Another day, another mass shooting in the US of A *

Written By: - Date published: 8:27 am, June 29th, 2018 - 41 comments
Categories: Donald Trump, journalism, Media, newspapers - Tags:

Another mass shooting has occurred in the United States although this one is different.  It occurred in the office of the Capital Gazette, a newspaper based in Annapolis.

Current reports are that there are four dead and dozens injured.

From Radio New Zealand:

Several people were fatally shot at a newspaper office in Maryland and a suspect was apprehended, the local sheriff told Fox News.

Anne Arundel Sheriff Ron Bateman told Fox News the incident took place outside the Capital Gazette office.

Phil Davis, a Gazette reporter, said that multiple people had been shot, according to a report from the Baltimore Sun, which owns the paper.

Agents from the Baltimore office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were responding to the incident, the bureau tweeted.

Local police in Anne Arundel County have not responded to the reports of deaths or injuries but cited an active shooter.

I wonder if the shooter will be characterised as having mental health issues?  Because already there is speculation about the motivation.

Fortune magazine posted this three days ago:

“I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight,” Yiannopoulos frequently writes via email or text message to reporters who contact him.

Yiannopoulos made the apparent mocking threat today in response to queries to the Observer asking about a restaurant he frequents and to the Daily Beast about an effort he’s apparently part of to take over the United Kingdom’s far-right white ethno-state party UKIP. The party has foundered after the Brexit referendum passed, one of its goals, and never won a seat in Parliament.

The threat is clearly less than earnest, an escalation of provocative and potentially harmful statements he has made previously, but along similar lines in which he stands teetering on the brink of free speech limits in the U.S. (Yiannopoulos reportedly currently lives in America.)

POTUS has not been helping.

Dark times …

Update:  the shooter has been named by the Washington Post as Jarrod Ramos.  He had a longstanding argument with the Gazette over an article it ran about him based on criminal proceedings that he faced.  The detail is set out in this court decision.  He is in custody.  He apparently had mangled his fingerprints and facial recognition had to be used to identify him.

For those thinking that Yiannopoulos’s or for that matter Trump’s rhetoric is not related can I politely disagree.  The contempt and violence contained in their public statements makes this sort of incident more likely to happen.

41 comments on “Another day, another mass shooting in the US of A * ”

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  1. esoteric pineapples 1
    29 June 2018 at 9:04 am

    I am constantly surprised by how many people I come across here in my part of New Zealand who still think the media are hard on Trump

    • Gosman 1.1
      29 June 2018 at 9:09 am

      Why don’t you feel they are hard on Trump?

      • Grey Area 1.1.1
        29 June 2018 at 9:23 am

        RedLogix last night speaking about TS: Too often it’s the same old people playing tiresome old games that wouldn’t be tolerated ten minutes in real world beyond social media.

        Snap!

    • Sanctuary 1.2
      29 June 2018 at 9:38 am

      I’m astonished as well by the number of people convinced about the whole conspiracy theory that climate change isn’t real it is just part of the UN agenda 21 plot to take over the world.

      Seriously. The sort of paranoids Fox thrives on feeding in the USA exist here today.

      • Gosman 1.2.1
        29 June 2018 at 9:59 am

        Amongst people from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

        • McFlock 1.2.1.1
          29 June 2018 at 1:20 pm

          Are you really pulling the ‘we’re all equally bad’ line on a post about a mass shooting? What sort of jerk are you?

    • Siobhan 1.3
      29 June 2018 at 10:59 am

      I am particularly heartened by Ocasio-Cortez who said “she wants to focus her campaign on rebutting the president’s policies rather than picking personal fights with him.

      “What we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision that people can believe in, and getting into Twitter fights with the president is not exactly, I think, where we’re going to find progress as a nation”

      That is really where the future lies.
      If the Left, and the Centrists and their media outlets, put as much time into planning a viable and positive future, and presenting and selling it to the people, as it does to hang wringing, teeth gnashing and blaming everything on Trump and the Russians, we might actually see, not only an undoing of Trumps carnage, but an actual step forward and re setting of the social contract.

