Last week I very intentionally didn’t do a Weekend Update post to supplement the previous day’s Friday Links post. I was feeling as if I was spending every Saturday morning writing about a few headlines that caught my eye later Friday. When maybe a better use of my time would be working on my fiction, or housework, or other things that actually gets something done that needs doing, y’know?
Then we got out of the movie last night, and one friend who had just turned his phone back on tells us that there was a shooting at a mall in a town about an hour’s drive north of where we were. There was almost no information available last night, and this morning there still isn’t really much: Cascade Mall shooting: Mayor vows to ‘bring the son of a bitch to justice’.
They have some really low-res blurry pictures of a generic looking dark haired guy wearing a very generic looking maybe black t-shirt and maybe black cargo shorts. They originally put out the APB for a “hispanic male wearing gray,” but if the pictures are any indication the only part of that which might be accurate is the shooter’s gender presentation.
Seriously, I know Seattle area men who come form a long line of Norwegians who look exactly like that guy. Heck! I used to know a lesbian firefighter (who was sometimes mistaken for a guy) whose ancestors came from Switzerland and England who looked just like that guy.
Some of the news sources are reporting this as the sixth mass shooting in Washington state this year. Another source said seven, and then lists them, but there are only five total in the list. Also of note only to my fellow pedants: one of the shootings they’re counting had only two victims, another had only three. The FBI still doesn’t have an official criteria for a mass shooting, but most people compiling statistics start with the FBI’s definition of mass murder (four people killed in a single incident, not counting the perpetrator), and count anything with four people shot as a mass shooting.
I don’t know what to say.
Except this (which I think needs to be repeated every time a story of some situation like this happens): unless you have the skills, temperament, and wherewithal to be a responsible gun owner (i.e., ensure that guns are always securely stored when not in use; they are kept clean and otherwise maintained; you regularly practice not merely shooting the thing but loading it, unloading it, checking its working parts before using it, working the safety; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera), don’t go buy a gun. Statistically, you will not be safer. Statistically, everyone around you will be less safe. That’s a fact.
So, a bunch of people were sitting in the theatre, about 20 minutes into Michael Bay’s latest atrocity, that Benghazi movie, when a drunk guy is seen fumbling with a pistol and it goes off, striking a woman in another row, putting her in critical condition. Then the drunk guy flees the theatre, throwing the ammo clip in a trash can on his way out. Ninety minutes later, a man called the police to report that his 29-year-old son was “distraught” because he dropped his gun in a theatre and thinks he might have hurt someone. Police come and arrest the 29-year-old, who they decline to identify, but note that he has a concealed weapon permit. The victim, meanwhile, has been hospitalized and her condition has been upgraded to “satisfactory.”
This particular multiplex is one that I’ve actually been to, as it’s local to me (the third time we saw the Star Trek reboot was in this theatre, for instance), so there were a number of stories on local blogs and outlets. One that I read yesterday, but haven’t been able to find again, quoted a witness inside the theatre who saw a guy several rows ahead of him pull the gun out, which prompted the witness to slip his phone out of his pocket and quietly turn it on, fearing the worst. This witness insists that the guy never dropped the gun, but appeared to be playing with it, and definitely didn’t have to stoop down to pick anything up off the ground after the gun went off as he fled.
Well, good on him! The usual definition of a mass shooting is a single shooting event in which four or more people (not counting the shooter) are shot or killed. By shooting only one person, this guy successfully made sure that it wasn’t a mass shooting, I guess.
There’s a whole lot I could say about this, but they all go down the rabbit hole of the topic no one can be rational about. So, let’s limit it to a couple of questions:
First, why are they protecting this idiot’s identity? Seriously, no one is a stronger believer in the Presumption of Innocence in our justice system than I am, but why do they keep withholding his name? He has been booked into jail. That’s a matter of public record. I could understand if we were talking about an underage suspect, because we treat juvenile defendants differently under the legal principle of Diminished Responsibility. This shouldn’t apply here, right? He’s 29 years old. The victim’s name and face have been plastered all over the place, including naming the hospital where she’s being treated. Why is the shooter’s identity being withheld? Maybe he hasn’t been formally arraigned, yet? I don’t know, but it seems weird.
