Crisis Actors and gun violence

Not sure why this one needs to be debunked, but it does.

Crisis Actors are people who are somehow hired to "fake" shooting incidents for those who are even more removed from reality than the people who push this theory.

Like any good lie, there is a bit of truth here. The first thing to understand is that the “crisis actor” conspiracy theory has a slender tie to reality. Crisis actors do exist, though there is nothing underhanded about them: they are simply performers hired to play disaster victims in emergency drills or wounded combatants in military exercises. They provide a degree of realism for people practising for real emergencies further down the line.

This term has been hijacked where the gun plague is concerned to somehow say these incidents "didn't happen".  Despite there being obvious victims and proof of the shootings having happened. That is what makes this bullshit so hard to fight.

I used to agree with Michael Moore that the crime scene photos would stop this shit from being mentioned. I even had an online argument with Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung's daughter about this. I used to believe that facts could be used to counter bullshit, yet this crisis actor shit still keeps coming up.

Now, I have to agree with the daughter: no amount of sanity can fight this insanity.

We can provide documentation, but that is all "faked" by an all powerful "deep state".  Hell, we could exhume the graves and show these people the bodies, yet the deniers would say that was somehow "faked".

There are a lot of problems with denying mass shootings and gun violence: one of which is that it re-traumatises the victims and their families.

The other one is the biggie: if the whole point of these false flags is to bring about gun confiscation, then why the fuck hasn't it happened?

The US has had mass shootings at least since Howard Unruh went crazy and killed 13 people in Camden, NJ. Probably even before that happened. There was the 1966 University of Texas mass shooting where you can still see the bullet holes. While there was a trend to "strengthen" gun laws in the 60s-70s, that has been weakened from the 80s on.

Instead of confiscating guns, the US is awash with guns in the hands of who knows since there is no registry. Short of the authorities going after the rabid people who post on the Internet (which happens to be a USDoD creation). I would even bet that a "deep state" capable of creating realistic "mass shootings" can probably even read your minds.

Problem number two with this theory is why don't people like Alex Jones meet fatal "accidents" perpetrated by a "deep state" which has these capabilities?  Or are these people just useful idiots?

Anyway, the signs are pretty obvious that the "crisis actor" thing is bullshit as is the likelihood of any "mass confiscation" of guns. To be honest, a mass confiscation would cost far more than an Aussie style gun buyback ever would.

Toss in an all powerful, deep state capable of doing such a convincing job in producing these "mass shootings" could probably also take your guns without anyone knowing about it.  For all we know, the mass confiscations are occurring right now and the "truth" is being silenced. So beware of the shadows in your bedroom at night: they are probably agents of the New World Order.

See also:

• Crisis actors, deep state, false flag: the rise of conspiracy theory code words 
• Florida Republican's aide fired for false suggestion shooting survivors are actors
• Memorial Issue of Eagle Eye, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school news magazine

Does the United States Have a Lower Death Rate From Mass Shootings Than European Countries?

Wow, what a stupid question.

But ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer: especially from right wing media and Fox News.

Seriously?

The source of all this is John Lott.

Again, Seriously? I can't believe that the right still trots this dude out after what they did to Michael Bellesiles. I guess John Lott is OK since his bullshit is what backs up the "pro-gun" arguments, but you might want to read this before citing  Lott.

Can you say Mary Rosh?

As per usual, Mary's, Er, John Lott's statistical method leaves a lot to be desired, but the pro-gun side has never been one to let facts get in the way of their arguments. And like pretty much ever one of the pro-gun arguments, this doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

After all, the last mass shooting in Norway was in 2011.  I was SOL when I tried to find a mass shooting in Belgium, and Belgium is pretty gun crazy. I did: there was one in 2011 where three (3) people were killed in Liege. That shooting doesn't count as a mass shooting under some of the US definitions for them (some require 4 dead to be a mass shooting). So, talk about being desperate to make the US situation look somewhat acceptable.

The last one in the US? Oh, About a minute or so ago.

Really now. Please don't try to say other countries have the US problem of mass shootings: that one just does not stand up.

Seriously!  The US has a problem with mass shootings, but like any addicted person refuses to face the facts until it's one of their family members who is a victim of gun violence.

And sometimes not even then.

So, the gun nuts work on the popular ignorance of other cultures, but the US is the only country not at war that has regular mass shootings (any one where there are 3 more more victims).

So, try not to be silly and get some REAL facts into this debate. Remember the pro-gun side banned gun research because it tended to be "anti-gun".

