Rev Sen Warnock Has Had Just About Enough Of Well-Regulated American Gun Violence
Another day, another mass shooting … literally.
Wednesday afternoon, 24-year-old Deion Patterson opened fire in a downtown Atlanta medical office building. He killed a 39-year-old woman and injured four other women, aged 25, 39, 56, and 71. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said the four injured women “are fighting for their lives at Grady Hospital."
According to Atlanta Police Chief Darin Schierbaum, it's unclear if Patterson had specifically targeted the victims. We also don't know if their gender was a factor. However, Patterson's mother was with him during the shooting. Fortunately, she was uninjured. Patterson's family is cooperating with law enforcement.
Atlanta police lifted a shelter-in-place advisory more than two hours after the shooting when they could find no evidence that Patterson was still in the area. However, the police urged people to stay away from the area of investigation and especially from the suspect if they were to encounter him. Patterson remained at large until Wednesday evening when he was arrested without major incident.
KJ Johnson was in the Northside medical building for his son's medical appointment, and he learned about the shooting while watching it all unfold on a waiting room television.
"At that time, we had no idea there was a shooting. But then the television was on and there was breaking news on the television. And they mentioned that there was an active shooter and they gave the address and the address was the building that we were in," Johnson said outside the building.
The shooting took place just two floors above him, he recounted.
"We were in the ninth floor. So once everyone heard the shooting happened on the 11th floor, you can imagine that some of the folks in the room got a little nervous, a little tense," he said.
It's just another day, and another regularly scheduled mass shooting in America. Texas police just caught Francisco Oropesa, who'd gunned down five of his neighbors last week, after a four-day manhunt. This can't be how we should live because of the paranoid demands of a gun-obsessed minority.
During a gut-wrenching speech on the Senate floor, Georgia's Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock noted how this latest shooting impacted his own children, who live in Atlanta.
\u201cGeorgia Sen. Raphael Warnock reacts to the deadly shooting in Atlanta: "It underscores the fact that none of us are safe, no matter where we are. This happened in a medical facility, where people are trying to find healing.\u201d\u201d— MSNBC (@MSNBC) 1683144560
"I feel it in my bones because my own two children were on lockdown this afternoon. I have two small children and their schools are on lockdown responding to this tragedy. They're there, I'm here, hoping and praying they're safe," Warnock said, adding with regret, "But the truth is none of us are safe."
"The unspoken assumption is that this won’t happen to me, this won’t happen to someone I love," he continued. "But with a mass shooting a day, the chances are great."
There have been at least 160 mass shooting so far this year, and Wednesday, May 3, was just the 123rd day of the year. They occur so often, Warnock warns, that "tragically we act as if this is routine."
"We behave as if this is normal. It is not normal. It is not right for us to live in a nation where nobody's safe no matter where they are. We're not safe in our schools. We're not safe in our workplaces. We're not safe at the grocery store. We're not safe at movie theaters. We're not safe at spas. We're not safe in our houses of worship. There is no sanctuary in the sanctuary."
EVERYWHERE WE'RE NOT SAFE:
After Nashville School Shooting, Republicans Are Ready To Regulate Trans People
Well-Regulated Bank Employee Kills Five, Injures Eight In Louisville, Kentucky
Another A-Hole With An AR-15 Shoots Up An Oregon Supermarket
Dark Knight Shooting Victims Practically Shot Themselves, Says Prominent Arizona Idiot
Conservatives Would Hate If Atlanta Shooter’s Hate Crime Was Considered Hate Crime
11 Dead In Shooting At Synagogue. Can All This Shit Please Stop Now?
Warnock is a pastor so of course he's "praying for those who are affected by this tragedy," but he also knows that "thoughts and prayers are not enough." That's not blasphemy. It's scripture: James 2:26 states, "For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead ..." This Bible verse motivates Warnock the politician.
"In fact, it is a contradiction to say that you are thinking and praying and then do nothing. It is to make a mockery of prayer. It is to trivialize faith. We pray not only with our lips, we pray with our legs. We pray by taking action."
We can no longer fall victim to despair or to the hip cynicism that says that after Sandy Hook, the gun debate was over. Regular gun violence should never stop horrifying us and never stop inspiring us to action, to demanding a better tomorrow today.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter if it still exists.
Catch SER on his new podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
Did you know SER has his own YouTube Channel? Well, now you do, so go subscribe right now!