      In the United States.

      And even here in NZ>

      (and by a ‘positive plan’ I mean something a little more believable and immediate than “Hope” or “Lets do this”. Because it seems the poor and disenfranchised aren’t really buying that quick sell anymore-if they ever did)

  2. Sabine 2
    29 June 2018 at 9:13 am

    but but, surely any time now the resident hate monger is gonna bring peace and freeance to the oppressed white evangelic male with economic anxiety and their spouses, and all shall gather round a big fire and sing ‘America the beautiful”. Right?

    Good grief.

    Good fucking grief.

  3. Gosman 3
    29 June 2018 at 9:15 am

    Aren’t people here being as guilty as people who jump to conclusions about the Religious motivations of terror attacks?

    • marty mars 3.1
      29 June 2018 at 9:21 am

      As usual cowboyhatboy you are just bullshit stirring. You act like a trump. Sad.

      • Gosman 3.1.1
        29 June 2018 at 9:58 am

        Are you happy then that when any potential terrorist attack occurs people jump to conclusions over who did it and their motivations?

        • marty mars 3.1.1.1
          29 June 2018 at 10:08 am

          Human nature – look it up, humans do that because it helps sort it – why do you not like human nature?

        • dukeofurl 3.1.1.2
          29 June 2018 at 10:16 am

          So he was sick of his newspaper being delivered wet and no one doing anything about it ?

          Theres a good chance it was a political attack, whereas a school or factory isnt

  4. marty mars 4
    29 June 2018 at 9:25 am

    So shocking this escalation – no matter the reason for this the faketrumpnews will spin it and disturbed individuals will smile evilier dreams as they sleep.

    Things are getting worse – I’ve been watching a series on building bunkers – business is booming! And the cl8ents wanting bunkers? I wouldn’t want to survive with them that’s for sure

  5. Grey Area 5
    29 June 2018 at 9:25 am

    Another thread derailed. Mission accomplished.

  6. AB 6
    29 June 2018 at 9:44 am

    We need more information. The USA was awash with gun violence long before Trump.
    And although it feels true that Trump supporters are much more likely to be both armed and deranged than Trump opponents, we shouldn’t go hunting for validation of that without some evidence. The coincidence is interesting, but no more than that, yet.

    • dukeofurl 6.1
      29 June 2018 at 10:11 am

      Yes. 4 dead would normally hardly be mentioned beyond the regional area- unless its a school or have some other ‘news hook’
      This clearly has that newshook.

      This archive has pages and pages for this year
      http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

    • Bill 6.2
      29 June 2018 at 10:45 am

      Remember the mass shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando and how it was put down to being a terrorist attack specifically targeting the LGBTQ community?

      How many people still believe that; take it as a read?

      On the suspicion that the answer to that is “many”, I’m providing this Glen Greenwald piece, and a link to a list of other decent pieces on the Pulse massacre and the aftermath published at The Intercept… and then just quietly walking.

  7. Sabine 7
    29 June 2018 at 9:49 am

    well thoughts and prayers were offered so its all good.

  8. mauī 8
    29 June 2018 at 10:10 am

    Very likely how the world ends, Captain Kirk (Liberals) vs Gorn (Trump). Notice how Kirk has to ran away at the end.. – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SK0cUNMnMM

  9. Sabine 9
    29 June 2018 at 10:39 am

    white male shooter apprehended and an explosive devise was found.

    How long until the US descend into Rwanda?

    • Gosman 9.1
      29 June 2018 at 10:59 am

      Really???

      Are you seriously trying to suggest that the US is on the verge of descending in to Rwanda genocide level of violence?

      I think you need to get out more.

  10. soddenleaf 10
    29 June 2018 at 12:40 pm

    I habitually turnover when a Trump story appears, coz it’s all bullcrap. Not that the media is hard on him, but hey I suppose it does look that way, ain’t anything good that can be said about him, like he goes out of his way to play up and get the press he wants. It’s just look at me. Ask the next question of people, do they dare that Trump isn’t getting favorable Press?

