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Open Thread for discussion of San Bernardino mass shooting

The scene outside the Inland Regional Center
The scene outside the Inland Regional Center

At least 14 people have been killed in a mass shooting at a center for people with developmental disabilities in San Bernardino, involving multiple shooters in combat gear and using assault weapons. Police say that two suspects have been killed, one man, one woman; a third suspect has been detained. As I write this it’s not clear who the attackers were, what motivated them.

Please post any relevant information you find in the comments below.

See here for ongoing coverage.

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Falconer
8 years ago

@lightcastle, what I heard was the third person was observed fleeing the scene, and was apprehended, and it turned out they were very sensibly fleeing the scene because motherfuckin’ flying bullets, but unfortunately they were the subject of an outstanding misdemeanor warrant unrelated to the shooting, so they get to be a guest of the San Bernardino taxpayers for a day or two.

raysa
raysa
8 years ago
Reply to  David Futrelle

YAY I CAN REPLY TO YOU.

That’s all. Much better for me, since my intellect is very limited.

weirwoodtreehugger
8 years ago

Oh good. It’s back. I’ve been going through Mammoth withdrawal!

Testing to see if the Blockquote Mammoth has at last been defeated.

Falconer
8 years ago
Reply to  David Futrelle

@David:

It’s a tweet by Grasswire:

https://twitter.com/GrasswireNow/status/672835250121129984

that I found in this Gawker article, it’s practically the first thing:

http://gawker.com/msnbc-reporter-rifles-through-san-bernardino-shooters-a-1746220523

Apparently the landlord was escorted away by the police at some point:

https://twitter.com/passantino/status/672855452795834368

LG.
LG.
8 years ago

David, I honestly and earnestly fear that the new “reply” option will be the death of the WHTM community as we know it. No, really. I’ve noticed that close-knit comments communities tens to form on blogs where this is not an option and die when it is.

Cerulean (Miss A)
Cerulean (Miss A)
8 years ago

I never had the chance to give you all an update over here since WHtM was down yesterday. (Nice job on the site move, David! Looks awesome!)

So I told you all about my friend’s friend? The one who was said to have been shot and recovering? Turned out that was an error; he was one of the fatalities. Understandable, my friend (along with everyone else who knew this person) took it extremely hard. And it hurt just reading about it.

For those who haven’t read it, the article about my friend’s friend. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-san-bernardino-daniel-kaufman-boyfriend-20151203-story.html

lightcastle
lightcastle
8 years ago

@Falconer – That tracks more or less with what I heard, explaining why they were picked up, held, and then released.

Virtually Out of Touch
Virtually Out of Touch
8 years ago
Orion
8 years ago

Honestly, I don’t mind “reply.” It’s true that it seems to prevent communities from *forming* (though Captain Awkward has replies), but I’ve seen communities like Slacktivist move to threading after they were well-established, with no particular harm I could see.

PieterB
PieterB
8 years ago

@Cerulean (Miss A) We weren’t actually friends, but I knew him; I worked at Ale I for about a decade. Never saw him without that sunny smile. Taking on the NRA just hit my “Things to do for the rest of my life” list.

kupo
kupo
8 years ago
Reply to  Orion

The Mary Sue is another example of a nested comments section with a great community. However, it’s heavily moderated, and I’d hate for the mods here to have to work harder if nested comments make it more prone to trolls. Also, it’s easier to get caught up on the most recent posts if the comments are flat.

guy
guy
8 years ago

FBI now believe it was a terrorist attack.

Media reports that there was a Facebook post by the wife pledging allegiance to ISIS that got deleted before the shooting; no official confirmation or denial. ISIS is claiming responsibility now, but they’re usually faster, so I’m guessing that this wasn’t planned by the group as a whole.

msexceptiontotherule
msexceptiontotherule
8 years ago

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/12/04/attorney-for-san-bernardino-attackers-family-floats-hoax-theory/

And then there’s this….(sigh) The washington post should be ashamed, the attorney should be informally reprimanded as a state bar member for the appearance of impropriety and being a jerkface about the ethics here…a conspiracy theory? Really mr. lawyerdude? That’s what you want to start on?! No! Wait until you’re hired as a legal consultant for faux news shows, they’ll love that stuff.

Argenti Aertheri
Argenti Aertheri
8 years ago
Reply to  David Futrelle

Since I needed to do some WP stuff anyways, I checked 🙂

From the sidebar on your admin page, settings -> discussion.

If you guys need more eyes, let me know, I’d rather be debugging this than “why am I still maintaining your site you can update your own damned plugins or pay me” (aka this is why working for your friends for free can be really iffy)

chagrin
chagrin
8 years ago

I’ve come to a grim thought today. Whatever one’s perspective on gun control, I wonder what comes to mind when people say “good guy with a gun.” We have all heard this argument, that disarming law-abiding citizens makes them easy pickings for criminals who don’t respect the law in the first place. I’m not going to speak to whether that is true, or if it justifies allowing shooting after shooting even if it is.

What I’m more concerned with is the consequences of potentially mainstreaming Open Carry, an objective that seems to cause lots of NRA-boners.

