How the Gun Industry Profits Off the Carnage its Product Creates

It's one of the gun lobby's and firearms industry's most successful scams; the "fear buying" marketing campaign. The way it works is this, you convince a certain cowardly subset of the population that there's some imminent threat to their safety or that the government is minutes away from scooping up all their guns and said cowardly subset will run out in a fit of panic buying, like people who get into fights over water before a big storm.

And how do we know it's the same subset every time? Because the numbers are too contradictory any other way. After a string of high profile and extremely shocking killings in 2013, it started to look like some real action was about to take place in the arena of gun safety. That this didn't happen is a matter of national shame, but the panic buying set in, making 2013 a banner year for firearms sales.

So, did everyone run out and buy a lot of guns and ammunition? Actually, no. Hardly anyone did. A study launched by the General Social Survey showed that gun ownership was actually at a 40-year low. Logic dictates that these are the same panicky grandmas out buying guns in a Pavlovian response to perceived danger -- danger that the guns would become illegal, danger that some other unhinged shooter would attack them, or both. And the gun-buying was in no way rational. If you're extremely skilled, you might be able to use two firearms at once, but record sales after record sales, combined with the number of gun-owning households in free fall, suggests these people have a lot more guns than two, which means a lot more guns than they can use at any given time.

So the "safety" conferred by gun ownership starts to look a lot more talismanic than utilitarian. In other words, the "guns keep you safe" argument basically becomes superstition.

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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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Shutting Down Debate at Gunpoint

Here's a fun item from over the weekend. While you were doing whatever it was you were doing yesterday, a fine and not at all cowardly group of Texans who are not at all lunatics were busy doing this:

ThinkProgress: On Saturday, nearly 40 armed men, women, and children waited outside a Dallas, Texas area restaurant to protest a membership meeting for the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, a gun safety advocacy group formed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

According to a spokeswoman for Moms Demand Action (MDA), the moms were inside the Blue Mesa Grill when members of Open Carry Texas (OCT) — an open carry advocacy group — “pull[ed] up in the parking lot and start[ed] getting guns out of their trunks.” The group then waited in the parking lot for the four MDA members to come out. The spokeswoman said that the restaurant manager did not want to call 911, for fear of “inciting a riot” and waited for the gun advocates to leave. The group moved to a nearby Hooters after approximately two hours.

MDA later released a statement calling OCT “gun bullies” who “disagree[d] with our goal of changing America’s gun laws and policies to protect our children and families.” The statement added that the members and restaurant customers were “terrified by what appeared to be an armed ambush.” A member of OCT responded by tweeting, “I guess I’m a #gunbullies #Comeandtakeit.”

So, on learning that they'd panicked innocent people, Mr. Second Amendment Hero here thought, "Good!" Clearly, that was the intent. There are two words to describe someone like that -- a thug or a prick. One does not rule out the other.

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Sorry Gun Fans, Reality Doesn't Work that Way

A recent news release is bad news for those who think everyone and their brother should be armed. From NPR:

Investigators now do not think there was a second shooter, D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said late Monday evening. Throughout Monday, authorities had run down witness reports and other evidence indicating there might have been additional gunmen.

Aaron Alexis, acting alone, killed twelve people and died himself as a result of his rampage. And the fact that there was no second -- or third -- shooter is a terrible blow to the "arm everyone" argument, since it demonstrates panicked people aren't extremely good at identifying shooters. Second shooter reports had other shooters wearing uniforms with guns drawn wandering around, causing havoc. But these "shooters" were most likely law enforcement. Had any one of these witnesses been armed, the tragedy would likely have been aggravated. The panicked witness might've fired on law enforcement and, given the situation, there's no reason for the law enforcement personnel not to return fire.

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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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Graham and McCain Exploit Boston Tragedy

After the arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in connection with the Boston bomb attacks, the nation's top unrepentant neocons --  John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- are currently engaged in a high-profile demonstration of grandstanding. The purpose of this posturing seems to be to showcase how Very Important and Serious they are, why you should have them on Meet the Press, and why you should vote for Graham instead of whatever random Tea Party nutjob the far right base will try to primary him with.

Graham and McCain would very much like Tsarnaev to be charged as an enemy combatant. Slate's Emily Bazelon spells out exactly why this is all pretense -- Graham knows this can't happen because "he helped write the 2009 law [pdf] that says Tsarnaev may not be tried as an enemy combatant and thus points away from holding him as one. But that’s not stopping Graham and the others from trying to score terror points—and, of course, trying to make the president appear weak. This isn’t about actually fighting terrorists. It’s about running for election."

So far, the rightwing blogosphere is following along like a brainless puppy. Mostly because they too are more interested in embarrassing Obama than rights or justice. After all, it was just weeks ago that half of them where defending the right of suspects like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to due process in the case of drone attacks on American citizens. But that was because the Obama administration held the opposite view, not because they gave a damn. Now that an American citizen is not in the sights of a drone hitman, they're all wondering why anyone would be at all concerned about due process for terrorists. As always, consistency is not their strong point.