Why did throw away the ammo clip? I get that he apparently was intoxicated. Maybe you can attribute all of his stupidity to the alcohol impairment, though I have more than a few quibbles with that. But even in the intoxicated mind, what is the point of throwing away the ammo clip? It’s he gun barrel that is likely to be used as evidence against him, right? We all understand how they match bullets to guns: it isn’t by the clip, it’s the barrel that the bullet was fired through. I’m genuinely curious.
The only silver lining I see to all this is, if he’s found guilty of felony assault, this idiot won’t be allowed to legally own guns any more.
While we’re on the topic of local idiots: Judge Rules Eyman Measure Unconstitutional. Tim Eyman is a local con artist and professional Initiative Sponsor (literally, that is the only way he’s made any income for many, many years), whose main target is taxes. Though ten years ago he took a detour into anti-gay territory and filed a referendum intended to repeal the state’s laws protecting discrimination based on sexual orientation. He literally showed up at press conference announcing the anti-gay referendum dressed in a pink tutu and thought that was a clever stunt. He switched to a Darth Vader costume for his actual filing of the initiative after the tutu evoked much criticism. That particular initiative failed to get enough signatures to even qualify for the ballot.
Hateful annoyance and perpetual iniative-sponsor Tim Eyman filing his anti-gay referendum when he took a break from his eternal assault on the state’s general fund in 2006.His schtick of getting voters to pass limitations on taxes and the ability of the legislature to raise them have usually succeeded at least temporarily, though they are often thrown out as unconstitutional. This one is a great example. Washington’s constitution sets up relatively easy initiative and referendum processes (the signature threshold to get them on the ballot is very low, there is only one specific court that is allowed to rule on whether an initiative meets the definitions to go on the ballot before hand, so they can’t be tangled up in a long appeals process before the people get to see them), but there are some limitations. Initiatives must adhere to only one topic, for instance. And referendums to repeal a law have to turn in their signatures within a certain number of days after said law is signed by the governor.
The constitution is also very clear on the process of amending the constitution: all amendments must originate in the legislature and be passed by a two-thirds majority of both houses before being submitted to the public for a simple majority vote. The constitution explicitly forbids constitutional amendments to be made through the initiative process.
This particular measure was essentially an act of extortion: if the legislature does not place a constitutional amendment requiring any future increase in taxes to pass with a two-thirds supermajority, then the current sales tax would be lowered, resulting in a loss of about $8 billion dollars in the next fiscal year. Voters, some of whom are eternally eager to believe that they can get all the state services they require without any taxes to actually pay for them, passed it, of course. But the judge ruled that the initiative is unconstitutional in two distinct ways: 1) it doesn’t adhere to one subject, being about both an amendment to the constitution and the current level of sales tax, and 2) it attempts to start a constitutional amendment through the initiative process, which the constitution clearly forbids.
One of the things that really annoys me about Eyman and his eternal initiatives (he’s already raises $1.2 million to put more on the ballot this year), is that he doesn’t even have to appeal this ruling. The state attorney general is obligated to appeal the ruling, and to defend the initiative (which every legal expert agreed was unconstitutional for the reasons the judge cited) all on the taxpayer’s dime. Meanwhile Eyman keeps rolling in the dough running more of these things up the flagpole.
Another of my posts mostly about news that came out after I queued up the Friday Links.
Bring out the buds!
Thursday before last was the first day of legal recreational marijuana sales in Oregon. The big news out of Oregon that day should have been about the triumph of de-criminalization over the myths of the war on drugs, et cetera. Instead we had a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College. Despite that, legal marijuana did move forward, and in a really big way: Oregon’s first week of recreational pot sales tops $11 million.
Wish we could just dodge the bullets
The Upmqua Community College shooting was the 32nd mass murder (using the FBI’s definition) in the United States of 2015. Lots of news organizations were reporting that it was the 32nd mass shooting, but the FBI doesn’t have a definition for mass shooting, only for mass murder, which is when four or more people are killed in a single incident. But the media keeps reporting these as mass shooting statistics, and I think that that affects how people perceive the problem, because by the FBI’s statistics, the Lafeyette theatre shooting in July, in which eleven people total were shot, but only two died, isn’t being counted in that statistic.
