Tag Archives: mass murder

In San Bernardino: A womb provides the perfect cover

So the woman apparently swore allegiance to ISIS on Facebook – that’s what AP and others report – meaning she viewed her womb as nothing more than cover. Staying in the US while deflecting suspicion – what better way than to have a child.

Meanwhile, Republicans are talking terrorism. Democrats talk guns.imgres

Both are right.

As this case unfolds, it seems to have more to do with fanaticism than anything else. The real question is, as this fanaticism spreads, should we be complicit in our own demise?

The ISIS connection, I guess, now doesn’t surprise me. This couple clearly had been planning some attack, given all the ammunition (thousands of rounds) and tools they possessed to make a dozen pipe bombs. So her entry into this country should only be viewed with suspicion.

Then, within a few years of returning from Saudi Arabia (home of Wahabi fanatics and the oil that we are addicted to), they’re married, with an infant daughter and, after much late-night work, they choose a holiday party of county employees a few weeks before Christmas to go off, kill people and leave their daughter an orphan.

All of that reeked with something more sophisticated than the typical insane killer a la Tucson or Aurora.

But the guy was a U.S. citizen, mild-mannered, county employee, from a family of at least one decorated US Navy sailor. How many of those are there in our country? Millions.

The question is: How easy are we making it for terrorists to do their job when someone can buy these kinds of assault weapons? That someone bought them for them is no surprise. This kind of straw purchase takes place at Arizona gun shows all the time. L.A. street gangs get their weapons this way, too.

Why is that an easy thing to do? That should not be easy – I see no reason why it should be legal in most cases at all. These guns are designed for the simple mowing down of people. Nothing else. Why don’t we know where each of those guns is and who owns them?

Senate Republicans just voted en masse against a bill that would have prevented the sale of arms to people on the FBI’s terrorism watchlist. That seems irresponsible. Particularly as they don’t appear to have any other solution to this problem, other than the mass arming of every American, a fanatical idea itself, it seems to me.

That is their final solution: A garrison state outside every holiday party and keeping the world out of the country.

Given Paris, Colorado Springs, South Carolina and now this, we are confronting something that combines classic political fanaticism with run-of-the-mill insanity. Mixing one more than the other, depending on the imgres-2case.

Dostoevsky had some things so say about that in his novel, The Devils, also known as The Possessed – an 1872 novel increasingly relevant to our times. It’s the denial of the individual, of one’s own existence, doubts, intellect, love and connection to others — all that prostrate before some perceived higher cause. At the same time, it’s an attempt to shred, destroy community, the public coming together of human beings.

Southern California has seen this before. The best example I’m aware of is in our street gangs, where nothing short of a brainwashing occurs in kids in their teens, teaching them that their 12-square-block area, their clica, is worth you dying or going to prison for. Hence, they dominated parks and street corners and didn’t pay too much attention to where their bullets flew. Saw that many times.

Heroin addicts display these brainwashed characteristics in devotion to their dope, I’ve noticed.

We saw it, too, in Colorado Springs or South Carolina, where loonies were killing for what they perceived was some higher cause. Even the Tucson guy, who was out of his mind, had some higher calling in mind, even if he couldn’t articulate it in a way any of us could understand.

In San Bernardino, the fanaticism is especially pronounced, of course. Even a womb was employed in its furtherance.imgres-1

The guy now seems a toady in comparison with the blind devotion of this woman he married – though we can only take that verb with a grain of salt.

What gives greatest pause is the couple’s target. Unlike the targets of previous killings, it’s unclear what a holiday party of county employees has to do with the larger goals of ISIS. Unless, of course, it’s simply to kill the way Americans live, the openness with which we conduct everyday life.

Any target is fine – place or human. That seems the clear conclusion here: sowing fear, shredding community, isolating us from each other.

Question is, then: Given that keeping that attitude out is almost impossible, are we going to be complicit in our demise?

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A Victim List in San Bernardino

A list of victims in San Bernardino reads like the wondrous cross-section of America that makes this country such a beacon to the rest of the world, so threatening to fanatics (foreign and domestic), and which is under attack by these now daily shootings everywhere.

They were Vietnamese, Latino, white, black, Jewish, Christian, gay, straight. One guy dressed as Santa Claus every year; another guy trained autistic kids to work in the cafe in the center where this happened and volunteered for the Renaissance Faire every year.

“Faire teaches us that everyone’s ideas are valid,” one man who knew him told the LA Times. “It gives us a greater understanding of each other and the world in general.”

Quite. The antidote to fanaticism is the Renaissance Faire. I buy that.

Which makes it hard, painful to watch the details of who these people were come out.

Meanwhile, this story continues to mess with our conceptions, including my own.

I’ve covered several of these and I always expect the shooters to be white American men, because so many of them have been.