That's the only reason somebody like John Lott is called to be an "expert" since most people who know his reputation don't take him too seriously.

See also:

• Deadliest Mass Shootings in Modern US History Fast Facts
• Mass shootings: How U.S.gun culture compareswith the rest of the world
• What we know about mass shootings
• This is how common school shootings are in America
• Mass shootings in Europe
• Six things to know about mass shootings

Just thinking

One of the 1 Aug 1966 University of Texas victims was an unborn child. 

How many more Gun Violence victims have been unborn children? By the pro-life way of thinking, these "unborn children" are innocent no matter what their parents are like.

Usual question: where are the pro-lifers on this one?

Sorry, but you can't say you are pro-life and go with the gun lobby's pushing the envelope on self-defence to make it easier to kill people. Traditional common law makes self-defence (1) a mitigation, not a complete defence, (2) places the decision on whether force was necessary to the finder of fact (usually the jury), and (3) makes excessive force, even deadly force, a hard hurdle to get past.

But even more importantly if you are going to be against "killing babies", then you should be firmly against guns.

Sorry, but you can't be pro-life and pro-gun without being in serious denial.

Footnote: the University of Texas shooting pretty much put the pro-gun arguments to rest: especially armed civilians stopping the incident. According to people who were there, there were armed civilians, but they made the situation much worse.

What fools these gun nuts be...(or Totally Texas).

The Texas Legislature has decided one of the best ways to commemorate a mass shooting now that we know that we can only tell if someone is a mass shooter is when they actually open fire.

The Texas Legislature passed a Campus Carry law that will allow concealed handguns in classrooms, offices, and dormitories. This law will go into effect on 1 August 2016.

This date happens to be the Fiftieth anniversary of the University of Texas Mass Shooting where Charles Whitman killed 14 people and wounded 32 others in a mass shooting.

At first, I was willing to write this off to ignorance.  It seems this is more of a case of straight out stupidity.  The choice of date was no coincidence since the legislators who passed this law believe that if more people on campus had been armed, that tragedy could have been mitigated or averted all together.

The absurdity of such a position seems even more extreme when you consider that Whitman, a U.S. Marine trained sniper, was shooting from the bell tower. He chose this location because he knew that he'd have an excellent vantage point to shoot his victims, and he'd be able to defend his position. He was able to hold his position for 96 minutes despite counter snipers on the scene.

Police handguns and shotguns were utterly useless. What makes these legislators think that a civilian with a handgun would stop a similar situation, if not make the situation much worse.

There is at least one building on that Campus which bears the scars of Whitman's bullets, yet the memory of this event has been lost to the point that the Texas Legislature unwittingly stupidly allowed for guns to be allowed on Campus.

The gun free zone being a target is a myth.  The FBI tells us that active-shooter scenarios occur in all sorts of environments where guns are allowed—homes, businesses, outdoor spaces. 

Umpqua Community College (UCC) wasn’t a gun-free zone. Oregon is one of seven states that allow guns on college campuses—the consequence of a 2011 court decision that overturned a longstanding ban. In 2012, the state board of education introduced several limitations on campus carry, but those were not widely enforced.

School policy at UCC does ban students from carrying guns into buildings except as “authorized by law,” but at least one student interpreted his concealed handgun license as legal authorization.

John Parker Jr., an Umpqua student and Air Force veteran, told multiple media outlets that he was armed and on campus at the time of the attack last week. Parker and other student veterans (perhaps also armed) thought about intervening. “Luckily we made the choice not to get involved,” Parker told MSNBC. “We were quite a distance away from the actual building where it was happening, which could have opened us up to being potential targets ourselves.”

It seems most of the "good guys with guns" have similar cases of cold feet, which is good since they will probably cause a total clutterfuck should they decide to get involved.

Politico has a good article on how the "good guys with guns" turns out to be a myth with seriously detrimental consequences.

The upshot of this is that the tide has to change or 1 August 2016 may be the date of more than one mass shooting.

And the Texas Legislature may truly regret this action.

Update on the Louisiana Theater shooting

This may turn out to be another instance of right wing domestic terrorism.  The shooter was a toxic teabagger.

From WHNT 19 news:

He has a profile created by the website Tea Party Nation. And on PoliticalForum.com, he left hundreds of messages espousing anti-government, anti-media views.
Houser was denied a concealed carry permit in 2006 after an arrest involving arson, and he was treated for mental health issues in 2008 and 2009, Russell County, Alabama, Sheriff Heath Taylor told CNN. And Taylor said his office served him an eviction notice in March 2014.

