No one else was in the theater when Smith sat down in the middle of the back row, Arcuri said.At his home, police found pistols, shotguns and rifles, "thousands" of bullets, and a gas mask.
"Where he was sitting, he had the tactical advantage," Arcuri said. "He had targets to the left, to the right, and straight ahead."
While the manager had let Smith through, off-duty Westlake police officer Jeremiah Bullins grew suspicious of Smith and followed him into the theater. When he spotted Smith in the back row, Smith had removed the bag from his waist and placed it on the floor.
Bullins asked Smith if he could search the bag and Smith agreed. That's when Bullins opened the zippered compartment and found a loaded 9MM Glock semiautomatic handgun, two additional fully loaded magazines, and three knives. A fourth knife was found elsewhere on Smith.
Also in the bag, Arcuri said, were a flashlight, medicated bandages that help clot blood, and a capsule that is dropped in fresh water to make it safe to drink.
Because what rabbit hunter doesn't need thousands of bullets and a gas mask?
The NRA, and their gun nuts in Congress, keep defending our lax gun slaws, claiming they're all we need to keep crazy people from getting guns. Yet the crazy people keep getting guns, lots of them, not to mention additional gear like kevlar and gas masks that will help improve their kills during the next mass slaughter.
We've tried it the NRA's way, and they failed.
The gunman in the shooting at a Sikh temple over the weekend has been labeled a potential domestic terrorist — defined as one who incites politically-motivated violence against his or her own country. In Wade Michael Page's case, that political motivation was likely white supremacy, a growing problem in the United States.
But when, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security reported that white supremacy is the US's biggest threat for domestic terror, it was met with harsh criticism. Conservatives blasted the department for defining terror threats too broadly, instead of focusing on potential Islamic terrorists. Then-House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was one of those who berated DHS, saying that they weren't focusing on the real threats the US faces.
What's even worse, last year Homeland Security gutted the department looking into domestic terror, particularly white supremacists, after the Republicans complained:
Daryl Johnson, who headed the DHS unit responsible for analyzing security threats from non-Islamic domestic extremists, was the principal author of the April 7, 2009, report "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment."
Johnson, who was interviewed for the upcoming summer issue of the SPLC's Intelligence Report, said that following the controversy, the DHS dismantled the intelligence team that studied the threat from right-wing extremists and that the department no longer produces its own analytical reports on that subject. When the 2009 report was written, there were six analysts in the unit, including Johnson. Today, he said, there is one.
"DHS stopped all of our work and instituted restrictive policies," said Johnson, who has since left the department. "Eventually, they ended up gutting my unit. All of this happened within six to nine months after the furor over the report. Since our report was leaked, DHS has not released a single report of its own on this topic. Not anything dealing with non-Islamic domestic extremism – whether it's anti-abortion extremists, white supremacists, 'sovereign citizens,' eco-terrorists, the whole gamut."
The Republican party, with the help of religious extremists and gun nuts who now control the GOP, stopped Homeland Security from investigating the domestic terror threat. And now people are dead, again.
So, we let the Republicans, the religious right and the gun nuts yet have their way, and they proved themselves yet again incapable of stopping nutjobs from getting access to guns and killing innocent Americans. How long do we have to keep doing this the GOP/NRA way before people simply admit that the Republicans and the NRA have failed to keep America safe?
And what's Mitt Romney, who just held a fundraiser three days ago with the head of the NRA, have to say about all of this?
I swear to ALLAH, this guy is just the gift that keeps giving:
Mitt Romney mistakenly confused the words "Sikh" and "sheik" at a fundraiser here Tuesday night when he offered his condolences to the victims of last weekend's shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.The presumptive Republican presidential nominee correctly spoke of the Sikh religion earlier in the day when he observed a moment of silence at a campaign event in Illinois. But at the Iowa fundraiser, he instead talked about the "sheik temple" and the "sheik people." Sheik is an Arabic honorific, whereas Sikh is a religion with roots in South Asia.
Palin with testicles.
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Not our finest hour. Not by a long shot. The Supreme Court allowed the state of Texas to put Marvin Wilson to death Tuesday evening even though the man had an IQ of just 61 and didn't understand what was happening to him. It was the 245th execution order signed by the "pro-life Christian" Rick Perry.