This time … a mild-mannered US-born killer of Pakistani extraction, living in SoCal suburbia, perhaps radicalized by a trip to Saudi Arabia (What a surprise! When do we wean ourselves from the oil this country controls?). There, he got engaged and somehow got his woman into the country, where she was next seen shooting it out with cops Bonnie and Clyde style after killing and wounding people at a holiday party.

And his brother was a decorated US Navy vet.

Still my question is: Who has a daughter six months before and decides then that today is just a great day to leave her an orphan? And why/how would you come to that conclusion?

And then why would you think that killing people you work with, who just months before had thrown you a baby shower, is the answer to your torments? If terrorism is your goal, how does taking out a holiday party in San Bernardino, far in every way from power, fulfill it?

Clearly he wasn’t insane, in the way that the South Carolina guy or Tucson or Aurora guys probably were. They were obviously planning something for a long time, with that much ammunition and weaponry on hand – all with an infant in the house. 12 pipe bombs, thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Of course, religious fanaticism is one of the few things that will deny the parenting instinct. So maybe that’s it. Saw a similar kind of fanaticism in Colorado Springs last week.

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What’s left to say about mass murder

In my reporting career, I have covered seven American mass murders – one in 1989 in Stockton, and the rest in the last decade.

One was a guy parking his SUV in front of a commuter train (25 dead). The rest were committed with guns, usually by dylann-roofderanged drifting people – all men, five of them white – who had remarkably easy access to high-powered guns.

I don’t know what more there is to say about these events. Seriously. They’re now so common that they have devolved into babble-fodder for our politico-cultural wars on the toxic battlefield of 24-hour cable news. Such a network, I suspect, could plan its profitability around the certainty of a boost in viewership from a couple of these events every year.

Somehow, despite all the talk, we never get around to doing anything about it.

We talked a lot but did nothing meaningful after Tucson and Aurora. Then 26 kids were shot to death at an elementary school and we did nothing. We did talk a lot, though.

People nowadays fall into rote after these events, saying profound things that have devolved into cliches from overuse.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out …” That’s a deep, poetic thing to say – that my thoughts and prayers I’m sending out in hopes they will soothe you and bind your wounds, that I am feeling for you and hope that in doing so it will lessen your pain. Yet it sounds trite any more.

I used to think that seven mass murders was a large number of mass murders to have covered in one’s reporting career.

Now another lost and drifting lunatic kills nine people in a church. A guy who by 21 is going nowhere, who apparently at one point had been abusing Suboxone (a heroin-addiction treatment). This time the guy has a racial animus.

Terrorist? I guess. Probably. Who knows?

“He looks bored,” one little girl I know said, upon seeing his mugshot. That’s sounds about right. His dad, bugging him to get a job, may have given him a gun for a 21st birthday present. Who does that? And why? To give him some direction in life? I don’t have the slightest idea why someone would do that.

(NOTE: It was later reported that Dylann Roof had, in fact, purchased the gun himself that he used in the church.)

I don’t know what to say any more about people who do these killings, or legislators who won’t do anything about these events, or 24-hour cable news babble, or dads who give their lost sons guns for presents, or a country that so easily moves on.

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FOR THE RECORD: Newtown Shooting and Adam Lanza

Today’s LA Times story is about Adam Lanza, the shooter in the Sandy Hook Elementary School horror in Newtown, Connecticut….

Here’s what didn’t make it into the story, from Olivia DeVivo, a thoughtful junior at UConn, who was kind enough to share her thoughts about the kid with whom she shared an English class when they both were sophomores at Newtown High School:

“…For Olivia DeVivo, Adam Lanza was a mystery throughout her sophomore year.

The two were in an Honors English class, reading Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn and Of Mice and Men.

Lanza sat in front of DeVivo, now 20, who remembers a young man who was thin, heartbreakingly shy and friendless.

“It was almost painful to have a conversation with him because he felt so uncomfortable,” DeVivo said.

DeVivo remembered a youth who was not “slacking off in the back of the classroom. He appeared to be paying attention, but when it came to class participation or any kind of interaction, he was not capable.”

“I’m not sure who his friends were. You can tell when there’s something a little off about a person. You could tell that it was more than just being shy,” she said.

Still, she said, “I never associated him with, or knew he had, any kind of disability.”

For a while Friday morning, five years later, DeVivo said she had trouble placing the name when she heard it for the first time connected to the shooting. It was only when she saw his photo that the memories of that sophomore English class came flooding back.

“I spent so much time in my English class wondering what he was thinking,” she said.

DeVivo is now at the University of Connecticut, double-majoring in Spanish and in psychology – the latter a long-time interest of hers.

“I think it was more because I was interested in psychology that I paid more attention and thinking maybe there was something more going on with him,” she said. “I didn’t want to reach out to him because he didn’t seem like he wanted to be approached and I didn’t want to put him in an uncomfortable.”

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