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.
Yiannopoulos told the Observer‘s David Richardson that this is now his standard response to a request for comment.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.
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