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty.
VA School Board: Workers Comp Should Cover Teacher’s Shooting By Six-Year-Old Just Fine
Abby Zwerner has sued the Newport News school board for $40 million.
Virginia teacher Abby Zwerner was shot in January by a six-year-old student at Richneck Elementary School. The child pulled a handgun from his desk, pointed it at Zwerner, and fired a single bullet through her hand and into her chest. She is still recovering physically and emotionally from this very American experience.
The school was warned three times that the six-year-old student had a gun but did nothing, and Zwerner has sued Newport News school board for $40 million. She accuses school leaders of "recklessly disregarding the safety" of everyone on school grounds. The school board filed a motion to dismiss the suit last week. Not even the best lawyers could argue that Zwerner's injuries are psychosomatic, but their actual argument is only slightly less absurd.
Law firm Pender and Coward (that's right) represents the Newport News School Board, former Newport News School Superintendent Dr. George Parker III, and former Richneck Elementary Principal Briana Foster-Newton. (Parker was fired outright after the shooting, but Foster-Newton was reassigned.) Pender and Coward argue that Zwerner's claims fall under Virginia's Workers’ Compensation Act, as if her injuries were something she could have reasonably expected to receive at her place of employment.
PREVIOUSLY: Well-Regulated Six-Year-Old Shoots Virginia Schoolteacher
... workers’ compensation exists for the benefit of employees for the purpose of providing coverage for workplace injuries without having to prove negligence on the part of the employer. Plaintiff is not without remedy; her remedy is dictated by the Virginia Workers’ Compensation Act and the provisions contained therein. The Newport News Circuit Court does not have jurisdiction to hear workers’ compensation claims.
The response from Zwerner's legal team was more grounded in reality:
No one believes that a first grade teacher should expect that one of the risks of teaching first grade is that you might get shot by a six-year-old. The school board’s position is contrary to how every citizen in Newport News thinks teachers should be treated, and the law does not support the board’s position. Teachers across the district will be alarmed to learn their employer sees this as part of the job description.
Zwerner has not yet returned to work. The bullet that shot her is still lodged in her chest. However, the defendants aren't just trying to avoid true accountability. They're attempting to normalize gun violence in schools. Zwerner was trained and hired as a teacher. She's not a cop, who is armed and empowered to use lethal force.
"In a perfect world, no teacher would ever be injured by one of their students at school… or anywhere," the attorneys wrote. "However, unruly students and bad behavior are all too common in schools across the country, and Newport News is sadly not immune to this."
That kid wasn't unruly. He didn't kick her in the shin and hold his breath until she let him play with a toy. He fucking shot her.
Last month, a grand jury indicted the six-year-old shooter's mother, Deja Taylor, for felony child neglect and a misdemeanor charge of endangering a child by reckless storage of a firearm. The felony charge is punishable by up to five years and prison and the misdemeanor charge carries another year. According to Taylor's lawyer, James Ellenson, she has no criminal record and insists her weapon was safely secured on a top shelf with a trigger lock. She's either terribly mistaken or her son is a Houdini-style savant. The child is not being charged, as Virginia law surprisingly does not allow charges on children under seven because they are children under seven.
It was reported that the child has an “acute disability” that requires his mother or father accompanying him to school every day. The shooting occurred the first week a parent wasn't with him. This seems like another area where the school administrators might've failed everyone involved.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter if it still exists.
Catch SER on his new podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
Did you know SER has his own YouTube Channel? Well, now you do, so go subscribe right now!
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty.
TX Gunman Kills Five, Including Child, With America's Favorite Freedom Maker, The AR-15
We should never consider this normal.
Wilson Garcia and his wife Sonia Guzman were trying to keep their baby asleep Friday night, but his Cleveland, Texas, neighbor Francisco Oropeza was shooting his gun in his yard, which is both distracting and terrifying. Garcia politely asked Oropeza to stop, but Oropeza — with all the swaggering bravado a gun provides — refused: His yard. His rules. (This is not actually true. Even Texas has some minimal rules about firearm discharge on private property.)
Garcia threatened to call the police, and Oropeza, who'd reportedly been drinking, went inside his house and returned with a AR-15 — the weapon of choice for mass shootings. He walked over to Garcia's home and shot and killed Guzman, who'd just called the police and was standing in the front door. The massacre continued, as Oropeza fatally shot four other people "almost execution stye" inside the home.