Specifically, can a black man be a so-called “good guy with a gun?
In a nation where unarmed black men are frequently killed by trained law enforcement officers with near impunity, will Open Carry save or doom us? Think about what will happen if during a shooting all the people licensed to carry guns take them out to fire back. What will the authorities see when they arrive to contain the situation? They’ll see targets to neutralize.
“Oh but wait,” gun advocates will say. “That’s why licensed carriers can order Carry Badges to put on their belt.”
Leaving aside that this necessitates never appearing in public with an untucked shirt again, it never seems to occur to them that law enforcement authorities who see a black man with a gun in his hands are not liable to check to see if he has a Carry Badge.
This means that if Open Carry becomes mainstream, every person of color who chooses to do so will put themselves at risk. And anyone who doesn’t will essentially surrender themselves to being surrounded by white people with guns.
This, I fear, is the ultimate consequence of normalizing Open Carry. America will go from having subversive pockets of white supremacy to having scores of people screaming it in the open to spite their powerless counterparts.
I could be wrong. I really hope I am.

Sorry I said so many words.

Nazrala
Nazrala
8 years ago

You know that Syria have been going through this s*** for over 4 and a half year, right?

That happened because the US governement and its “allies” have been supporting the modern-day equivalent of the banderists, croatian ustases and Kwantung army.
Since 2011, the “democratic rebels” have been comitting a long series of bestial atrocities that even includes hanging 4 years old boy and taking a bite off a man´s heart. The “democratic” rebels in Benghazi butchered civilians like animals and Gaddafi was raped, thousands of black workers in Libya were killed or tortured.
Your president have not only carried out even more deadly drone strikes than Bush Jr, he even lied about the Syrian governement carrying out a chemical attack in order to start a war and destroy it, now the fear is that ISIL is about to use chemical weapons in european cities.
Even now, Saudi Arabia is waging a murderous war against Yemeni rebels, Yemen was the poorest arab country before the Saudi-lead intervention, kudos to the brave fighters resisting those murderous Saudi demons and their lackeys.
Your president knew that Erdogan was buying massive amounts from ISIL and Erdogan would never have ordered the downing of that Russian aircraft without the prior approvale from the White House.

Even before Obama took power, how many governements have the US & UK govs subverted? How many coups? How many bombing campaigns? How many economic dictates? How much has the war on drugs cost? How many millions have been in prison in the last decades? How many has been killed by the police with near impunity? Is the 18 trillion debt going to pay itself?

Yet some of you people seriously expects the US governement to safeguard and protect you by disarming the law abiding citizenry? How paternalistic and naïve!

Not only that, you outright insult those who would warn you of the dangers as being themselves dangerous, barely litterate, paranoide right-wingers.
Yet, local gun-control laws did not prevent this latest tragedy and the one in Paris, it only ensured the attackers could kill at will.
On the other hand, getting a single bullet between the eyes would have stopped Elliot Rodger cold.
How will Anita Sarkeesian protect herself if someone breaks into her home? Or David Futrelle himself for that matter, if he is attacked by that unemployed a***hole from Alabama?
The police cannot unrape and unmurder you.

Gun-control advocates did not even wait until the bodies were cold and stopped bleeding to push their agenda… they have my utter and utmost contempt.

Well no, sorry to disappoint you, there are left-wingers who supports the 2nd amendment. -)

http://orig13.deviantart.net/5b27/f/2015/209/4/9/pro_gun_far_left_by_americansfr-d9381m3.jpg

scarlettpipstrelle
8 years ago

I don’t usually pay much attention to rants about the evil our government may have done, because the people who are doing these attacks aren’t attacking our government. They’re deliberately attacking ordinary people whose only crime was to try and live out their lives. They went to a party, went to work, got on a plane, etc. The victims aren’t being chosen for the degree of their guilt or power. Nor are they dying accidentally as a result of some action targeted elsewhere. Even the planes flown into the Pentagon didn’t take out any high-ranking generals,. They attacked ordinary Americans, and we have the right to feel how we feel about that.

So, how many of our people are they going to kill before they’re happy? There were children on the planes. So, we have to sit still and accept the deaths of our loved ones and fellow citizens because somebody is mad at our government?

As a mother and grandmother in America, no I’m not going to accept the tribal notion that revenge is somehow justified. It has to stop somewhere. They complain about drones, then send sleepers after us. I’m not going to hand over ordinary Americans, not even theoretically, nor do I respond to guilt trips, ever, not for any reason.

Policy of Madness
Policy of Madness
8 years ago

Someone help me out: what is Nazrala on about? The first half of that seems to be a “well, y’all are asking for it by being Americans” sort of rant, while the other half is a “well, y’all are asking for it by not packing heat everywhere you go so you can play Rambo on the street” kind of thing.

How do these two rants connect? I’m not getting it.

scarlettpipstrelle
8 years ago

Policy, I think you were right the first time. A general guilt trip and threat, all wrapped up in one package. Trying to make us feel bad and insecure.

Falconer
8 years ago

Oh look, illiterate, paranoid, free-gun left-wingers.

Virtually Out of Touch
Virtually Out of Touch
8 years ago

““Oh but wait,” gun advocates will say. “That’s why licensed carriers can order Carry Badges to put on their belt.”

Misogyny much? How many women wear belts on the regular? Oh I guess “our men” are supposed to wear them and accompany us wherever we go, eh?

Falconer
8 years ago

I think the two paragraphs are connected by a theme of “can’t trust the government,” but there’s a twist in it.

Like, in the first paragraph, Nazrala is claiming that our government is imperialistic, meddling, violent and immune to reprisals, and that it could turn its wrath on any of us, so we can’t trust it to have our best interests in mind.

The second one is boilerplate “police are useless!” ranting, which also fosters the idea that we can’t trust our government — in the sense that it claims we can’t rely on them to protect us.

The unspoken conclusion is that an armed individual is protected from the government; but it hand-waves away the preponderance of the evidence, which is that in this country you don’t shoot a cop and live to tell about it.