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The Gun Show Loophole Remains -- And You Should be Angry About That

Reading through the reactions to yesterday's successful obstruction of an expanded background checks bill, there's one thing you notice right away. Normally, stories like this are peppered with words like "saddened," disappointed," or "discouraged." That's not the case today. Today, people are opening their papers or visiting their favorite online news source and reading words like "angry," "disgusted," and "furious."

The pro-crime lobby may think they've beaten us, but all they really managed to do is make us mad.

For her part, Gabrielle Giffords has spent her time cultivating the image of a happy warrior, a friendly hero overcoming tremendous adversity and senseless tragedy. While the hero part of that persona remains, "happy" doesn't describe her op-ed on the issue in the New York Times:

Speaking is physically difficult for me. But my feelings are clear: I’m furious. I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done, and until we have changed our laws so we can look parents in the face and say: We are trying to keep your children safe. We cannot allow the status quo — desperately protected by the gun lobby so that they can make more money by spreading fear and misinformation — to go on.

I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. I am asking for mothers to stop these lawmakers at the grocery store and tell them: You’ve lost my vote. I am asking activists to unsubscribe from these senators’ e-mail lists and to stop giving them money. I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say: You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.

Giffords writes that "if we cannot make our communities safer with the Congress we have now, we will use every means available to make sure we have a different Congress, one that puts communities’ interests ahead of the gun lobby’s." The issue of partisanship does not come up. Democrat, Republican, or Independent, if you sided with the pro-criminal gun lobby, we want your head.

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The Pointlessness of Spinning an Event Like the Boston Bombings

I saw the article yesterday, but I kind of set it aside. In it, the Boston Globe reported that the Boston Marathon bombing has all the earmarks of a domestic terror attack.  I bookmarked it and tagged it for later, thinking that maybe it would be better reference from a historical standpoint than from a predictive one. After all, rightwing bloggers have been using baseless speculation to cover themselves in clown paint and I wasn't eager to emulate their failures. I thought the article would better serve as a "clues were there" reference (or "clues were misleading," as the case might be). The article describes the bombs as "crudely made" and suggest that the death toll indicates they weren't as effective as the bomber would've hoped, "making it unlikely that they were the work of a foreign government or global terrorist group, such as Al ­Qaeda." Besides, Islamic terrorist organizations always claim credit for bombings -- that is, after all, the point: to spread terror -- and we're now approaching the end of the 72 hour window in which those claims usually are issued. In incidents of attacks by lone domestic terrorists, it's generally the case that no one takes credit, because the perpetrator doesn't want to risk providing more evidence. In these cases, the purpose of the attack isn't to spread terror, but to "strike a blow" against a perceived enemy from the perspective of their own lives (i.e., the DC Sniper, the Olympic Park bombing, or Oklahoma City). Sophisticated terrorists try to perceive their attacks from the eyes of the media and the populace. From the Globe article:

Juliette N. Kayyem, a Globe columnist and lecturer at ­Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who has spent years working on counter­terrorism and homeland security, said she thought the bombing was probably the work of a terrorist in the ­Boston area who would appreciate the race’s importance to the local culture.

“It is probably home-grown, someone with a political cause from the right or the left,” said Kayyem, “someone who knows how appealing the Boston ­Marathon is to citizens here.”

“Even though it’s an international event, it is still a local event,” she said.

Of course, none of this is to say it isn't an Islamic terror attack -- which was why I approached the piece with a healthy amount of caution and a grain of salt. What people surmise and what people know are two entirely different things.

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Tea Party Bloggers, the Boston Bombing, and the Cult of Perpetual Victimhood

It's a shocking and terrible crime. A blast that was almost certainly terrorism (run of the mill mass murder can't be ruled out yet) rocked the finish line at the Boston Marathon, followed quickly by another. The brutal carnage has resulted in the death of three, with the real possibility of that number rising still -- many of the injuries were horrific.

The smoke had barely cleared before the speculation began -- and with it, the idiocy. Reports were confused, unclear, sometimes contradictory. But one group of Americans felt they had a firm grasp one the true story in Boston. And that story was that they -- the rightwing, Tea Party, wingnut bloggers -- were the real victims in the day's tragedy.

Leading the charge was the blog "Fire Andrea Mitchell," claiming that CNN's Wolf Blitzer had blamed the Tea Party for the bombing. The right went insane on Twitter, which is where the right goes to go insane these days, and the story spread like widlfire. "CNN's Wolf Blitzer just speculated if anti-tax groups were behind the bombing WITH ZERO EVIDENCE," one tweeted -- which turned out to be a massively hypocritical statement.

