UPDATE: The shooter has been captured.
UPDATE 2: Three people were killed in the shooting, officials say, one police officer and two civilians
A reminder that some people take the war on women quite literally. As USA Today reports:
A man wearing hunting gear and armed with an assault-style weapon was barricaded inside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs Friday after a shooting spree that left four officers and at least five civilians injured, police and hospital officials said.
In a dramatic operation, with the gunman still on the loose, officers crept into the building and rescued six or seven civilians cowering in a bathroom.
As I write this, the shooter remains barricaded inside the clinic. So far, according to CNN, nine people have been taken to local hospitals with injuries.
Ongoing coverage here.
Shootings like this are the inevitable result of the propaganda campaign that is being waged against Planned Parenthood. Indeed, as the Huffington Post’s Laura Bassett noted in a recent piece, abortion rights advocates are reporting
an alarming spike in death threats and violent acts against abortion providers, clinics and companies that work with them since the undercover videos of Planned Parenthood were released. Two Planned Parenthood clinics have reported arsons, anti-abortion protesters are showing up in large numbers at doctors’ homes, and commenters on conservative websites and online forums are calling for the bombings of abortion clinics across the country, according to Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation. Saporta is so alarmed by the escalation of threats against providers that she asked the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigations to intervene.Â
“In my 20 years at NAF, I have never seen such a volume, intensity and escalation of hate speech, threats and criminal activity, and we would like to prevent a serious violent act from occurring,” she told The Huffington Post in an interview. “We have enlisted law enforcement’s help.”Â
To offer your support to Planned Parenthood, by donating money or time or simply by posting an “I stand with Planned Parenthood” graphic online, go here.
Yeah, that’s pretty much my reaction too.
“Others are claiming that the shooter is transgender and hit this PP because they weren’t giving enough abortions…. sadly, on all these sites, there is much rejoicing and revelry (even though they are desperately trying to distance themselves too…)”
I’ve gone onto the FOX news article and I’m reporting all of these comments as spam and off topic, who wants to join me?
Absolutely!!!
I mean yes I am on my way to do that now!! Not sure why I didn’t do it before…
Additionally, I have a theory that explains why he’s marked as female on the one online voter registry. This Dear guy is apparently very erratic and scatterbrained, I find it highly likely he marked the wrong box on the form and forgot all about it.
http://www.coloradovoters.info/by_number/6010/10372_robert_lewis_dear.html
That, or it could be a mistake on the part of the webmaster of this site. Mistakes happen.
https://twitter.com/WesleyLowery/status/670736134146801672
Aaaaaaaaaand the ‘but but but he was mentally disturbed’ dance starts again.
Apologies for three posts in a row, but this reporter’s Twitter is full of info about the shooting:
https://twitter.com/bystephenhobbs
AnAndrejaPejicBlog — before or after noon EST? Cuz I had a “bet” riding on that one. No actual money involved, I’m not that crass, just a “so, how long until they blame us?” between me and a friend. Because without fucking fail, those of us with “severe mental illnesses” who’d prefer to just avoid people and are fucking harmless, get the wrath of people attacking the right wing terrorists. Easier to go: mentally ill => unstable => no motive we should waste our time discussing; than it is to actually discussing said motives.
Huh, looks like that one didn’t start until 12:30, I was off by half an hour and am strangely pleased that it took that long and seems like a limited thing even among republicans. This should not be a thing I’m that used to.
@Argenti Aertheri
The first one I noticed was in response to the embedded tweet above, so after noon. So, first people are like, “Maybe he wasn’t even targeting PP!” Now that we know he was targeting PP, it’s “Nooooooooooo,it has nothing, nothing to do with the lies deliberately spread about PP for the past months, he’s just a crazy person crazying at random!!”
I’m glad I deactivated my Facebook so I don’t get to see all the well-meaning-but-misguided ‘This sort of thing wouldn’t happen if we had adequate mental health care in this country” posts :/ Being an asshole is not a mental illness.
I’m unable to go to other comment sections about this. I’ve come to rely on Mammotheers to break disturbing stuff with equal disbelief.
RE: Diagnosing people with a mental illness over actions.
I was really upset a while ago when one of my favourite feminist spaces had many guys (regulars, not trolls) arguing that acts like this “prove” the person is “mentally ill”. It was extremely difficult to explain all the levels and ways in which this is harmful. Not just the continued judging of people with mental illnesses but also what it does to discussion about important societal matters.
