayberry!
Would you like to be forced (it’s that or go work as a greeter at WalMart!) to get sent into Chi-congo or Fergustan and pray that, while you’re responding to what you hope might be a legit call for help instead of a set-up, you don’t get shot in the back by a two-legged animal?!
As an old White woman, I am SO grateful that there are young males (I also don’t think women should be cops) want to be cops. Are some bad? Of course — so are some old White women! But the ‘odds’ of finding a cop willing or able to “be more like Andy Griffith” are pretty good, if you’re NOT in a bad neighborhood or acting pissy towards the cop with whom you interact.
Want to talk about ‘triggered’ amygdalae? How about those of the cops?! All-too-often they’re in the dangerous jungle listening for that twig snap; or, worse, in the nice neighborhood and some violent jungle animal decide to leave the jungle for some fun.
Compassion and patience might be a better attitude towards cops until one proves he’s a jerk!