Comments on: Shooting at the Sikh Temple & Rodney King

By: Ric

Ric — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:07:43 +0000

Was it Gore Vidal who said that a war on terror was like a war on dandruff? Maybe it was Hitchens. Anyway, the same thought holds for our other ‘wars’ – on drugs, on domestic violence, illegal immigration, abortion, et al. Americans love to metaphorize every difficulty into a ‘war’.

By: lbwoodgate

lbwoodgate — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 12:12:10 +0000

“The unathorized militias/weekend warriors don’t scare me as much as the lone wolves who decided that whatever the group was doing wasn’t working.”

My contention is that such groups serve as breeding grounds for such lone wolves who feed into the sick minds of such people. People whose hatred may have lingered at the back of their mind had they not got involved with others who stimulate and arouse that inert contempt

By: Spinny Liberal

Spinny Liberal — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:25:23 +0000

You’re totally right. “Winning” a war doesn’t erase the fact that you were in one.

By: Spinny Liberal

Spinny Liberal — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:22:54 +0000

Me too! Now I hear they’re looking for another person of interest. Great.

By: Spinny Liberal

Spinny Liberal — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:21:47 +0000

The lack of mental healthcare for former military is a travesty – especially now when it’s desperately needed. 4, 5 tours is going to seriously mess with your mind. The unathorized militias/weekend warriors don’t scare me as much as the lone wolves who decided that whatever the group was doing wasn’t working. So they take matters into their own hands and end up committing horrific acts – like killing 7 people in a Sikh temple.

By: Lori

Lori — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:54:33 +0000

Or as John Lennon said, “…give peace a chance..” We aren’t going to “win” any war on drugs, terrorism, domestic violence and whatever…

By: aFrankAngle

aFrankAngle — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:14:33 +0000

Great final question Spinny. Meanwhile, I am interested in hearing more about this loon.

By: lbwoodgate

lbwoodgate — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:12:56 +0000

One thing I found disturbing in the NBC news report is that the shooter “had no obvious connection to domestic terror or white supremacist groups and apparently was not on any list of suspected terrorists. The suspect was in his early 40s, and while he had an arrest record, it was for minor offenses.”

Now there may be more revelations that will alter this description or fill in a lot of grey areas as they stand right now but this basic bit of information is telling, to me at least, that this country has a serious issue with those who suffer mental health problems and the easy access to guns.

I’m not sure what the answer to this is or even if there is a singular answer. There’s no evidence yet that this shooter had been building up an arsenal and for the time being seems to have only had this one weapon. So you can’t claim that he abused his 2nd amendment right to bear a weapon to protect himself.

Clearly though, being white, his attack on dark skinned people who shared a “foreign” religious belief system set something off in him that can be associated with a mentality in this country, as in some parts of Western Europe, that openly demeans non-chrisitians.

“Officials told NBC News the suspect, who served in the U.S. Army, had many tattoos. The suspect had some kind of radical or white supremacist views but, as far as officials said they had heard, he was not in any kind of radical organization.”

We have serious mental health issues with many former military who have engaged in combat. This experience along with an atmosphere of religious intolerance and overblown fears of “jihadists” makes such people susceptible to violence. Somehow it seems this information needs to be part of a background check and one that may, under certain conditions, require a mental health exam at the expense of the Veterans’ administration.

This would still exclude a lot of hateful people who never served in the military but are weekend warriors in unauthorized militias around the country who have an exaggerated fear of “people who hate the constitution and want to steal our freedoms”.