Shooting at elephants

wv wrote:

I’m surprised this doesn’t happen a lot more often. I’ve been surprised about that for a long time now. Not just Reps. I’m surprised more angry-unhinged citizens aren’t shooting Dems as well.

I suspect this kind of thing is going to be more common in the future.
Just a hunch.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/alexandria-shooting-multiple-victims-reported/

My thought, too. This is going to become more common.

The Link Between Domestic Violence and Mass Shootings

By Jane Mayer

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-link-between-domestic-violence-and-mass-shootings-james-hodgkinson-steve-scalise?mbid=nl__daily&CNDID=24038857&mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(180)&CNDID=24038857&spMailingID=11269714&spUserID=MTMzMTgyMzE4NzQzS0&spJobID=1181325948&spReportId=MTE4MTMyNTk0OAS2

At a press conference, the F.B.I. agent Tim Slater discusses James Hodgkinson, who shot Congressman Steve Scalise and four others. Like many mass shooters, Hodgkinson had a history of domestic abuse.Photograph by Alex Brandon
Within hours of the shooting of the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise, and four others, one couldn’t help but feel tired watching the predictable brief moment of political unity. The country has been through enough horrors to know that political adversaries will soon line up and take their battle stations on Twitter and talk shows as no solutions are found and no lessons are learned. They will blame each other’s political ideologies and rhetoric for the bloodshed. It won’t be long until the conspiracy theorists come along and throw doubt on whether the facts are the facts, or something more sinister.
No one wants to talk policy reform so soon, but there’s one that is glaringly necessary, and really ought not to be divisive. Wednesday’s shooter, James Hodgkinson, reportedly had a history of domestic violence. Yet he was able to legally obtain an assault rifle. These two facts are incompatible with public safety.
The Daily Beast reported, on Wednesday:
In 2006, he was arrested for domestic battery and discharge of a firearm after he stormed into a neighbor’s home where his teenage foster daughter was visiting with a friend. In a skirmish, he punched his foster daughter’s then 19-year-old friend Aimee Moreland “in the face with a closed fist,” according to a police report reviewed by The Daily Beast. When Moreland’s boyfriend walked outside of the residence where Moreland and Hodgkinson’s foster daughter were, he allegedly aimed a shotgun at the boyfriend and later fired one round. The Hodgkinsons later lost custody of that foster daughter.
“[Hodgkinson] fired a couple of warning shots and then hit my boyfriend with the butt of the gun,” Moreland told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. Hodgkinson was also “observed throwing” his daughter “around the bedroom,” the police report said. After the girl broke free, Hodgkinson followed and “started hitting her arms, pulling her hair, and started grabbing her off the bed.”
In this, Hodgkinson fits a pattern. As Rebecca Traister has written, for New York magazine, “what perpetrators of terrorist attacks turn out to often have in common more than any particular religion or ideology, are histories of domestic violence.” Traister cites Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who drove a truck through a Bastille Day crowd in Nice, last summer, and Omar Mateen, the Pulse night-club shooter. She also cites Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in 2015. According to Traister, “two of his three ex-wives reportedly accused him of domestic abuse, and he had been arrested in 1992 for rape and sexual violence.”
Last year, Amanda Taub also wrote powerfully on this issue in the Times. “Cedric Ford shot 17 people at his Kansas workplace, killing three, only 90 minutes after being served with a restraining order sought by his ex-girlfriend, who said he had abused her,” Taub wrote. “And Man Haron Monis, who holed up with hostages for 17 hours in a cafe in Sydney, Australia, in 2014, an episode that left two people dead and four wounded, had terrorized his ex-wife. He had threatened to harm her if she left him, and was eventually charged with organizing her murder.”
Obviously, not everyone accused of domestic violence becomes a mass shooter. But it’s clear that an alarming number of those who have been accused of domestic abuse pose serious and often a lethal threats, not just to their intimate partners but to society at large.
The statistical correlation between domestic violence and mass shootings has also been documented. As the Times reported:
When Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, analyzed F.B.I. data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2015, it found that 57 percent of the cases included a spouse, former spouse or other family member among the victims — and that 16 percent of the attackers had previously been charged with domestic violence.
In the meantime, many domestic-violence suspects, like Hodgkinson, are arrested only to have the charges dropped later, which leaves them armed and dangerous. The National Rifle Association and its allies have successfully argued that a mere arrest on domestic-violence charges—such as Hodgkinson had—is not sufficient reason to deprive a citizen of his right to bear arms.
After the Sandy Hook massacre, in 2012, an overwhelming majority of Americans favored tighter gun control, including laws that would require background checks for gun purchasers to be extended to sales at private gun shows. Yet a bill proposing that very measure failed to make it through Congress. And as David Cole, then a law professor and now the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote last year, in the New York Review of Books, the clout of the gun lobby is even greater at the local and state level, where, after Sandy Hook, eleven states tightened their gun-control laws but some two dozen made them even looser. The N.R.A., with its yearly budget of three hundred million dollars, has mastered the dark art of substituting money for popular will. By spending strategically and threatening to “primary” any office-holder who deviates from its agenda, it has managed to impose an extremist agenda that seems almost unchallengeable. America now has something like eighty-eight guns per hundred citizens—the highest concentration in the world—yet, inevitably, there will be calls for more tomorrow.