  11. Gosman 11
    29 June 2018 at 1:27 pm

    Here is the suspect’s Twitter feed.

    It seems he had a long running feud with the paper and this is unlikely a politically motivated attack

    https://twitter.com/erichartleyfrnd?lang=en

    • joe90 11.1
      29 June 2018 at 1:32 pm

      Thread.

      I cannot confirm but Jarrod Ramos lost a lawsuit against Capital Gazette and could be the suspect. 👇🏻 https://t.co/W9CeIAsmk0— Tracie McElroy (@traciemac_Bmore) June 29, 2018

      https://twitter.com/traciemac_Bmore/status/1012490702360645632

    • Siobhan 11.2
      29 June 2018 at 4:33 pm

      The mention of ‘Trump’ will one day be the subject of Godwin’s law.
      If its not already.

    • Carolyn_Nth 11.3
      29 June 2018 at 5:18 pm

      It depends what you identify as “politcally motivated”.

      The harassment charges against Ramos were for harassing a woman who rejected him.

      So it does come under gender politics, and a guy threatening violence to a woman who rejected him.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/29/us/jarrod-ramos-annapolis-shooting.html

      His feud with The Capital, the chain’s daily newspaper, apparently began with a column in 2011 that detailed his alleged harassment of a high school classmate.

      After Mr. Ramos reconnected with the classmate in 2009, his emails to her soon turned venomous.

      “He seems to think there’s some sort of relationship here that does not exist,” the woman told a judge, according to court documents in a harassment case she brought against Mr. Ramos. “I tried to back away from it, and he just started getting angry and vulgar to the point I had to tell him to stop.”

      After she told him not to contact her again, Mr. Ramos wrote in a 2010 email that the woman should “go hang yourself.”

      Weeks later, the woman was put on probation at the bank where she worked. A supervisor told her it was because Mr. Ramos had sent an email — and had also called the bank — telling managers that the bank should fire her.

      A judge gave Mr. Ramos a 90-day sentence, but suspended the jail time. Instead, Mr. Ramos was granted probation before judgment. He was ordered not to contact the woman and to continue getting therapy.

      Not long afterward, The Capital published the column that apparently fueled his anger.

  12. Robert Glennie 12
    29 June 2018 at 5:02 pm

    When Trump first became President I concluded there are seven ways his Presidency could end (and then ranked them on probability – 1 being most likely)):

    1) Democrats clean out all three houses in 2020 (1)

    2) Some international or domestic incident sufficiently severe in terms of consequences that to avoid either impeachment or one of the other possibilities mentioned below, he has to resign (2)

    3) Impeachment – Trump does something unconstitutional that is bad enough that Republicans support it just to save face (6)

    4) Civil War – some say the U.S. is getting close to this now; not sure about that, but certainly the division makes the alternative label “Divided States of America” look quite appropriate now (3)

    5) World War 3 – U.S. provokes Russia or China or North Korea (Kim Jong Un has given up nothing and this has all been for show) (7)

    6) Assassination – there are enough rogue or severely anti-Trump/anti-Government agents in the U.S. that someone might be nutty enough to try (4)

    7) Somehow Trump completes two full terms (5)

  13. Timeforacupoftea 13
    29 June 2018 at 6:55 pm

    Send the shooter over to NZ and Andrew MP would have him out on our streets in a blow of a whistle, bowling over our excess news media cranks for sure.

    Gosh I have forgotten Andrew’s last name already.

    • dv 13.1
      29 June 2018 at 7:01 pm

      NOT appropriate.

    • One Anonymous Bloke 13.2
      29 June 2018 at 7:06 pm

      Send you over to the USA, where you can join ICE, and wear a smart uniform with shiny buttons, and open and close the gates when the trucks roll by.

      That way you can evade your personal responsibility for supporting penal policies that increase the crime rate.

    • millsy 13.3
      1 July 2018 at 11:39 am

      As opposed to Garth McVicar who would have people hanged or flogged for the slightest indescrestion.

    • Ken 13.4
      2 July 2018 at 9:13 pm

      Hide your guns, Jethro.