And in contrast to the assertion by the NRA that a good guy with a private gun will stop a tragedy like this, no one did, other than the efforts of law enforcement.  The good guy scenario is really more of a right wing nut fantasy than cogent reality thinking.  The shooter stopped himself by committing suicide when he realized the LEO response was so prompt.

Rather in this case, as the preliminary reports are emerging, it was another couple of heroic teachers who made a difference, one injured woman pulling the fire alarm as the shooter stopped to reload.  But of course this being Louisiana where there is a continuing right wing war on education, a GoFundMe account has been started to help these two heroic teachers with their medical bills, because apparently if you are injured, heroically or otherwise, you can't afford care as a normal benefit when you are a teacher.

The Governor will call you a hero, and put out a lot of hot air lip service, but he will stop well short of paying you or supporting a professional education curriculum.

Here is the info about the Go Fund Me account, via myhighplains, should you wish to show your appreciation towards these two heroic teacher in a more tangible way than grandstanding governor Jindal.

The Iberia Association of Educators and the Louisiana Association of Educators have created a Go Fund Me account for the two teachers that were shot at the Grand Theater shooting.

The organizations want to raise money to help them defray the cost of their medical bills that they will be left with after this tragedy.

Governor Bobby praised the heroic actions of two Iberia Parish teachers Jena Meaux and Ali Martin for risking their lives to save others.

The money raised will be split between these two brave women to help with any and all medical bills they will be left with.

To donate, click here: http://www.gofundme.com/9s2j4cyd2j

Red Neck, Red-state Racist Southern Gun-Worshipping Old-Style Segregationist Is another Mass Shooter

As  the right wing propaganda machine jerks and contorts their message to control the sheep, we see them trying to hijack the narrative of this tragedy so they can trot out another false claim of victimization, asserting this was an attack on Christians and Christianity.

The right wants to deny any racism exists, ever, especially when it is their own racism they're trying to pretend doesn't exist -- when it clearly does exist.

It was not a victimization of Christians. It is the old traditional Southern White Christians, of the far right "hatriot" variety, that are bent on attack. The kind that in the past burned down black churches and lynched black civil rights advocates.

It is the right wing extremists that are the greatest threat, more so than Islamic extremists, within our borders.  It is also the largely conservative vigilante gun culture, the gun culture which promotes the notion that everyone should have a gun so that everyone can individually shoot it out with whomever they have a conflict.  We also see that in the narrative hijacking from the right, including one particularly offensive black token asshat who is now insisting that black churches (or perhaps all churches) should be armed because of this incident -- and legal abortion, gay marriage, or because it is a day of the week that appears on a calendar.  We see THAT hijacking of the tragedy narrative with lies about violence like the notion that gun free zones should be blamed for mass shootings.  The factual evidence shows the opposite, but the right never lets facts get in the way of their narrative hijacking.  It is essential to their identity and to their emotional status that they FEEL like they can shoot someone else if they want or need to do so ---- and THAT is arguably a part of this tragedy in so far as the shooter also felt that he could and should go shoot up the people in this church  "for a good reason - the whole bullshit rape our women, taking over our country" pretext.  THAT is straight up gun culture right wing nut thinking.

We do NOT live, in the 21st century, in a frontier shoot-your-food world anymore, other than for hobbyists.  We do live in the 21st century, in a world of law, not vigilantism.  Make no mistake, this was an act of terrorism, but it was also an act of vigilantism - taking individual violent action for what appeared to this individual to be legitimate grounds. 

We will not end mass shootings by trying to understand individual motivation; that motivation is emotional and the reasoning behind it is not driven by fact, and operates on murky thinking.  We will end mass shootings, and for that matter other kinds of shootings like murder suicides, by ending the premise that everyone should have a gun and shoot people when they feel justified in doing so.  Our so-called gun culture is not culture at all, it is not civilized, it is not rational, it has no place in our world any longer. 

During the shooting in the church, Dylann Roof was reported by survivors to have said:

"You rape our women, and you're taking over our country. And you have to go," [and that he was there] "to shoot black people."

Roof's motive seems pretty clear, and unambiguous, and not anti-Christian.  It does reek of that far right hubris that this country is a white conservative religious entitlement, something to take away from others - as are women, another kind of owned property that belongs to them.

