Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, 6 YTBN Shot, Killed In Tuscon AZ

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In summary: I then went in the front door and around customer service to the copy machine. I was in the middle of copying when I heard a series of loud pops. I thought to myself: Why are people setting off firecrackers, don't they know that they could get in trouble with a member of congress so near? Then a couple came in covered with blood and other people rushed by to help. I continued to copy until I thought that this is stupid, I should either help or get out of the way. I walked over to where the shooting took place. There were people lying around I assume dead and injured. It was just like a scene from the movies. Blood everywhere. There
  • #456
According to the AP story in the morning paper, the guy's father was mad at him and was trying to chase him down in his pickup truck as he ran off with his black bag. If the father suspected something, why didn't he make a 911 call and have his son picked up?
 
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  • #457
Update.

In the hours before the assassination attempt against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Jared Loughner went to Walmart, was pulled over for running a red light and ran from his father after an angry confrontation.

Investigators are piecing together the timeline of Loughner's frenzied morning before the attack that killed six.

"What he did and the morning before the shooting, we're just trying to find all that out," said sheriff's Capt. Chris Nanos.

Nanos wouldn't say what Loughner bought during two trips to Walmart.

After the shopping trips, Loughner ran a red light but was let off with a warning, the Arizona Game and Fish Department said. The officer took Loughner's driver's license and vehicle registration information at 7:30 a.m. but found no outstanding warrants and didn't search the car, a late 1960s dark gray Chevy Nova.

About 8 a.m., Randy Loughner saw his son walk to one of the family's vehicles and take a black bag out of the trunk.

"The father went out and said, 'What's that?' and he mumbled something and took off running," said Sheriff Clarence Dupnik.

Randy Loughner got in his truck and chased his son, but Jared ran into the desert.

At 10:11 a.m., police say Jared Loughner showed up at a Tucson grocery store in a taxi and shot 19 people, killing a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, among others and wounding more than a dozen.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_congresswoman_shot;_ylt=Ar0sZA_K_VjhFDddwQKkxjRH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTMzMWlydWMzBGFzc2V0Ay9zL2FwL3VzX2NvbmdyZXNzd29tYW5fc2hvdARjY29kZQNtcF9lY184XzEwBGNwb3MDMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA29mZmljZXJzdG9wcA--

turbo-1 said:
According to the AP story in the morning paper, the guy's father was mad at him and was trying to chase him down in his pickup truck as he ran off with his black bag. If the father suspected something, why didn't he make a 911 call and have his son picked up?
Obviously the father was concerned enough about something to chase after his son with a truck. That's not what I'd call normal.
 
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  • #458
arildno said:
I just read Susan Klebold's harrowing essay from 2009.
She was the mother of the Columbine high school murderer Dylan Klebold.

I think it might be of some interest:
http://www.oprah.com/world/Susan-Klebolds-O-Magazine-Essay-I-Will-Never-Know-Why

How could she be expected to know after all... she wasn't the one who was mad. We very rightly focus on the victims of violent crime, but I think it's too easy to forget how many people that can include. I don't know if this applies to these parents or not though, and as you're saying, we may never know THAT either.


This whole thing is sad; it took a county to raise Loughner, who seems to have given as many warning signs as anyone could want, ans directly TO the authorities. It's ironic that in his writing he's so certain that the government was watching... if only the dreams of paranoiacs were true sometimes.
 
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  • #459
turbo-1 said:
Is there any way that we can get "church" and "religious freedom" re-defined so that actual churches are covered and nasty fringe crap is not? If not, why? I shouldn't be able to gather a handful of idiots in my house and call it a "church" and get tax-advantaged treatment for it. I'd rather rescind all tax-exemptions for religious groups and tax them like any other other business, then grant them exemptions based on their charitable works.

I think you might have something, here. :)

I strongly agree with you with respect to some organizations getting away with tax-free murder. The question, however, is where one draws the line. I support giving honest organizations a break, as many of them do a lot of good. Scratch my head a thousand times, however, and I can't figure out where best to draw the line. Perhaps nowhere.

For the last dozen years, I've been a firm believer in the 10% rule. It would make doing one's taxes so much simpler. Just move the decimal point, and if the gov't can't figure out how to make it on that stipend, then they can just keep figuring.

Ouch. I think I drew blood with that one. I hear the PC helos arriving...

Back to the OP:

Evo said:
Obviously the father was concerned enough about something to chase after his son with a truck. That's not what I'd call normal.

Agreed. Something's not quite right, there.

Anytime I read of situations like this, however, my heart goes out to the family. Sad? Yes. Hugely! I just wish there were some way to fix it before/U] things hit the fan.