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America's 10 Largest Corporations Paid 9 Percent Average Tax Rate Last Year
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Since rMoney decided to attack the Kibbutz movement, someone should ask him about those fundamentalist Mormon compounds that dot the southwest. At least in a Kibbutz a female child isn't married off to some creepy old pervert who uses her as a brood mare and the boys aren't expelled so the young women won't reject those old pervs for men their own age.
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Remarkably, if it gets really hot, and there is no rain, and the rivers and streams start drying up, then things get really bad for the fish. Of course, the sneaky — and very wealthy, Lamborghini-driving — scientists behind the Great Climate Change Hoax are trying to endanger further all those endangered species (like the Pallid Sturgeon) so they can have an excuse to fasten onto liberty-loving Americans even more firmly the shackles of the Endangered Species Act during Obama's second term. Or something.
And it turns out that, in addition to fooling people into thinking that a Nickelback concert has broken out, the presence of many thousand dead fish in one place carries additional complications for the rest of us....
So many fish died in one Illinois lake that the carcasses clogged an intake screen near a power plant, lowering water levels to the point that the station had to shut down one of its generators.
It's almost as though things have consequences or something.
The fish are victims of one of the driest and warmest summers in history. The federal U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly two-thirds of the lower 48 states are experiencing some form of drought, and the Department of Agriculture has declared more than half of the nation's counties — nearly 1,600 in 32 states - as natural disaster areas. More than 3,000 heat records were broken over the last month. Iowa DNR officials said the sturgeon found dead in the Des Moines River were worth nearly $10 million, a high value based in part on their highly sought eggs, which are used for caviar. The fish are valued at more than $110 a pound.
Bear up, though, pater.
Gavin Gibbons, a spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute, said the sturgeon kills don't appear to have reduced the supply enough to hurt regional caviar suppliers.
And thank god for that, I say.
What's going on is a damn piscatorial cataclysm, is what it is.
In Illinois, heat and lack of rain has dried up a large swath of Aux Sable Creek, the state's largest habitat for the endangered greater redhorse, a large bottom-feeding fish, said Dan Stephenson, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
Also, too...
In Nebraska, a stretch of the Platte River from Kearney in the central part of the state to Columbus in the east has gone dry and killed a "significant number" of sturgeon, catfish and minnows, said fisheries program manager Daryl Bauer. Bauer said the warm, shallow water has also killed an unknown number of endangered pallid sturgeon. "It's a lot of miles of river, and a lot of fish," Bauer said. "Most of those fish are barely identifiable. In this heat, they decay really fast."
Also, too, as well...cannibalism!
Kansas also has seen declining water levels that pulled younger, smaller game fish away from the vegetation-rich shore lines and forced them to cluster, making them easier targets for predators, said fisheries chief Doug Nygren of the Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism. Nygren said he expects a drop in adult walleye populations in the state's shallower, wind-swept lakes in southern Kansas.
Kansas, it should be noted, is governed by Sam Brownback, who once was concerned about the effect of dumping all that CO2 into the atmosphere, but who then realized he'd been bamboozled by evil scientists. Just sayin'.
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Romney adds a new lie to his repertoire. Moving on from the vote-suppression lie to a lie about Obama "gutting welfare reform" -- after the administration did what GOP governors asked to have the work requirements in the 1996 welfare reform law determined by the states.
But wait! There's more! When rMoney was Governor of Massachusetts in 2005 he didn't just ask for one of the waivers he's now trashing, he also offered welfare recipients free car insurance, inspections and registrations, even free AAA memberships. Maybe he should just STFU.
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Oh look, a Louisiana charter school has found a simple solution for combating teen pregnancy that also allows them to "maintain an environment where students will learn and exhibit acceptable character traits that govern language, gesture, physical actions and written words." The solution is to force the girls to take classes at home if it turns out they are indeed going to be punished by blessed with a child, thus killing two birds with one stone — shaming pregnant girls while simultaneously teaching students that shaming pregnant girls is constitutive of an acceptable "gesture, physical action" or "written word." READ MORE »
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Oh LOOK what a typist at the Los Angeles Times found out about the Romney's multi-million dollar home in La Jolla (that's pronounced La HOY-uh for you Midwesterners, and yes, this is the one with the $55,000 car elevator)! Turns out that the Romneys got a tax cut of about $109,000 by having their lobbyist/lawyer request that the county reassess the $12 million dollar home several times over the years. Of course, the Romneys used the money from this tax cut to trickle a bunch of good jobs with benefits and a living wage all over San Diego. KIDDING! READ MORE »
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