Roof (pronounced like cough)was known to be a pill-popper who frequently went about armed, wearing clothing with the flags of previously racist African nations, the South African flag from their apartheid era, and the flag of segregationist Rhodesia between 1965 and 1994, eras ending before his lifetime. Those flags are a modern symbol of 21st century white supremacists.

From the New York Times

Dylann Roof, Charleston Suspect, Wore Symbols of White Supremacy
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The Facebook profile picture chosen by Dylann Storm Roof in May is thick with symbolism. It shows Mr. Roof, a scowling young white man, against a distinctly Southern backdrop: a swamp dripping with Spanish moss. His black jacket is adorned with two flags — one from apartheid-era South Africa, the other from white-ruled Rhodesia — that have been adopted as emblems by modern-day white supremacists.

From the same NYT article:

“He used drugs heavily a lot,” Mr. Mullins added. “He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.”

Mr. Roof “had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say — strong conservative beliefs,” Mr. Mullins said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

Racism should NOT be something we blow off as normal, no big deal.  Too often it is, as evidenced by right wing so-called editorial humor, and also by right wing very serious voter suppression against people of color.



 A drop out, apparently unemployed, racist pill popper? Among conservatives too often that is no disqualification for gifting someone with a gun.  They're just 'good ol' boys', 'you don't need education', 'one of us', we NEED a gun, appears to be the thinking, however badly flawed.

I personally, from my experience traveling in the south, have a problem with the Southern notion that kind of joke is 'ok', something to blow off as 'not serious', when it is ugly and racist. Too many conservatives in the south (and elsewhere) do not. Which all seems to me of a piece with white far right conservative South Carolina governor Nikki Haley supporting flying the confederate flag, a symbol of pride in traditions of white supremacy, and a symbol with which Roof posed for photos, apparently in support of the original use of the confederate flag, as push back in South Carolina against civil rights and as a gesture of opposition to segregation.  It is associated with the worst excesses of slavery and racist persecution.  It gives social cover, normalcy,tolerance and acceptance to things that should be anathema.

As Jon Stewart noted, even the roads on which people drive in South Carolina are named for confederate generals.  It is time to stop glorifying racists, and to stop pretending that is an era of southern history that deserves honoring or respect.  It does not.  But so long as the south pretends it does, expect to see it contribute to racism among the right wing domestic terrorists with their guns.

Don't act surprised when it happens again, either racism or another mass shooting.

There have never been any school shootings in the US.

They have been over 100,000 gun violence incidents since Sandy Hook of which between 7 and 74 were at or near schools.

But, from what I understand, for a "school shooting" to occur:

1. The shooter needs to be a student
2. The shooting needs to be within the school
3. The shooter intended to kill students in the school
4. The shooting needs to happen during school hours
5. The shooting cannot be related to extracurricular reasons

Wow, that knocks out a lot of shootings.

In fact, using this criteria we can not only knock off a few victims from the toll, such as Rachel Scott who was shot outside the school at Columbine. We can also get rid of a few school shootings!

For example, the 1999 Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings occured OUTSIDE the school!

Even better, Adam Lanza WASN'T A STUDENT!  Even better, we can knock out a few of the victims are not students. This criteria confirms what gun nuts have been saying all along--The Sandy Hooks shootings weren't school shootings, but it was a mass shooting.

Now, if people want to look like dicks, then they have to admit this is the case and they can knock that one off the books.

The real confusion is whether a school shooting is a mass shooting or not.

Some people only want the mass shootings which happen in schools to be considered "school shootings".  That is the fallacy which Politifact falls into in their piece:

For many people, this is the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the phrase "school shooting" -- an incident such as Sandy Hook or, before it, the 1999 Columbine shooting in Colorado that left 15 dead, including the shooters.

But, the people who want to dispute these numbers want to limit the amount of School Shootings to a number which is somehow "acceptable" rather than address the issue that gun violence is far too pervasive in US culture.

On the other hand, The Daily Beast came up with the number 68:

We keep a tally of school shootings at The Daily Beast, too, using a slightly different methodology. We include only shootings that occur on school campuses while students are present. We count shootings that result in no fatalities as well as those where the only victim was a shooter who committed suicide.

We published a report last year using our data to show just what a school shooting looks like, noting specifically: “These events aren’t necessarily the types of tragedies that come to mind when one thinks of “school shootings”—madmen in fatigues roaming school hallways, strapped with automatic-style guns, murdering indiscriminately—nor do they receive the media attention of such mass shootings. But they can be similarly traumatizing for students and staff, and they have led to at least 24 injuries and 17 deaths over the past year.”