Strangely enough, I keep thinking back to my lifeguarding days, and in particular, about this one wayward kid. As it turns out, he turned out ok. Still, there was that one week where he ramped his bicycle into the pool in an awesome display of somethingorother.

:)

Sometimes I wonder if the difference between one's path turning out to be the right one, and one's path turning out to be the wrong one, was merely the matter of a single decision.
 
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  • #460
Man, this just gets sadder. Loughner seems to be the picture of a Schizophrenic, eventually becoming so paranoid that he believed his own friends were stalking him with intent to kill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/us/12loughner.html

NYT said:
“He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos, and that is probably why he did the shooting, along with the fact he was sick in the head,” said Zane Gutierrez, 21, who was living in a trailer outside Tucson and met Mr. Loughner sometimes to shoot at cans for target practice... ...The new details from Mr. Gutierrez about Mr. Loughner — including his philosophy of anarchy and his expertise with a handgun, suggest that the earliest signs of behavior that may have ultimately led to the attacks started several years ago.

Mr. Gutierrez said his friend had become obsessed with the meaning of dreams and their importance. He talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “The Will To Power” and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing. And every day, his friend said, Mr. Loughner would get up and write in his dream journal, recording the world he experienced in sleep and its possible meanings.

“Jared felt nothing existed but his subconscious,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “The dream world was what was real to Jared, not the day-to-day of our lives.”

And that dream world, his friend said, could be downright strange.

“He would ask me constantly, ‘Do you see that blue tree over there?’ He would admit to seeing the sky as orange and the grass as blue,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “Normal people don’t talk about that stuff.”

He added that Mr. Loughner “used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.”

As his behavior grew more puzzling to his friends, he was getting better with a pistol. Starting in high school, Mr. Loughner honed his marksmanship with a 9-millimeter pistol, the same caliber weapon used in the attack Saturday, until he became proficient at handling the weapon and firing it quickly.

“If he had a gun pointed at me, there is nothing I could do because he would make it count,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “He was quick.”

He also said that Mr. Loughner had increasing trouble interacting in social settings — during one party, for instance, Mr. Loughner retreated upstairs alone to a room and was found reading a dictionary.

Jared Loughner’s retreat — whether into the desert with his gun, or into the recesses of his dreams — coincided with a broader retreat by the Loughner family that left them increasingly isolated from their community, neighbors said.

...

...And it gets worse. We're going to spend so much time wringing hands over this shooting, and the research has already been done: diagnose early, treat early, save lives. We CHOOSE not to, and we CHOOSE to mix the mentally ill with 'regular' criminals, which means we CHOOSE to mix the release of those mentally ill people as if they had been rehabilitated!

This is pathetic, and a shame, and if a 9 year old girl being gunned down along with 5 others, and the attempted murder of so many more doesn't get people to realize this is not sustainable, we're going to just go back to gun-control debates, gun rights debates, the "political rhetoric" debates, and of course the "how do we not get shot?!" debate congresspeople are having now. What a shock... they are still their first priority, Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, or Independent.
 
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  • #461
  • #462
Evo said:
Obviously the father was concerned enough about something to chase after his son with a truck. That's not what I'd call normal.

Nor I.
 
  • #463
Loughner should have, "THERE IS NO 'NORMAL' HERE. PLEASE MOVE ALONG." tattooed on his forehead.
 
  • #464
WhoWee said:
It's their name. If they were the WMC (Westboro Motorcycle Club) - we wouldn't know anything about them.
Well that's part of it no doubt. But protesting and hurling vile epithets at the funerals of American troops and leading officials will get you noticed with just about any label I'd guess.
 
  • #465
turbo-1 said:
... WBC is a family-group of loons that want to exploit pain and suffering in order to get coverage for their own twisted brand of "christianity".
Yes the WBC has no more connection to Christianity than did the "[URL Gate UFO cult.[/URL]. Hopefully WBC will fade out long before the next appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet.
 
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  • #466
mheslep said:
Well that's part of it no doubt. But protesting and hurling vile epithets at the funerals of American troops and leading officials will get you noticed with just about any label I'd guess.

Lets be honest... it should. People want to know who is vile enough to do that kind of thing in their communities.
 
  • #467
mheslep said:
Yes the WBC has no more connection to Christianity than did the "[URL Gate UFO cult.[/URL]. Hopefully WBC will fade out long before the next appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet.

Really? Personally I'm rooting for them to take just that route.
 
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  • #468
mheslep said:
Hopefully WBC will fade out long before the next appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet.

That might be nice. In the meantime, let us all enjoy a simple good round of applause.
 