It’s impossible to talk about what is *really* going on if people who do horrible things are ‘othered’, even though they are a direct result of an unwell society. They’re not aliens from planet Ableist-Insult-8753, they are humans from Earth, and usually humans that very actively participate in some sort of echo chamber of exchanging ideas about society. Hell, many of them leave entire manifestos that aren’t “insane” (ugh) either, but all ideas that came from somewhere and were and are supported by others.
Here’s a cat in a flip flop.
http://cdn.makeagif.com/media/7-15-2015/mDwWQE.gif
I’ve been donating to PP for years now and will never stop doing so although it doesn’t feel like I’m doing enough. It’s awful that anyone has to risk their lives just to ensure that women can exercise their constitutional rights. This has got to stop. Republicans and Conservatives have to be held responsible for creating this climate of hate and violence towards abortion providers.
Came across this illustration:
?oh=a488a4e5146f1ab2f14e77ef79f3d826&oe=56F2CF05
“planet Ableist-Insult-8753”
Totally stealing that off you 😛
Seriously though, that the “he’s just nuts” shit is so predictable that my guess was only off by half an hour is disturbing in its own right. Like, not only will we not discuss anything resembling the actual problem, but we have a default scapegoat. Which, of course, consists of an already marginalized population (that I happen to be part of in this case) — were he not white, that’d surely be blamed, were he not Christian, that’d be blamed, etc etc etc.
Not fucking once has the media ever gone “white guys, amirite?” when 75%+ of mass murders in the US are committed by white guys (I crunched the numbers for a troll years ago now, I could probably find it if you want, but it was basically just some math off wiki’s list of mass murders). I think it was actually way higher than that, with only a handful being women, mass murder is almost exclusively a male thing, and racially, white folks are way over represented — and when they aren’t white, you can bet your ass it’s plastered all over the headlines.
pkayden — my “income” is welfare and after the necessities and paying for aerials, PP and, currently, Sander’s campaign get a donation. Not just this shit, but because sliding scale STD testing and birth control is a damned godsend. These people aren’t pro life, if they were they’d be all about supporting PP’s efforts in making birth control accessible and affordable. You want every child to be a wanted child? Besides that being the best bumper sticker I’ve ever seen, birth control is the damned answer. You want to prevent abortions? Prevent the pregnancy before it happens, this isn’t fucking rocket science. But nope, that’s not what they want, what they want is women too afraid of the consequences of sex to engage in it.
Though, this all has reminded me to check a thing. Some women had uterus transplants long enough ago that the ones where IVF “took” should’ve given birth by now… kinda a big deal if it worked. BRB with research.
That was easy, it’s been a year (man am I behind) so wiki has the details — https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterus_transplantation#First_successful_pregnancy
In short, healthy baby born from a transplanted uterus. Welcome to the future?
yutolia, I just did a post on the shooter-is-trans nonsense, which I heard about from your comment. I’ll happily give you credit in the post for tipping me off if you’d like.
Also, hugging your dog sounds like a good plan for today.
@Argenti Aertheri
Steal away! 🙂
I’d actually really love it if at some point you could see if you found your previous research about the mass murders. There are some incredibly hard heads to get to with information, I’d love to at least have some numbers to throw at them.
I previously cited the FBI murder stats to show the ratio of murdered wives and girlfriends to husbands and boyfriends, and indeed the gender stats of committed murders. Unfortunately this was done for a finnish guy and he disregarded my source because USA is an n-word state,
Sigh, racism and misogyny go together like a horse and carriage…yny.
And if we get another of those “but mental illness is scary and everyone who has it goes out and kills people!” trolls in here, I swear to St. Dymphna that I’m going to spam them with pictures of creepy garden gnomes.
Leda Atomica — I have GoogleFu. I found it — https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2012/07/19/update-norwegian-mens-rights-blogger-eivind-berge-will-be-held-for-four-more-weeks-due-to-the-risk-of-recurrence-of-new-criminal-offenses/comment-page-3/#comment-178457 — looks like I spent my 27th birthday crunching numbers to shut up NWO, I need a life >.<
Thank you very much!
At least you did something, if memory serves my 27th was spent facebooking with too much wine. Way too much wine.
Find and copy the link? No problem! And oh was I drunk, so so drunk, if you read that thread I think it was in there that I was granted permission to drunk post, I apparently get quite funny the drunker I get!