The following day, another school shooting at Arapahoe High School added to our tally. As of today, we count 68 school shootings, with 28 dead, and 66 injured.

Oliver Burkeman gets to the point in his post at the Guardian:

(If you think this kind of absurdity is confined to the fringe, see this only slightly less mendacious CNN piece (and Politifact), which brings the figure down from 74 to 15 by excluding, among others, shootings motivated by "personal arguments, accidents [or] alleged gang activities and drug deals". Johnson says the cable channel stole his work.)

What’s especially dispiriting about this flat denial of reality is how little prospect it offers for rational discussion or compromise. Even if you're a supporter of gun control, you can still hold a reasoned discussion with somebody who believes that the benefits of widespread firearms ownership outweigh the harms. You can discuss international comparisons; and how no comparable country experiences anything like this level of gun violence; the other person can seek to establish why those comparisons aren't relevant; or that, yes, violent deaths are actually in decline in the US, and so on. But when the pro-gun side of the argument consists of simply insisting that the gun violence that people are so distraught about isn't real gun violence? Then there's no clear way forward at all.

And let’s not forget the bigger point here. A pro-gun journalist applies the most stringent imaginable criteria to the term 'school shooting'; he rejects every instance he possibly can, for reasons many might regard as spurious, and then triumphantly declares that there have only been … seven bona fide school shootings in America since December 2012!

Only seven school shootings since December 2012.

I hope I never to get to the point at which the word "only" in that sentence makes even the slightest bit of sense.

As I said we can knock the numbers down even further if we want to say there have never been any school shootings in the US.  That should appeal to the people who do nothing to stop the plague of US gun violence.

So, do we want to split hairs or try to come up with a solution to a real problem is the real issue here.What is important is that people died. What category some people choose to put a specific shooting is irrelevant to our mission. Our mission is to stop future shooting, no matter what the location or circumstance.

Please explain to me: If mass shootings only happen in gun free zones...

why have there been at least two mass shootings and a lockdown at a University in Kennesaw,

Georgia?

Come on, you know Kennesaw, GA--it's the Melanie Hain of US cities for gun loons since all citizens are required to own guns.

And, like Meleanie--it hasn't made anyone safer.

On 12 January 2010, Three people were killed and two others critically injured in a workplace shooting at the Penske truck rental business located near the city of Kennesaw, Georgia.

Another mass shooting happened today at a Fedex facility with one person rushed into surgery for serious injuries and five others with less critical injuries.  I guess this will only be a blip on the radar despite the fact that the shooter was described as having an assault-style rifle, knife and bullets strapped across his chest "like Rambo".

It also seems that Kennesaw State University has a campus lockdown last month.

While people such as Glenn Harland Reynolds have pointed to Kennesaw's law as having a significant effect on crime, the actual data shows that any change in crime was insignificant .  Kennesaw's law was purely symbolic and was never enforced so is unlikely to have had any effect on gun ownership in Kennesaw.

Of course, if we listen to the "pro-gun" side, we should want to see more people carrying weapons and not have the police pay any attention to them until after they have killed someone.

They are good guys with guns until they start killing people.

In the case of the Fedex mass shooter, he actually was a good guy with a gun since he ended up killing himself.

Arizona Mormon Nazi Shooting Update - Who Shot Whom?

From the Fox News station in Phoenix, it appears the house had numerous firearms, that the Mormon Nazi believed to have shot the others was wearing body armor, and it is a possibility that one of the other people in the house shot him.  Amber Mederos was the daughter of Ready's girlfriend.

Amber Mederos has been listed as a treasurer with the JT Ready for Sheriff campaign. This happened at the home of Lisa Mederos, where Ready had been living for the past 2 years.

Ready is dead, but it's not clear whether the wound was self-inflicted, "as there is multiple weapons on scene," an official said. There were reports of a domestic violence incident between Ready and his girlfriend earlier in the day Wednesday.

We've learned another daughter of Lisa's, a 19-year-old, is alive and found the blood bath. 

It appears that Ready was wearing body armor at the time of the incident.
I'm surprised that Ready would meet the qualifications for the job of sheriff; apparently he had a conviction for assault at 18, was discharged from the marines, twice, for bad conduct, including theft.  This was not a law abiding man, yet he was able to own 'multiple weapons' despite a pattern of conflicts with law enforcement over a period of years.
While Ready claimed to be running as a Democrat, he did not have the support or endorsement of the Democratic party which was supporting their popular incumbent candidate, Clarence Dupkin.
One more gun nut who shot himself and a lot of other people, one more ugly gun incident in the lax gun state of Arizona.

