Gun killings stretch thin media weekend staffs

                                                     Image of Noah Harpham from Heavy.com

At least two weekend shootings stretched thin the staffs of media outlets.
A witness told the Colorado Springs Gazette the first incident, which claimed three lives and resulted in police killing the shooter, looked like “it was a Halloween prank."
Witness Teresa Willingham said she and her 7-year-old son saw the shooter murder a bicyclist.
The Gazette said witnesses said the bicyclist begged unsuccessfully for his life.

Colorado Springs Gazette

The shooter, later identified as 33-year-old Noah Harpham, was seen walking into and out of a house with a rifle, pistol and a gasoline can before the shooting spree began. He had started a fire.
He then shot two women, reportedly on their front porch the killings apparently were random.
A news release Monday from Colorado Springs police said: "The El Paso County Coroner’s Office completed the autopsies on the three victims from Saturday’s incident.  The first victim is identified as 35 year old Andrew Alan Myers of Colorado Springs.  Mr. Myers’ cause of death was from a gunshot wound and his manner of death has been ruled a homicide. Mr. Myers is the male who was on a bicycle in the 200 block of North Prospect Street. 

The two victims who were located in the 500 block of East Platte Avenue have been identified as 42 year old Jennifer Michelle Vasquez and 34 year old Christina Rose Baccus-Gallela.  Both of these victims are from Colorado Springs.  The cause of death for both of these victims is from a gunshot wound.  The manner of death has been ruled a homicide."
It was later revealed that Myers had survived three Army tours of Iraq.

 The Gazette, which had earlier identified Harmpham, also reported he had written rambling blogs about religion and his family, as well as fighting addiction.
https://www.facebook.com/updatemind/?fref=nf
Westword of Denver said there may have been a connection to a Satanic cult.
Meantime, CBS and others reported police had identified a man who killed one person and wounded a second at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina. The man, Jarrett Jerome Moore, was arrested Monday on separate charges.
Despite the fact that more than 12 million Americans have permits to carry concealed weapons once again no one intervened in the latest shootings.



Colorado Springs is a center for evangelical Christians and home to thousands of Army and Air Force servicemen and servicewoman has one of the highest rates of gun ownership. But despite the fact that the shooter was attacking people at a busy intersection near downtown around 9 a.m. he was only stopped when police arrived and killed him in a shootout.
It is often argued by the NRA and gun rights’ proponents that shooters are drawn to so-called gun free zones, such as schools.
Nine people were shot dead at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., earlier this month
without any intervention although there were a number of students present carrying concealed weapons. One student said he heard the shooting but feared that if he tried to intervene police might mistake him for the gunman, who killed himself when police arrived.
A headline on the Daily Tar Heel of March 18 said a new law allowing the carrying of permitted concealed weapons on North Carolina campuses would curb assaults.

Daily Tar Heel.

Although politicians like Donald Trump have argued that arming the population would stop massacres the facts show otherwise.
There are several reasons no vigilante has stopped a massacre, and in one case such an individual was shot dead because he did not realize he was contending with two attackers.
There have been reports that armed civilians have shot killers as they were fleeing.
Some off-duty police officers or other trained individuals have successfully intervened.
In most massacres the attackers plan their assaults so that by the time police have arrived they will have killed many people. They also sometimes have carried automatic weapons, and in general have more powerful weapons than someone with a concealed carry permit could possess.

Colorado Springs Gazette

Heavy.com Five Facts You Need to Know About the Alleged Killer

There are no gun-free zones

Yes, there were guns at the Roseburg, Ore., college when the killer struck.

One student vowed the killer wouldn’t get through his classroom door. But he didn’t go out to confront him.

In many states, perhaps most, including Colorado, where memories of Columbine linger, courts have ruled that people with a permit to carry a concealed weapon may not be barred from the campus of the University of Colorado or Colorado State University.

Another reason there are no gun-free zones is that killers disregard them, whether they are schools, movie theaters or churches.

The Crime Prevention Research Center estimates that nearly 12 million Americans carry concealed weapons. This does not include retired law officers.

It is estimated that there is at least one gun for every one of America’s 320 million people. It is hard to be sure because the NRA has used every trick in the book to keep information about how many guns there are secret.

The No. 1 lie of the NRA is that a good man with a good man will stop a bad man with a gun. Why hasn’t it happened in a single massacre, except when armed police or security guards intervened?
Yet the NRA and others continue to claim that simply having more armed vigilantes will lower the death tolls.

This year Illinois signed a bill making it the 50^th state to permit the carrying of concealed weapons.

California is considering trying to keep guns away from schools but previous attempts have been knocked down by courts.

Bill sponsor Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, said, “Most people I hear from are astonished that someone could legally carry a concealed firearm onto school grounds.”
UPDATE: Within two weeks there were at least two more shootings at colleges, both in states that permit conceal carry weapons at colleges. 

Nation commits suicide

WTF.

The United States appears to be adopting the Greek and Roman attitude of tolerance towards suicide.

In Rome there was even “patriotic suicide,” to allow people to account for their dishonor.

