Tag: mass shootings

Blaming Mass Shootings on Mental Illness Doesn’t Address Either Issue

Since a gunman went on a rampage in Lewistown, Maine, killing 16 people, we’ve learned a few things about the shooter, Robert Card, who was found with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound after a two-day manhunt. A member of the Army Reserve, Card had recently been committed to a mental health facility after he reported hearing voices and threatened to shoot up the National Guard base in Saco, Maine.

Card’s mental health history has been central to reporting that laid out the lead-up to the deadliest mass shooting in the US this year. Questions of how Card was able to have access to guns, given his psychiatric hospitalization and documented concerns of family and soldiers in his reserve unit, drove much of the coverage. Lax gun laws that allow people like Card to slip through the cracks warrant interrogation, but the reality is that most mass shooters don’t have a mental health history like Card’s, nor is a record of mental illness a good predictor of gun violence.

Card’s ability to carry out this tragedy is a symptom of the gun violence crisis in the US, but the presence of his mental illness is not representative of the issue. In the vast majority of cases of mass violence, mental illness is not considered a primary factor. Attempting to rationalize the horrors of a mass shooting by emphasizing the perpetrator’s mental state does very little to address the larger issue at best, and leads to dangerous mental health stigma at worst.

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Seven Nashville cops are placed on leave after manifesto written by trans shooter Audrey Hale was released

Seven Nashville police officers have been placed on administrative leave amid an investigation into how the ‘manifesto’ of school shooter Audrey Hale leaked online. 

Nashville Police Department told WSMV that the officers were suspended after a probe into how three pages of notes written by Hale before she opened fire at The Covenant School in March. 

She fatally shot three nine-year-olds and three teachers before being shot dead by police. 

The manifesto had been shrouded in secrecy since the shooting, until they were leaked on Monday by controversial podcast host Steven Crowder, who claimed his reporters obtained it from a detective on the scene. 

Police sources told Fox 17 that the documents were authentic, and purport to show Hale’s plan to target ‘white privileged’ ‘cr*****s’ and ‘f****ts’ before killing herself.  

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YouTube Censors Reporting On Leaked Trans Shooter Manifesto

YouTube has removed reporting by Steven Crowder on the pages of the withheld manifesto of the Nashville mass shooter that he managed to obtain, claiming that they “think it violates” their policy on “violent criminal organizations”.

Whatever that means is anyone’s guess. Crowder shared the development with a screenshot from his YouTube account, commenting “Investigative journalism is now considered a ‘criminal organization’”.

YouTube further told Crowder that “Content that glorifies violent criminal organization or incites violence is not allowed on YouTube.”

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Nashville Mayor’s Office, MSM Flips Out After Trans Shooter Manifesto Leaks; Facebook Censors

As the Epoch Times notes:

Metro Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell said in a statement on Nov. 6 that he had directed the city’s legal director to initiate an investigation into the leak, but he didn’t address the veracity of the documents. Other agencies were unable to verify the authenticity of the documents when asked to do so by The Epoch Times on Nov. 6.

“I have directed Wally Dietz, Metro’s law director, to initiate an investigation into how these images could have been released,” Mr. O’Connell said in the statement. “That investigation may involve local, state, and federal authorities. I am deeply concerned with the safety, security, and well-being of the Covenant families and all Nashvillians who are grieving.”

A spokeswoman for MNPD said there was “no information” they could provide at this time when reached via phone on Nov. 6. So far, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said that they can offer no confirmation of the documents, according to a spokesman of the agency.

. . .

Earlier Monday Alex Jones claimed that the Biden DOJ suppressed the document.

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Nashville Covenant School Trans Shooter’s Manifesto Has Been Leaked

Nashville Police told FOX News in late April that they will finally release the manifesto of the trans shooter that they recovered from her car following the attack on March 27, 2023.

28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, a transgender former student murdered three 9-year-olds and three adults last month in a mass shooting at the school. Hale fired off 152 rounds during the targeted attack at the Covenant School, in Nashville, Tennessee.

The attack appears to be a deadly hate crime by a deranged trans shooter against Christian Americans. The media has largely ignored the attack that resulted in six deaths including three children.

The local authorities and FBI refused to release the manifesto to the public following the mass shooting by Hale in March.

The release of the manifesto was delayed again in early May. Michael LaChance reported, “The excuse this time is that there is ‘pending litigation’ around the document. Does anyone believe any of this?”

The Daily Mail reported in May that the manifesto is now in the judge’s hands.

A judge in Nashville has been provided with an unredacted copy of the trans shooter manifesto. And it could be soon released to the public.

According to Fox News 17, the judge was given two versions of the manifesto to review: one with no redactions and another with proposed redactions made by city attorneys.

However, lawyers at The Covenant School filed a motion of intervention to prevent the release of trans shooter Audrey Hale’s manifesto, arguing that doing so would compromise the safety of the school, its staff, and its students.

The fight to pull the manifesto of school shooter Audrey Hale from the grip of authorities brought danger to one journalist-businessman who has filed a lawsuit to learn what the killer wrote before the massacre at a Nashville Christian school in March that left three children and three adults dead.

Radio talk show host Michael Patrick Leahy, who has filed a lawsuit to release the manifesto, received an ugly threat July 9, according to Just the News.