Tea Party speaker, Mormon Neo-Nazi Candidate for Sheriff Apparent Shooter in Mass Murder / Suicide in Arizona

Would this be a good time to point out the inherent problems with the lax gun laws of Arizona? I think so.  I can't wait to learn his permit status, if any and how many gunzzzzz he had accumulated.
This creep could easily be the poster child for NRA gun nuts - the individuals who are obsessed with firearms, obsessed with finding someone to shoot, obsessed with threats lurking around every corner about to getcha (because you're so appealing/good looking/rich/ important/ sexy - if only in your own mind). That would be as distinct from the sane individuals who don't feel a need or desire to go armed everywhere, who aren't afraid of imminent home invasion, who don't wet themselves over improbable heroic fantasies involving their fetish objects, and who practice sound, sane gun safety for normal firearm activities like skeet shooting or hunting where a firearm is a tool in an activity, but not an essential fetish prop to a person's core identity.
J. T. Ready, who mostly personifies the National Rifle Association demographic of an old looking (he's  white overweight angry guy with right to extreme right wing leanings, killed himself and four other people in Arizona.  Ready was a speaker at Tea Party events, where he was embraced.  Ready had also attempted to be part of Occupy events, where his participation was rejected because of his hateful and extremist views.
While many on the right have tried publicly to distance themselves from the anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and racist views of the white supremacists, the reality is that the right has courted and embraced them.  They have been part of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, where all four of the then running GOP presidential candidates spoke.  Right wing bloggers are featured and presented with awards, including Pamela Geller who shares a number of views that she holds in common with right wing extremist mass murderer Anders Breivik in Norway, demonizing anyone who isn't white, and exclusively culturally western European. The right wing is concerned about keeping domination in the U.S. for white European-descended people, and desire to keep black, brown, and presumably Asian people in a subordinate relationship.
Ready was running for Sheriff, but he appears to be doing so - so far as I could tell - without an official endorsement.  Popular Democrat Clarence Dupnik, who gained national attention as the sheriff who took Jared Loughner into custody in 2011 is running for his party, and as of last week, Terry Frederick was the candidate was running for the Republicans, and Mark Napier was running for the Tea Party Patrios in Pima.   Ready identified that he was running as a Democrat, but it doesn't appear that the Democrats were willing to have him either - they directed the good citizens of Pima not to sign any petitions on behalf of Ready.
The conspiracy theory driven right wing-nut tin-foil-hat-brigade is positing all sorts of silliness, including that the murder suicide was really a cartel murder, and that Ready was a secret federal informant.  These people are nuts, just plain wackadoodle nut jobs, who believe any garbage, the more stupid the more it appeals to them.  It's not a reach to imagine them all huddled around playing a game of 'telephone' making up details and passing them back and forth between themselves as they fondle their arms full of firearms with frissons of gun fetish thrills and the adrenaline rush of fear - and loving it!
Here are just a few of the extensive Youtube video collection about the now-late TJ Ready.  He and his colleagues are far more damning than I could be about them.  For those of you who don't readily recognize him in some of these clips, recalled right wing majority leader Russell Pearce was a close buddy of Pearce, including having converted him to Mormonism, and then catapulted Ready right to an important status position in the church.  For those not familiar with the acronym, ADL is the Anti-Defamation League.

I could point out these guys are ignorant extremist red-necked- red-state racist, bigoted assholes, but that would be redundant.

If this piques your curiosity, wikipedia has an entry on him.  This is from that entry:

He also served as president of the Mesa Community College Republican Party Club and as a precinct committeeman for the Maricopa County Republicans. In 2006, he sought a seat on the city counsel for Mesa, Arizona. He put forth as his motto that "The Purity of the Aryan Race is the most precious resource Nature has to offer All of Humankind."^[2]

As the Brits would say, Ready seems to have fancied himself a superior human being.  I don't see that in any aspect of him.  I would worry that might offend his surviving family and friends, but he appears to have shot them all.

I would not have thought this guy had anything whatsoever to do with a college edumacation; maybe he just presided over the college Republicans, but wasn't actually a student himself.  We're talking Arizona after all.  Republicans, Tea Partiers, Neo-Nazis; gun nuts all, they deserve each other, but the rest of us don't.