  • #469
Evo said:
Anyone want to guess that the gun and ammo were in the black bag and the father knew it?
I think the father must have known much more than that, if he chased after him. Even more than the knowledge that his son was mentally ill.

If the father knew the gun was in the bag, then either he already knew that previously and gained knowledge later that caused his concern, or he had knowledge of his son's plans and assumed the bag contained the gun because of that knowledge.

Either way, I think what we don't yet know is far more than what we do know.
 
  • #470
Al68 said:
I think the father must have known much more than that, if he chased after him. Even more than the knowledge that his son was mentally ill.

If the father knew the gun was in the bag, then either he already knew that previously and gained knowledge later that caused his concern, or he had knowledge of his son's plans and assumed the bag contained the gun because of that knowledge.

Either way, I think what we don't yet know is far more than what we do know.

If you had a 22 year old son who was mentally ill, and left in the middle of the night with weapons, mumbling, that wouldn't be reason enough to chase him?! I would think that for many, it would be reason to notify the police... this guy should have had a record, and this is another example of how that was probably prevented for so long.
 
  • #471
nismaratwork said:
If you had a 22 year old son who was mentally ill, and left in the middle of the night with weapons, mumbling, that wouldn't be reason enough to chase him?!
I think the key word there is "mumbling": what was he mumbling about that so greatly concerned his father, who wasn't concerned enough by his pre-existing knowledge of his son's illness and gun to do anything earlier? (assuming that the father knew his son had a gun in that bag, which we don't really know.)

That was my point, did his son tell him something, or did he overhear his son "mumbling" about his plans, or did he otherwise know his son had evil plans?
 
  • #472
Al68 said:
I think the key word there is "mumbling": what was he mumbling about that so greatly concerned his father, who wasn't concerned enough by his pre-existing knowledge of his son's illness and gun to do anything earlier? (assuming that the father knew his son had a gun in that bag, which we don't really know.)

That was my point, did his son tell him something, or did he overhear his son "mumbling" about his plans, or did he otherwise know his son had evil plans?

I have no idea, and we may never know; my point is that's speculation unnecessary to explain why you'd make chase in a car.
 
  • #473
Evo said:
Update.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_congresswoman_shot;_ylt=Ar0sZA_K_VjhFDddwQKkxjRH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTMzMWlydWMzBGFzc2V0Ay9zL2FwL3VzX2NvbmdyZXNzd29tYW5fc2hvdARjY29kZQNtcF9lY184XzEwBGNwb3MDMQRwb3MDMQRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA29mZmljZXJzdG9wcA--
.

Nanos wouldn't say what Loughner bought during two trips to Walmart.

what i remember reading in earlier accounts is that he tried to buy ammo at the first walmart and was denied purchase, so went to another one.
 
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  • #474
Proton Soup said:
what i remember reading in earlier accounts is that he tried to buy ammo at the first walmart and was denied purchase, so went to another one.

Your memory is accurate, the report wasn't. He just left abruptly for no reason, but we can probably surmise that it was for reasons of paranoia. If he thought the government was watching his YouTube (I don't mean watching, I mean WAAAATCHING *theremin*) I'm sure buying ammo felt even more exposing.


Good news:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/12/arizona.shooting.victims/index.html?hpt=T1&iref=BN1

President Obama said:
Gabby opened her eyes so I can tell you know she knows we are here, she knows that we love her and she knows that we are rooting for her through what will undoubtedly be a difficult journey
 
  • #475
As one who disagrees with him on most things, let me be the first to say here the President turned in a top drawer speech tonight, the kind of speech that caused his star to rise so fast in the first place. He did what a President should do, and perhaps only a President can do, he rose above it all, hopefully bringing the country with him.
 
  • #476
mheslep said:
As one who disagrees with him on most things, let me be the first to say here the President turned in a top drawer speech tonight, the kind of speech that caused his star to rise so fast in the first place. He did what a President should do, and perhaps only a President can do, he rose above it all, hopefully bringing the country with him.

I sincerely hope so, too.
 
  • #477
lisab said:
I sincerely hope so, too.
A uplifting and unifying (I sincerely hope!) address to highlight our losses. Obama acquitted himself quite well, IMO. I hope people who have previously excoriated him can bring themselves to support him.
 
  • #478
turbo-1 said:
A uplifting and unifying (I sincerely hope!) address to highlight our losses. Obama acquitted himself quite well, IMO. I hope people who have previously excoriated him can bring themselves to support him.
Well, that's the point of such speeches, isn't it? To take advantage of a bad situation for personal gain? Worked for Bush too!

Sorry, fluff doesn't win my support.
 