A devastated Garcia said in an interview: "He wanted to kill us all to leave no evidence."
One of the survivors of Oropeza's rampage told Edgar Sandoval at the New York Times how Oropeza shot his sister, nephew, and other loved ones. He hid his wife and their six-month-old in a closet. Sandoval tweeted, "He left Honduras 5 yrs ago to escape gang violence & found himself victim of America’s gun epidemic."
Sonia Guzman was 25. The FBI has identified the other victims as Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Juliza Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and eight-year-old Daniel Enrique Laso.
\u201cA man who survived the #clevelandtexas shooting told me how he saw the gunman shoot his sister, nephew & other relatives & he pulled his wife & 6 mo old into a closet. He left Honduras 5 yrs ago to escape gang violence & found himself victim of America\u2019s gun epidemic @nytimes\u201d— Edgar Sandoval \ud83e\ude90 (@Edgar Sandoval \ud83e\ude90) 1682816360
PREVIOUSLY:
Guns, Guns Everywhere But Never A Shooter Who Thinks
Well-Regulated POS Fatally Shoots 20-Year-Old Woman Who Pulled Into His Driveway
Kansas City Confirms It Is Crime To Shoot Black Teenager Who Rings Your Doorbell
Only A Sick Culture Worships Guns
Oropeza was still at large as of Sunday. Local police say he could be anywhere! He is considered "armed and dangerous," which unfortunately applies to far too many well-regulated citizens with their freely available death machines. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott seized on the chance to note that Oropeza and his victims were allegedly in the country illegally. Diana Velazquez Alvarado was actually a permanent legal resident, but Abbott isn't one to let facts get in the way of his inhumanity.
\u201c@GregAbbott_TX This is despicable. I would have thought bringing up the immigration status of the innocent victims of this senseless violence would be beneath even you. But I was wrong.\u201d— Greg Abbott (@Greg Abbott) 1682889323
After another regularly scheduled mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, Rep. Tim Burchett from Knoxville appalled decent people everywhere with his nihilistic remarks about gun violence: "We're not gonna fix this." CNN's Jim Acosta reminded Burchett about these stupid words he'd said out loud during an interview Saturday.
\u201cWhat a fucking farce: A sitting US Congressman from Tennessee tries to blame godlessness and \u201cfreedom\u201d for gun violence, saying it\u2019s not his job to fix this crisis and it\u2019s too late anyway because 3D printers. Enjoy your mayhem, America!!!\u201d— Shannon Watts (@Shannon Watts) 1682817904
"You like to speak plain English to folks," Acosta said, "but a lot of people listen to what you said and say it is your job to fix [gun violence] and it's unacceptable to have mass shooting after mass shooting after mass shooting. Why not fix this? Get together with the Democrats and get it done."
Burchett claimed he was "probably speaking more from a Christian perspective." He added, "We need a real revival in this country. I feel like we've turned away from the Lord. I know that maybe that makes people's heads spin off when they hear somebody like me say that ..."
Yes, because it's absurd. As Acosta points out, Christianity exists in other countries without rampant, escalating gun violence. Meanwhile, in America, there are mass shootings occurring in Republican-run states where white evangelicals have an anti-democratic chokehold on government. The only people showing up with guns at drag queen story hours and brunches are the supposed "Christians."
Burchett said those other countries "don't have our freedom." How exactly is he defining freedom? You can't take your kid to a drag story hour but you are free to hide your kid in the closet from a homicidal, gun-toting maniac.
From the New York Times:
Mr. Garcia said he went to a family member’s house to hide. But then he returned to his home.
“I came back for my two children,” he said. “They were hiding in the closet. The two women protecting them when they died — they were hugging them.”
According to Carlos Ramirez, Mr. Garcia’s brother, the two women who were killed were shielding a 6-week-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, who survived.
Texas Republicans have promoted legislation restricting reproductive rights,gender-affirming care, and drag performances. These are not people who value freedom to a fault. They just thrive politically on fear and mayhem, no matter the human cost.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter if it still exists.
Catch SER on his new podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
Did you know SER has his own YouTube Channel? Well, now you do, so go subscribe right now!
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty.
Pentagon Leaker Idjit Was Caught Before He Could Do Any Mass Shootings
He seems nice.
