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A gunman opened fire at U.S. Congressmen and others who were gathered at a practice this morning for the Congressional Baseball Game. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and at least four others were reportedly injured. The gunman, who has been identified by unnamed sources as James T. Hodgkinson III, was taken to a local hospital where he died from his injuries:
A gunman unleashed a barrage of gunfire Wednesday at a park in Alexandria, Va., as Republican members of Congress held a morning baseball practice, wounding at least five people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (La.).
The suspected gunman is James T. Hodgkinson III, 66, from Illinois, according to multiple law enforcement sources. President Trump announced that the gunman, who was wounded in a shootout with officers, has died at an area hospital.
The wounded also included two Capitol Police officers and a congressional aide, according to one law enforcement official and witness accounts.
Congressman Scalise was shot in the hip and is in stable condition.
Hodgkinson's motive may have already been identified by the media:
A Facebook page belonging to a person with the same name includes pictures of Democratic presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, and rhetoric against President Trump, including a post that reads: "Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co."
Charles Orear, 50, a restaurant manager from St. Louis, said in an interview Wednesday that he became friendly with Hodgkinson during their work together in Iowa on Sanders's campaign. Orear said Hodgkinson was a passionate progressive and showed no signs of violence or malice toward others.
Also at LA Times, Reuters, The Atlantic, The Hill, and CNN.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Wednesday June 14 2017, @07:15PM (11 children)
WTF is the "The Left" and "the Narrative" crap. It's pretty obvious to those of us watching from other countries that your current president is a misogynistic, narcissistic bully of well below average intelligence, and that can be gained just from his own campaign speeches and tweets. His party seems to be standing behind him to a degree, but I think even that's going to go off the rails. People in the US *really* need to get over this polarized us and them view of politics. It seems to be well on the way to destroying your country. It was already well on its way to becoming a defacto police state, and things have been going downhill rapidly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @07:37PM (5 children)
Those are the propaganda terms that allow conservatives to shut off their critical thinking skills and presume it is one giant conspiracy to push whatever "ism" fits the current discussion. It allows them to disregard anything and everything they disagree with as simply a fiction of "the narrative". That trait is why we are in such trouble.
A smaller fraction of liberals suffer from similar problems where they view every conservative / republican as "racist white patriarchy" which makes discussions impossible. That is where the "literally hitler" complaints come from, idiots on the left calling too many things "literally hitler".
Idiots on the left, idiots on the right. However the conservative base has been highly brainwashed with harmful propaganda whose sole aim is to stoke the fires of anger in order to manipulate the people. We are looking at a new civil war if this bullshit doesn't stop. I still have hope, a lot of conservatives are getting a real education on what their group is really made of and what their leaders actually do for them. If nothing else good comes from Trump at the least he has raised their hopes so high and now dashed them upon the rocks of the black sea. The salt will soak into them and perhaps they will finally start rejecting the bigots and bullshit who lie and hurt them. Obama did it for the liberals, we lost faith in the system after his campaign of hope for change. Now conservatives get to see the bullshit behind the curtain of propaganda.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DECbot on Wednesday June 14 2017, @09:42PM (1 child)
The conservatives already saw behind the curtain once. That was the basis of the Tea Party movement before it was hijacked by corporate interests. The conservatives have been pissed about their party leadership since GWB. That's how Trump got the nomination, the republican constituents (1) nominated him in protest of the other bimbos selected as they were unelectable against Hillary and (2) hoped Trump might actually act on his campaign promises of helping small businesses and the middle class. Most conservatives would be happy to see the Progressive agenda curbed as it tends to harm average people and dismiss traditional values as irrelevant; stop the empowerment of banks, large corporations, and government; and provide a bit more protectionism for the American laborer as globalized manufacturing model hurts local US communities. If the media and politicians stayed out of the conversation, two sensible people of either party can come to an agreement on all of these issues with some of the details still a little fuzzy. What the media, politicians, and internet forums are doing is providing gasoline to add to the fire to ensure these conversations cannot happen. Specifically, narratives are written (AM talk radio vs print/TV) that frame the arguments in a manner that makes the opposing faction to appear to be logically insane.