A more reasonable statistic would be the define a mass shooting as any time 4 or more people were struck by a bullet in a single incident, regardless of how many of them survived. By that metric, The Umpqua Community College shooting was the the 295th mass shooting of the year. Read that again: 295 mass shootings for far this year in the U.S. as of October 1—that’s more than one a day. That’s more mass shootings in a year than other countries have in decades. Heck, that’s more mass shootings a day in the U.S. than most countries experience in a decade! Yet, some people keep insisting that these things can’t be prevented. They are right only in the sense that as long as we let them use that nonsense argument to prevent us from doing anything about it we won’t reduce the number of shootings.
As if one school shooting on Friday wasn’t enough, we had two! TWO IN CUSTODY IN FATAL TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY SHOOTING. Since I made a big deal in the earlier paragraphs about definitions, it would be misleading of me to refer to the Texas Southern shooting as a mass shooting: only two people were shot, of which only one died. However, the Texas Southern shooting is worth mentioning because it was the third shooting on that campus within the space of a week! There are been another incident on Tuesday night, and they mention just casually an incident the previous weekend where someone fired two shots but didn’t hit anyone.
But Congress doesn’t have time to close any loopholes in existing gun laws (such as a fact that it is not a federal crime to knowingly purchase a gun on behalf of someone who is legally barred from owning a gun!). They’re too busy conducting a witchhunt against Planned Parenthood and coming up with nothing. Republicans Admit Planned Parenthood Did Nothing Wrong.
Billionaire bully
Fortunately, not all of the news late on Friday was bad: We Were Sued by a Billionaire Political Donor. We Won. Here’s What Happened. Billionaire donates millions to anti-gay causes, a magazine reports the fact, and he sues them for defamation. This is a variant of a problem we deal with with these rightwing nut jobs all the time: if you don’t want to be called a bigot, stop doing bigoted things! Especially when you’re a co-finance chairman of not one, but two presidential campaigns (which means you are no longer considered under the law a private citizen, you’re now a public figure) who buys dozens of billboards to put up anti-gay messages, purchased full-page ads in major newspapers to run anti-gay slogans, go on Fox News to describe how awful it is to institute anti-bullying campaigns that try to protect gay children from harassment and bullying, et cetera.
Coming out is scary. It doesn’t always go well. I’ve written before about some of the issues I’ve had (and sometimes continue to have) with family members and old friends. But I firmly believe that, unless you are a kid living at home or otherwise still dependent on your parents for financial support, or unless you live in a place where it is illegal to admit to being queer, coming out is better than continuing to live the lie. There will be some surprises when you come out. Some people that you are certain will never come around, will become your biggest defenders. Some people who you thought might understand will disown you and go to their grave without reaching out. You will definitely learn which people really love you, and which only love the idea of who they think you ought to be.
But living the lie carries a heavy price, because you live in constant fear of being found out, and you expend a lot more energy than you realize trying to cover things up all the time. Second-guessing yourself, keeping track of cover stories you’ve told, the constant worry damages both your mental and physical health. And all of that goes away once you stop hiding in the closet. Once you’re free of that you’ll be able to fill your life with people who really love and respect the real you for who you are. And that is a much happier and healthier way to live!
Last week I very intentionally didn’t do a Weekend Update post to supplement the previous day’s Friday Links post. I was feeling as if I was spending every Saturday morning writing about a few headlines that caught my eye later Friday. When maybe a better use of my time would be working on my fiction, or housework, or other things that actually gets something done that needs doing, y’know?
They have some really low-res blurry pictures of a generic looking dark haired guy wearing a very generic looking maybe black t-shirt and maybe black cargo shorts. They originally put out the APB for a “hispanic male wearing gray,” but if the pictures are any indication the only part of that which might be accurate is the shooter’s gender presentation.
Font Folly 