But unlike today, most suicides involved individuals killing themselves, not taking dozens with them.

According to Wikipedia, suicide is the tenth leading cause of death in the world’s richest nation.

But are incidents like the shootings at Roseburg, Ore., or Columbine, Colo., result of dishonor or mental illness.

Mental illness could be considered dishonorable.

For those ages 15-24, suicide is the third leading cause of death.

School massacres didn’t begin with Columbine, but it had never attracted such attention.

Exhaustive reviews of each incident have led to new protocols for police to try to reduce the death toll. Millions, perhaps billions have been spent. Not much was spent on mental illness care.

At the same time governments have made it easier to get guns, even semi-automatic. Attempts to bar the sale of clips carrying dozens of bullets, have failed.

The idea is that if every American was pistol-packing then mentally ill young people would be stopped in their tracks.

Unfortunately, in most cases these killers planned for months or longer, and outgunned the officers sent to confront them.

Officers have in some cases lowered death tolls. But in most cases the killers were not even interested in death by cop.

They intended to die, if they had any goal. They are our kamikazes.

This has proved true in Roseburg, Ore., where an autopsy revealed the killer took his own life. Police and deputies may have pumped bullets into his dying body, as well they should.

Expect to see President Obama again, lamenting these deaths.
Gun lovers claim that if Umpqua Community College had not been a gun-free zone the killer could have been stopped. But the state had declared that persons with concealed-carry permits could bring their weapons on the campus.

Pope embarrassed by meeting with Kim Davis

The Vatican released a statement Friday attempting to portray Pope Francis 1’s meeting with homophobe Kim Davis as a misunderstanding.

“The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said in Friday morning, according to the New York Times.

New York Times
Liberty Counsel, which represents Davis, says the Vatican is lying, according to the Advocate, a gay advocacy publication.

Davis had been briefly jailed for refusing to marry same-sex couples and her supporters claimed the meeting with the pope showed that he supported her.

a statement released on Friday morning.

Supporters of Davis, who was jailed for a week for refusing to obey a court order requiring her to issue marriage licenses to gays, had claimed the papal meeting was proof the Vatican supported her.

“I was very disappointed to see the pope having been used that way, and that his willingness to be friendly to someone was turned against him,” Father James Martin said.  Martin, editor at large of the Jesuit magazine America.

The Vatican stopped short of calling the author of an article comparing Davis to a conscientious objector a liar.

“Inside the Vatican” reported that the pope had said:

“Conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right. Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right, a human right. Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying ‘this right that has merit, this one does not.’ It (conscientious objection) is a human right.”

“Would that include government officials as well?” “It is a human right and if a government official is a human person, he has that right. It is a human right.” 

Unlike conscientious objectors, such as draftees who refuse to fight, Davis had run for election to her post knowing full well that it was quite likely that same-sex marriages would soon be legal.

Not only did Davis decline to offer to do some other community service instead of marrying gays, she even ordered her staff not to issue licenses with her name on them.

That would be the equivalent of a conscientious objector, assigned to carry a stretcher for the wounded in combat, telling other solders not to fire their weapons.
It was no surprise that reports subsequently appeared on news-for-hire CNN that the pope had met a gay couple before seeing Davis.

The true Pope appears

After he had left the U.S. it was revealed Francis 1 had met with the government clerk who would not marry gay people.

The pope tried to compare Kim Davis to a conscientious objector. He truly is a face in the crowd, not above it.

His advisers apparently had not explained to him what a conscientious objector was and how he/she acted.

Or the pope simply has been misleading the world since the days he cooperated with the murderous Argentinian military.

A conscientious objector was a draft-eligible soldier who was given a job that would not require firing a gun or otherwise harming the enemy.

Davis could have done that but refused. Not only wouldn’t she give up her job, she specifically said that any licenses issued without her name would not be legal.

The Roman Catholic church hasn’t changed, and the pope recently praised the same bishops who tolerated the sexual abuse of altar boys and others.

It is no surprise the pope met with Davis secretly, and word of the meeting was only revealed after he left the country. He also prayed with her.

This is likely to be a huge boost for gay haters.
http://insidethevatican.com/news/letter-38-2015-kim-and-francis

“Inside the Vatican” reported:

“Conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right. It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right. Conscientious objection must enter into every juridical structure because it is a right, a human right. Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying ‘this right that has merit, this one does not.’ It (conscientious objection) is a human right.”

“Would that include government officials as well?” “It is a human right and if a government official is a human person, he has that right. It is a human right.” 

No doubt the pope was ill-advised by Vatican staff who know little about American law. No one forced Davis to marry anyone. She could have quit. This is the exact opposite of being a conscientious objector. In such cases those who did not want to fight were not allowed to leave, but forced to do alternative work.
The irony is that conscientious objectors were detested, considered cowards,  in the Bible Belt where gays are so hated and Davis is so admired.
And in the case of Davis she sought the position she now finds anathema. Conscientious objectors were drafted. They had no choice. She created her own problem.
She knew that gay marriage was coming and it would create a conflict. She should have declared to the public that she would not be able to do her job if same-sex marriage became legal.