Here's two issues where people on all sides have shut down their critical thinking:
Our 30 year war on drugs has not curbed the problem. If anything, it has made things worse by making more profit in selling drugs, overworking our judicial system, militarizing our police force, and making a whole demographic of our population 2nd class citizens. Legalizing and controlling pot like tobacco will stop this insanity and as an added benefit bring a huge tax incentive for the States. Like the end of Prohibitions, this should be stupid simple.
How many responsible gun owners who've owned their firearms for decades have committed a gun-toting act of terrorism? I'm sure Google can find a few, but most recent acts have been committed by people who have bought or acquired the guns to commit their premeditated acts. It was a convenient tool they had access to, if you remove the accessibility you still won't remove their intent. As events in Europe have shown, a determined terrorist or mentally unstable person can perform an act of terrorism with anything. Guns, knives, trucks, fertilizer, compressed air and hardware, pencils, scissors, literally about anything can be used to take a life. Banning guns won't stop anything--especially if your government is selling them to gun trafficking criminals. Taking away guns from law abiding citizens does not solve the terrorism problem. It only makes law abiding citizens unable to protect themselves while waiting for law enforcement to arrive. Will all people carry guns and solve all trivial arguments with a western style shootout? Hell no. Legalizing guns doesn't turn the world into some Mad Max post apocalypse playground. However, if there is one armed citizen in 100 subjected to a terrorism attack, he or she may possibly save 99 other people before law enforcement arrive. Sure there are risks to everyone, but mostly there is a greater risk to criminals as you cannot assume who of your targets will be armed and to law enforcement and government officers as there are greater immediate consequences when you abuse your power.
Yes, both my arguments have flaws and deserve criticism. That's what Congress should be doing as there is a middle ground that most everyone can agree on. I'm not advocating that every drug should be legalized, but legalizing pot--even if only medicinally--will defang much of the gang violence and theft that is associated with drugs because the finical incentive is diminished, it will lighten the load on the courts and police, and remove the tools used to punish nonviolent minorities for being a minority. Likewise, not every gun should be legalized and there should be public places where gun possession does not make sense like courthouses and airplane cabins, but area wide bans covering entire cities seem to violate an individual's constitutional right to own a firearm in my simple opinion.
Here is the problem: responsibility is lost. Congress is not held responsible. The POTUS is not held responsible. Most regrettably, the media is not held responsible for setting a decisive narrative. Our current situation makes sense if you realize that all news articles are written to increase revenue from the target audience--the urban subscribers and viewers while AM talk radio is formatted for those adversely affected by the policies enacted by the former target audience.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @11:15PM
Drop the medical exclusion for pot, it is disingenuous and would have zero impact on gang activity. Legalize all the drugs, get money from sales tax, use lots of that money for education and rehabilitation programs. It is the only sane way forward, obviously even draconian laws can't stop the massive drug problems. People that want to do hard drugs do them regardless, at least make the drugs safer and make it easier and less stigmatized to get help.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @07:42AM (2 children)
Sometimes I read infowars or breitbart. Yuck.
This is what it has come to. I used to like CNN. A few years back, well maybe 5 or 10, they starting getting serious about shoving a liberal agenda down my throat. Illegal aliens became "undocumented immigrants", despite normally having stolen identity documents. Um, the term "illegal alien" is in our law and in our supreme court rulings, and it is a factual description. Men with implants and overgrown hair are now getting female pronouns. It's now "racist" to oppose importing people who chop sex parts off of girls and idolize a man who married a 6-year-old girl. It's now "racist" to want a monolingual English-speaking country. It's now even "racist" to have an American flag. Instead of rememberance for D-Day, we hear about Ramadan... but of course ignoring the Ramadan Bombathon. Just last week, CNN was even caught staging a fake protest in London. They even moved the people around to different locations. WTF, this is a new low for very fake news. We never seem to hear the end of Russia, but what about Seth Rich? His assassination, right in DC after he leaked DNC email to wikileaks, gets almost zero coverage.
