In-Bred Gun Humpers Greet Obama In Oregon

Such nice, bright people you got there.  They must be Republicans!

If brains were gunpowder, they wouldn't have enough to blow their collective noses.  File under: Why we can't have nice things in this country.

UPDATE:  Steve M. has background on the upstanding citizen cretin who organized the anti-Obama demonstrations.

Cartoons of the Day

(click to enlarge)

Always ignoring the, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state" preface to the Second Amendment, the gun lobby and their coin-operated facilitators in the U.S. Congress may not respond with gun safety legislation until there's an attack on them collectively-- and probably not even then.

(cartoons: top, Signe Wilkinson, bottom Mike Luckovich, via Gocomics.com)

The Sheriff and The Shooter

Reports are emerging that the shooter at Umpqua Community College yesterday, Chris Harper Mercer, was a loner with white supremacist leanings.  He also reportedly asked the religion of the victims before he executed them, causing the mass shooting to be investigated as a hate crime.  Mercer, who accumulated 13 guns, of which 6 were brought to the campus, was obsessed with guns according to reports.

In today's press conference, Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin said he wouldn't name the shooter because he said that it would lend undeserved fame to him.  But it appears the shooter had more in common with the sheriff than the sheriff wants to acknowledge.  Hanlin posted a video on his Facebook page in 2013 that claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was staged to usher in more stringent gun controls. Also, in a letter to Vice President Biden shortly after he posted the despicable video, Hanlin said,

"Gun control is NOT the answer to preventing heinous crimes like school shootings. Any actions against, or in disregard for our U.S. Constitution and 2nd Amendment rights by the current administration would be irresponsible and an indisputable insult to the American people."

Small wonder that the sheriff didn't want the media to name the shooter or, presumably, dig into his background: that would hit too close to home.

BONUS:  Meanwhile, let's praise veteran Chris Mintz, who was shot seven times while trying to stop the shooter, and survived.

Here We Are Again

It never stops, does it?

A mass shooting at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon on Thursday morning has left 13 dead, according to Oregon's attorney general. 

Sheriff John Hanlin at a press conference said he would not confirm the death toll, saying only that there were multiple fatalities and multiple casualties. At 10:38 a.m. local time, police received a 911 call of a shooter in a classroom.

Hanlin said officers exchanged gunfire with the shooter and he was neutralized. The shooter is deceased and has not been identified publicly. Oregon Governor Kate Brown said the shooter is 20 years old.

Spare us the ephemeral outrage.  Spare us the 36 hours of concerned media coverage.  Spare us the smarmy words from the unspeakably evil enablers at the N.R.A., their bag men in Congress, and every right-wing creep.

We have a sick political system in this country, and these are its casualties.

UPDATE:  Here's some of what is known about the shooter:

A posting on the Spiritual Passions dating and social networking site uses a picture that appears to be [Chris Harper] Mercer under the user name IRONCROSS45, which Mercer also used as his email.

He described himself on the site as a 26-year-old, mixed-race “man looking for a woman”. He said he was “not religious, but spiritual”, and was a “teetotaler” living with his parents and a conservative Republican. Socially, he said, he was “shy at first” and “better in small groups”.

We hadn't seen anything in the "mainstream media" about his political leanings and probably never will.