Lone Wolves and angry drivers — an update
by digby
So the other day I wrote a post about a shooting that happened as a result of a fender bender. It was a harrowing tale of a woman who was allegedly shot in her driveway by an assailant who followed her home after the accident and shot her.
There’s an update to that story:
A woman who was fatally shot after an apparent “road rage” incident went looking for the suspect with her armed son, police said, and was likely not followed home immediately after the street encounter as was previously thought.
Police now believe it was only after Tammy Meyers and her 22-year-old son went out and found the suspect Thursday that they were apparently followed home, said Lt. Ray Steiber, who is in charge of the homicide section at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
“There was a volley of rounds fired from that vehicle,” Steiber said at a news conference Tuesday, adding that the son then returned fire. “All indications … are that this unknown person had fired shots first.”
Meanwhile, a candlelight vigil was held Tuesday evening outside Walter Johnson Junior High School, where Meyers was giving her 15-year-old daughter a driving lesson in the parking lot before the encounter.
“I did what I had to do to protect my family,” Brandon Meyers, the son who fired at the car, said at the vigil. “And I’d do it for anyone I love.”
Now for reasons that are not quite clear to me some commenters seem to believe that these new details disprove my point about this sort of thing being just as scary as the threat of Lone Wolf terrorism and that we live with the terror of random violence every day because of our gun culture.
I wrote this:
There is no apparent path in this country to curb the kind of random violence that occurs every day among our own people for the most mundane of reasons, even when people are mowed down in movie theatres and armed lunatics shoot 1st graders by the dozens.
And yet I hear ridiculous crapola like this all day long on cable news networks, the worst of which on Fox and CNN are basically running snuff porn as often as possible and pimping the most hysterical ideas possible. Yesterday terrorism expert Bob baer said on CNN that ISIS was “the worst pandemic of violence ever” and that it was inevitable that American lone wolves inspired by ISIS would attack us here: “I can see them coming.”
Apparently if you are killed by a lone wolf ISIS misfit the death is worse than if you are killed by a miscreant with a gun who gets upset over a fender bender or a parking place. I don’t know why that should be, especially since the latter is far more likely than the former.
I certainly understand why the Europeans are freaking out. They aren’t used to random gun violence. And needless to say, the fact that Jews are being specifically targeted is extremely horrifying. Terrorism carries a special brand of fear due to its political motivation.
But the “lone wolf” threat in the US? Considering the threat we live with from our fellow “lone wolf” citizens every day, even from political violence, it ridiculously hysterical. Nobody bats an eye at abortion clinics being targeted for years on end. A couple of right wing lunatics gunned down police officers in Las Vegas with a political beef a few months back and we didn’t launch a national crusade against it. We can’t even sustain any alarm at kids shooting up kids in schools for longer than a couple of days. We hardly even report it anymore it’s so old hat. If there’s one nation on earth that knows how to keep calm and carry on in the face of random armed misfits gunning down strangers it’s us.
To me, the new details about this story make it even more horrifying and prove my point even better. A couple of angry gun owners firing shots at each other over a car accident resulting in the death of one of them is about as useless a death as I can imagine. And it’s just random luck that someone didn’t get caught in that crossfire. That’s an insanely stupid scenario that makes even less sense than terrorism.
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