So yeah, what am I supposed to do? You want me to just gobble down the shit that CNN is trying to serve me? No thanks. I have to go elsewhere.
FYI, conservatives are pretty darn happy with Trump so far. I could gripe about net neutrality, but that's about it. For all the rest, he's doing so well that I've been in shock since the first week. He's clearly the best president in at least 28 years, and maybe the best since Washington. I wasn't hoping for much; he could've grabbed pussy 24x7 and still been better than Hillary Clinton so the choice was obvious, but the man is actually kicking ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 15 2017, @06:43PM (1 child)
All of your examples are extremes that you apply to large groups of people. Your entire rant could be mirrored by someone saying "I'm tired of racist conservatives being allowed to vote, they all support human rights violations and are dumb as a bunch of bricks to boot!"
I don't care for CNN, but they are a hell of a lot better than r/The_Donald. Anyone happy with Trump so far is a willfully blind idiot, or a bootlicking authoritarian. Not saying you should have voted differently, we can argue all day about which would have been worse, but we have seen Trump in office for a while now and the verdict is in. Only idiots still support him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @08:05AM
Let's start with this: lots of supposedly anti-authoritarian people don't act that way when they feel they might lose -- the left went for authoritarianism with Lenin, Castro, Kim, Chavez, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and many more. I can't actually think of a proper example on the right. The popular one, Hitler, is only "right" relative to the popular alternative at the time, which was communist. He's far left by modern American standards, and totally mainstream by modern European standards. Maybe some kind of theocracy would count, but the only non-Islamic one is a silly example: Vatican City.
It isn't fair to compare Trump against a theoretical ideal. We just got done with Obama, who was even more into drone strikes and spying than the second Bush. Heck, Obama even spied on Trump, which is kind of a Nixon thing! Our standards are thus pretty low.
Trump has made at least a bit of progress on the wall, shifting the current budget a bit and putting out bid requests for contractors. He has made some progress in tossing out illegals. He has made multiple attempts to block immigrants from Obama's list of dangerous countries and is taking the fight to the supreme court. He has gotten a great judge onto the supreme court, probably better than Scalia and almost as good as Thomas. He found a truly wonderful secretary of defense. He is beating some sense into the EPA and he got us out of that Paris climate disaster, so now there is hope for our economy. People are getting hired again.
So... that all looks good. You should support him. MAGA
(Score: 4, Touché) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 14 2017, @09:11PM
It's pretty obvious to those of us watching from other countries that your current president is a misogynistic, narcissistic bully of well below average intelligence
That's simply not true: he was elected by roughly half the voting population here, and it's immediately apparent to me that his voters aren't any smarter than he is.
I can't say I'm too impressed by the intelligence of a significant portion of the Democratic voters either.
Trump may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I think it's wrong to say he has "well below average intelligence", at least if you're talking about the US population that elected him.
(Score: 2) by KGIII on Wednesday June 14 2017, @11:29PM
You don't get out of it that easy, I'm afraid. If the US goes down, it's going to take a whole lot down with it. No, I don't have the answers. Well, I guess, if I had to make a suggestion, it would be to eat more homemade donuts.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 15 2017, @12:44AM (2 children)
However good or bad you think Trump is, do you think it is justified that the left is essentially calling for his assassination, and/or armed revolt? Is Trump that bad? Does Trump pose that much of a threat against your view of what America should be?
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Thursday June 15 2017, @03:58AM (1 child)
Yes and yes.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 15 2017, @02:28PM
So, you would have been comfortable if some racist white asshole had assassinated Obama? You know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Put in a position where I might have to defend a president's life, I would have defended any president in history with equal enthusiasm. It wouldn't matter in the least what his name was, what his politics were, or how much I liked or disliked him. The President of the United States is the President. End of story. That's because I'm an American. I don't know what some of the rest of you are, but you aren't Americans.