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Don’t Blame the Maine Shootings on ‘Woefully Weak’ Gun Laws

Five months before an Army Reserve sergeant killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine, his relatives told police he was increasingly paranoid, erroneously complaining that people were describing him as a pedophile. Two months later, he underwent a psychiatric evaluation after service members who were training with him at West Point reported that he was behaving erratically, and last month he told a friend he was “going to shoot up the drill center” at his base in Saco, Maine.

The fact that the 40-year-old petroleum supply specialist nevertheless managed to commit his horrifying crimes last week, after which he killed himself, underlines the challenge of identifying and thwarting mass murderers. But contrary to what some critics claimed, the problem was not Maine’s “woefully weak” gun regulations.

On its face, Maine’s “yellow flag” law, enacted in 2019, could have made a crucial difference in this case. It authorizes police, after taking someone into “protective custody” based on probable cause to believe he is “mentally ill” and poses a threat to himself or others, to ask a “medical practitioner” for an assessment of whether the detainee “presents a likelihood of foreseeable harm.”

If the medical practitioner thinks so, police “shall” seek a court order temporarily barring the individual from obtaining or possessing firearms. The respondent is entitled to a hearing within 14 days, after which the order can be extended for up to a year based on “clear and convincing evidence” of a threat.

Since the Maine killer was released after his psychiatric evaluation at West Point’s Keller Army Community Hospital, where he stayed for two weeks, he apparently did not meet the state’s criteria for involuntary commitment. But that needn’t have been the end of the matter.

After the shootings, neighbors in Bowdoin said the sergeant’s psychological problems were “pretty well-known.” The Maine Information and Analysis Center had alerted police about his “recently reported mental health issues,” including “hearing voices and threats to shoot up the National Guard Base in Saco, ME.”

The local sheriff’s office had received disturbing reports from “increasingly concerned” relatives, a friend, and the Saco base. But its investigation did not result in an assessment or a court order, possibly because police thought his relatives had “a way to secure his weapons.”

Gun control activists complained that Maine’s “yellow flag” law is harder to use than the “red flag” laws that 21 states have enacted, which have fewer and weaker procedural protections. That criticism seems doubly misguided.

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Cops visited Maine gunman’s home six weeks before massacre

Police across Maine were alerted just last month to ‘veiled threats’ by the U.S. Army reservist who would go on to carry out the worst mass shooting in the state’s history, after concerns he would ‘snap and commit a mass shooting’. It was just one of a string of missed red flags that preceded last week’s massacre at a bowling alley.

The revelations came as more than 1,000 people packed a cavernous church on Sunday night, with hundreds more spilling outside, to hug, sing, weep and seek comfort in the wake the state’s most deadly mass shooting. The crowd gathered for the vigil at the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston, where days earlier a gunman fatally shot 18 people. Two local law enforcement chiefs revealed over the weekend how a statewide awareness alert was sent in mid-September to be on the lookout for Robert Card after the firearms instructor made threats against his base and fellow soldiers. Patrols were stepped-up on the base and a visit was paid to Card’s home only six weeks ago – neither of which turned up any sign of him – after which, they moved on.

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The 10 Mass Shootings Since Lewiston You Didn’t Hear About

Most news articles about the animal in Lewiston, Maine, who shot 31 people, killing 18, focus specifically on the shooter’s skin color and “AR-15 style” rifle.

The media seem to have missed the ten mass shootings that have taken place in the three and a half days since the Maine massacre.

FACT-O-RAMA! A mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot, not including the shooter, in a fluid situation.

Lewiston stands out because of the unusually high body count. Also, the shooter escaped and was at large for a while before police found his body. Every news source from Maine to New York kept readers glued to their sites with stories of “the shooter MAY come here next” fear porn.

Legendary jackpudding Joy Behar from “The View” doesn’t know the difference between an AR-15 and a bazooka. She is paid millions of dollars a year to lie to wine-box mommies who believe her codswallop.

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No, Mike Pence, We Should Not Make It Easier To Execute Mass Shooters

During last night’s Republican presidential debate, former Vice President Mike Pence had a startling answer to a question about what he would do to reduce gun violence.

“I am sick and tired of these mass shootings happening in the United States of America,” said Pence. “And if I’m president of the United States, I’m going to go to the Congress of the United States, and we’re going to pass a federal expedited death penalty for anyone involved in a mass shooting so that they will meet their fate in months, not years. It is unconscionable that the Parkland shooter…is actually going to spend the rest of his life behind bars in Florida. That’s not justice. We have to mete out justice and send a message to these would-be killers that you are not going to live out your days behind bars. You’re going to meet justice.”

This plan is not just unlikely to reduce mass shootings; it would leave lots of accused criminals without important procedural protections. While “mass shooting” doesn’t have a set legal definition, one common definition puts it as any shooting with at least four victims, including people who were injured rather than killed. By that metric, over 3,500 mass shootings occurred from 2015 to 2022. Roughly 95 percent of these shootings resulted in fewer than four deaths, according to Everytown for Gun Safety’s data. That includes a lot of crimes that do not look like Parkland—crimes in which there could be serious doubts about whether the accused is in fact guilty.

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