Federal prosecutors argued at a hearing yesterday that Massachusetts Air National Guard guy Jack Teixeira needs to stay in jail before his trial for allegedly leaking classified Pentagon documents. The 21-year-old walking security risk should be detained until trial because he gave up a ton of military secrets for the sake of impressing his gamer dork friends on Discord, the prosecutors said. Teixeira also regularly talked about his desire to equip a minivan or SUV as an "assassination van" and to "kill a [expletive] ton of people," for the lulz we guess. The DOJ detention memo did not specify whether that was a shit ton of people or a fuck ton of people, nor whether, if it were the latter, he meant a metric or standard fuck ton.
Magistrate Judge David Hennessy didn't make an immediate decision yesterday on whether Teixeira will be kept in jail before trial, or to grant his attorneys' request that he be allowed to stay under supervision at his father's home, because he's a good boy who would definitely stay off the internet and there's no chance he'd flee.
The feds' court filing detailed Teixeira's murderous fantasies, as well as the trove of weapons he'd collected, and argued that he's too much of a flight risk to let out of jail, particularly since he might still have classified information that hasn't yet made it to public view. That information, the government argued, could be of "tremendous value to hostile nation states that could offer him safe harbor and attempt to facilitate his escape from the United States."
We can see that the government wouldn't want to risk that, even if it would settle online arguments about whether Thor could beat the Russian military in Ukraine alone, or if he'd need help from Doctor Strange or Captain America. (Iron Man or Captain Marvel would be too over-powered to make the argument worth even having.)
The feds show that Teixeira has a long history of talking about killing and shit, going back to an incident in high school (in March 2018, which was like last Tuesday for most of us) that led to his suspension after
a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats. In the pretrial services interview, the Defendant attributed those remarks to a reference to a video game.
Call us skeptical, since we're pretty sure that "guns at the school and racial threats" aren't part of any video games, unless maybe Teixeira had downloaded the special School Shooter Expansion Pack. That incident also kept Teixeira from being approved for a firearms ID card, since 1) local police knew about it and 2) Massachusetts actually has sane firearms laws.
But the boy really wanted guns, and was eventually able to buy a small arsenal after getting his application approved, in part because he "cited his position of trust in the United States government as a reason he could be trusted to possess a firearm." Who says government lawyers don't have a sense of irony?
When Teixeira was arrested, FBI agents found a gun locker in his bedroom containing "multiple weapons, including handguns, bolt-action rifles, shotguns, an AK-style high-capacity weapon, and a gas mask." Elsewhere in his room, agents found ammunition, "tactical pouches," and what seems to be a silencer, which would be illegal unless he had a license.
And then there's the jolly social media posts where he talked up all the murder he wanted to do:
The Defendant’s statements included the following:
• In November 2022, the Defendant stated that if he had his way, he would “kill a [expletive] ton of people” because it would be “culling the weak minded.”
• In February 2023, the Defendant told a user that he was tempted to make a specific type of minivan into an “assassination van.”
• Also in February 2023, the Defendant sought advice from another user about what type of rifle would be easy to operate from the back of an SUV. He describes how he would conduct the shooting in a “crowded urban or suburban environment.”
• In March 2023, the Defendant described SUVs and crossovers as “mobile gun trucks” and “[o]ff-road and good assassination vehicles.”
OK but who among us hasn't occasionally told all our online buds that we need to cull the weak by going full DC sniper? Oh, all of us?
The filing also noted that Teixeira had taken some very half-assed steps to try to cover his tracks, since tampering with witnesses and destroying evidence are among the criteria that can be used to order detention until trial. He deleted the Discord server where he had shared the classified documents, told friends to "delete all messages" and "If anyone comes looking, don’t tell them shit," and gotten a new phone number and email address.
Teixeira also smashed up a tablet, a laptop, and his Xbox — although he may not be a super spy, since the FBI found the devices in a dumpster at his parents' house, where he lived.
At yesterday's hearing, the AP reports, Judge Hennessey
expressed skepticism of defense arguments that the government hasn’t alleged Teixeira intended leaked information to be widely disseminated.
“Somebody under the age of 30 has no idea that when they put something on the internet that it could end up anywhere in this world?” the judge asked. “Seriously?”
We can only assume that Teixeira's defense in the case will be that he's simply too fucking stupid to have been a threat to national security.
[AP / Pretrial Detention Memo / Vox]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 or $10 monthly to help us keep you on top of all the classified intelligence the yoots of today are posting online.