  • #479
I heard Rush on the radio yesterday and he was going on and on ad nausium about this and a supposed desire of the dems to take advantage of the situation to give Obama a boost. He specifically brought up Obama's planned speech and how his publicists were brainstorming hard to figure out the best way to profit from this. I doubt any dittoheads are going to be feeling unified.
I have to agree with Russ though. Its basically fluff. It doesn't in any way effect my opinion of the man (my having a good opinion of him anyway).
 
  • #480
turbo-1 said:
...excoriated...

I had to look this one up!

(beats feet...)
 
  • #481
turbo-1 said:
A uplifting and unifying (I sincerely hope!) address to highlight our losses. Obama acquitted himself quite well, IMO. I hope people who have previously excoriated him can bring themselves to support him.
This is not about Obama personally, not for me, but about the country and this tragedy. Obama is a part of the country, not the other way around. Here he chose to forgo the http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/117321-obama-critics-talk-about-me-like-a-dog" or "punish our enemies" shtick he's done before, and to use the talent I admit he has for speeches to render something sublime; credit where credit is due. As for some other of his choices with which I feel are not just mildly but catastrophically wrong, and continue on that path, he'll get more of the same from me.
 
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  • #482
mheslep said:
credit where credit is due.

But it was very painful, huh. :rofl:
 
  • #483
Ivan Seeking said:
But it was very painful, huh. :rofl:
Nope.
 
  • #484
mheslep said:
Nope.

If there were any more off-topic qualifiers in there you could start a new thread. :wink:
 
  • #485
Well, fluff-production IS important, because the sense of belonging and being members of the same society is in part, an emotional phenomenon, rather than just a rational one.

Without such fluff, one's attachment to one's society will be some mere abstract idea amongst innumerable others neither oneself or others will bother much with upholding.

So, thumbs up for Obama's speech, and its contribution towards ending a pointless, acrimonious blame game.
 
  • #486
russ_watters said:
Well, that's the point of such speeches, isn't it? To take advantage of a bad situation for personal gain? Worked for Bush too!

Sorry, fluff doesn't win my support.

Maybe so, but statistically it wins support from the masses.
 
  • #487
russ_watters said:
Well, that's the point of such speeches, isn't it? To take advantage of a bad situation for personal gain? Worked for Bush too!

Sorry, fluff doesn't win my support.

Phew, thanks... I was worried that I only thought you were painfully cynical. By the way, how do you know that fluff doesn't win your support... have you allowed for a scientific examination of your voting and ideological history?

You certainly seem to be swayed by it, just not fluff you dislike or find less than useful... it seems. Of course, maybe you defy the odds, but of the people on this site I'd have called as being "above it all"... you're not it. I'm not either, don't get me wrong, but you and Ivan are the legendary pair chasing each other for eternity... I'd be crushed if that was shaken somehow. :rolleyes:
 
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  • #488
mheslep said:
Well that's part of it no doubt. But protesting and hurling vile epithets at the funerals of American troops and leading officials will get you noticed with just about any label I'd guess.

I can't imagine that happening at any funeral I've ever attended. It's hard to understand why the local residents (at minimum) don't stand in opposite protest - whether they knew the deceased/family or not? Perhaps this is a call to action of members of the "real" Baptist church to defend their name - start showing up in greater numbers to honor the fallen.
 
  • #489
WhoWee said:
I can't imagine that happening at any funeral I've ever attended. It's hard to understand why the local residents (at minimum) don't stand in opposite protest - whether they knew the deceased/family or not? Perhaps this is a call to action of members of the "real" Baptist church to defend their name - start showing up in greater numbers to honor the fallen.

As I posted earlier, they will: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2011/01/11/2011-01-11_tucson_residents_to_fight_back_against_westboro_baptist_church_with_angel_wings.html
 
  • #490
Mother Jones magazine has an in-depth interview with a fairly longtime friend of Loughner:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/jared-lee-loughner-friend-voicemail-phone-message

Points of interest:

1. Around 2008-09, Loughner decided to stop smoking pot, and being fairly regular with his interviewed friend, Bryce expresses surprise that Loughner failed an army drug test.

2. Intriguingly, Bryce says that as Loughner stopped using drugs, his weirdness seemed to intensify, rather than becoming reduced.

3. Bryce confirms that on several occasions, Loughner derided Giffords as "fake", i.e, some sort of personal obsession was building up against her, in Loughner's increasingly sick mind.

4. At 2.00 AM Saturday morning, Jared phoned Bryce, who chose not to pick up his phone.
Jared left the following message:
"Hey man, it's Jared. Me and you had good times. Peace out. Later."

Now, his friend's thoughts are still whirling around: "WHAT IF I had picked up the phone that night?"
 

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