What We Know About Sandy Hook

The official police investigation into the killer behind the Sandy Hook massacre has closed and the final report offer frustratingly few answers. Authorities found no evidence that he'd ever spoken about any plans to commit the crime to anyone else, but that this crime was committed for reasons we'll never know. He'd had no contact with anyone at the school, so it couldn't have been some argument or feud. And the "violent video games" theory? Adam Lanza seemed obsessed with only one video game in particular, according to CNN.

But while many of his video games were violent, others were not. For months before the killings at Sandy Hook, he would go to a movie theater on weekends to play the dance game "Dance Dance Revolution" for hours, the report recounts.

Maybe he was playing violent video games at home. But so do plenty of other people. Only one went out and committed an unimaginably horrific crime. If a video game drove him to a murderous state of mind, there's more evidence that video game was "Dance Dance Revolution" than "Call of Duty."

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America is Getting Tired of Your Cowardice and Your Guns

I suppose it's wrong to hope that gun extremists all wind up killing each other off. Still, it's not hard to imagine it happening. If there are two things that are hallmarks of the Second Amendment Hero, they're incredibly bad judgment and a yellow-streak a mile wide. After all, the obsessive need to carry a firearm with you every place you go and to collect arsenals of weapons and piles of ammunition is not evidence of an overabundance of courage. And bad judgment? Well,this comes to mind:

ThinkProgress: Earlier this month, two men decided to wander into a crowded farmers market in Appleton, Wisconsin each with an AR-15 assault rifle strapped across their back. They did not make it to the market. After several residents called 911, expressing concerns about the two gun-toting men. Police briefly detained the men, with at least one officer drawing his weapon after they determined that the assault rifles were real. The men were briefly handcuffed and detained but were eventually released without citations.

Although open carry is legal in Wisconsin, police say they stopped the men to prevent a panic — “walking into a farmers market filled with a couple thousand individuals would be a recipe for disaster.” Yet the a county attorney told the Appleton Post-Crescent that the men could not be charged because “they had not made it to the farmers market” at the point when they were stopped and the men are reportedly considering a lawsuit against the police. In video of the men’s encounter with the police, one of the men tells an officer that they are carrying a highly visible pair of assault rifles into a crowded public market for “self defense.”

Meanwhile, there's no shortage of concealed-carry dopes wandering around among the sweet corn, nursing their own paranoid fantasies of needing their sidearms at any moment for self-protection. And here come two clowns who look exactly like what you'd expect mass shooters to look like -- after all, that's why people called the cops on them in the first place. Take all this cowardice and mix it all together and you've turned a farmers' market into a powder keg -- for absolutely no good reason. These two Second Amendment Heroes may sue the cops for not allowing them to disturb the peace, because conservatives are opposed to frivolous lawsuits right up until they're not. When it comes to having government fail to enable their emotional instabilities, gun owners can get pretty whiny.

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When Gun Nuts Abandon Guns as Their Method of 'Tyrant-Killing'

For a while now, I've been arguing that the gun lobby's and Tea Party's interpretation of the Second Amendment amounts to advocating terrorism. There's no small amount of bullying thuggishness in the threat to start shooting "tyrants" if you don't get your way. They would have us believe that the founders intended that constitutionality be tested not by the courts, but by wild-eyed, poorly-informed loons who believe that "unconstitutional" means "something I don't agree with." And that the remedy for an unconstitutional law or act isn't to reverse it in the judiciary, but to start blasting. Luckily, people who feel the need to hide behind piles of guns and ammo aren't exactly paragons of courage, so the threat had remained a threat.

Until now.

New York Times: Two letters that contained threats to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg — one addressed to him, the other to a lobbyist who works on his gun control campaign — have tested positive for the deadly poison ricin, the authorities said on Wednesday.

The first letter was opened at a New York City mail center in Lower Manhattan on Friday, the police said. Although staff members at the mail center do not appear to have become ill, several police officers who came into contact with the letter’s contents “indicated some mild symptoms the next day, including diarrhea,” and they are being treated in hospitals, the New York Police Department’s spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said on Wednesday afternoon. “They’re being checked out as a precaution.”

The second letter, which was opened on Sunday in Washington, was addressed to Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Mr. Bloomberg helps run and finances, officials said. Mr. Glaze opened the letter, an official said. No injuries were reported, Mr. Browne said.

"Both letters were identical in content, bore references to the debate over gun regulation and contained written threats to Mayor Bloomberg," the report tells us.

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Bachmann's Career Dies as it Lived -- Running Scared from Any Hint of Accountability

During her presidential run, soon-to-be former Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann developed a reputation for having a rocky relationship with the press. It wasn't so much the media's fault, as it was Shelly's.

Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News (Aug., 2011): CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon says that Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, and two members of her campaign staff pushed him into a golf cart during a campaign stop at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines before Bachmann's victory in Saturday's straw poll.

"She came out, after speaking for just a couple minutes," Lemon said on CNN. "There were other reporters and cameras there. And I asked her very respectful questions: 'How do you think you did in the debate last night?' and 'How do you think you're going to end up in the Ames Straw Poll?' And her two campaign aides started elbowing me."

Lemon continued: "I told them, asked them not to elbow me. And then her husband Marcus started doing the same thing. And then he elbowed me into the cart. And I said, 'You just pushed me into the cart.' And he goes, 'No, you did it yourself.'"

The entire incident struck Lemon as odd, since he was just doing general reporting. "We weren't asking any 'gotcha' questions," he said. The same story covers a similar incident with ABC's Brian Ross, who was "manhandled" by Bachmann security after asking a question about Bachmann's tendency toward migraine headaches.

"I was never closer than 10 or 12 feet to her," Ross said later. "The people around her recognized me and came up and identified themselves as with the staff said they knew who I was. And the blocking was all about me. Other cameraman, other reporters were allowed to get close." See, Ross is scary because he's ABC's investigative reporter

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