Blitzer's supposed "blaming" of the Tea Party right consisted of one sentence, "It is a state holiday in Massachusetts today called Patriots' Day and, uh, who knows if that had anything at all to do with these explosions." The only way you to take that as an attack on the right is if you wanted so badly to wear the mantle of victimhood that you'd twist anything anyone said in order to take offense. If you were so self-absorbed as to be able to do that, then the victims weren't those people bleeding on the streets of Boston, the real victims were the wingnut bloggers and their audience.

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America's Current Mass-Murder Prevention Method -- Luck

As so often happens with mass killings in America, time moves on and a horrible crime is forgotten. Maybe it's that there are just so many that it's impossible to keep track of them all, maybe we mentally block it out to keep ourselves from realizing the entire country's a war zone, or maybe we're just so damned tired of it all that we just want to stop thinking about. For whatever reason, a racist 2012 shooting spree in Tulsa, Oklahoma that left three black men dead and two wounded doesn't come up when we talk about mass killings in America. And that's a pity -- not only because the victims deserve to be remembered, but because the case is just so damned instructive. Especially when we look at what set off the gunmen -- Jake England and Alvin Watts -- on their rampage.

The Tulsa shooting spree took place around the second anniversary of England's father's shooting death. The man who shot his father is Pernell Demond Jefferson, who is black. England and Watts are described by authorities as white. England has Cherokee ancestry.

Jefferson is expected to stand trial for charges of attempted first-degree burglary and illegal possession of a firearm in connection with the incident. But he will not face murder charges because England's death was ruled a justifiable homicide by prosecutors under Oklahoma's "stand your ground" law.

So the "shoot first" legalized murder law is what started this whole thing. A "tough on crime" measure that -- like most "tough on crime" measures -- is simpleminded and poorly thought out and designed only to bring votes to fearmongers and demagogues, while selling guns for the special interests they represent. No one should be able to deliberately shoot and kill someone else, only to avoid trial in that killing. That's not how the justice system works. Self-defense is a legitimate and legal reason to commit homicide. If you killed someone because you had to, that should stand up in court. Instead, Oklahoma -- like too many states -- has this idiotic law that allows killers to just walk away, never resolving the issue or airing out the evidence. It just allows grudges to fester, fueled by the complete ignorance that comes from being denied a public hearing of the facts. I'm not excusing England or Watts, I'm just pointing out that Oklahoma's idiotic "stand your ground" law is more likely to make sick jerks like them even sicker. And it obviously made the community of Tulsa more dangerous, not safer.

But if "stand your ground" laws make people less safe, then a more recent case in Michigan proves that universal background checks increase public safety.

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Wayne LaPierre's Horror Show Vision for America

Why do people need access to an unlimited number of assault weapons, endless crates of ammo, and magazines of every imaginable capacity, while being able to dodge a background check by buying it all at a gun show? According to the NRA's Wayne LaPierre, it's because the United States is a blasted hellscape, soon to become even worse. "Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals," writes La Pierre in an op-ed at the reliably loopy Daily Caller. "These are perils we are sure to face—not just maybe. It’s not paranoia to buy a gun. It’s survival. It’s responsible behavior, and it’s time we encourage law-abiding Americans to do just that."

Hey Wayne, you forgot the Zombie Apocalypse.

I can boil this all down for you pretty easily; we all need guns, because people are pouring over our open southern border and setting up gangs and being al Qaeda (because Obama's not doing anything about them lawless mezkins, you know. He wants to give them amnesty). Pretty soon, the entire country will be like Brooklyn after Hurricane Sandy, with looting and killing and who knows what all, because Obama's bankrupting 'murika so bad that we won't be able to afford any police and criminals will run wild, seeking out the unarmed to prey on and that could be your family and do you want that? Well, do you? For the sweet love of God, you need a gun OR WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!

Yes, it really is that racist and paranoid and partisan and cowardly. If this is what's going on in the average NRA member's head, they totally shouldn't be allowed to have firearms. They would be quite literally insane. If there are any NRA members out there reading this, is this really the way you want to be portrayed to everyone else? Because this is the stereotype: a nut who's so afraid of the dark that he needs lots and lots of guns to shoot all the monsters. "Lapierre sounds more every day like a parody of himself: a hysterical old man who started out yelling at kids to get off his lawn and now has barricaded himself indoors with five years worth of canned food and shooting irons," Ed Kilgore comments.

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For the NRA, a Possible Perfect Storm of Bad PR

Yesterday was not a triumph in PR for advocates of zero restrictions on firearms. While NRA boss Waynne LaPierre and other blood lobby types were getting their rhetorical asses handed to them in a Senate hearing on gun violence, gun violence erupted across the land. In Chicago, a 15 year-old girl who performed at the president's inaugural was shot and killed, apparently an innocent bystander in the attempted murder of another. In Phoenix, a man went on an office rampage, injuring two and killing one. And in Alabama, a hostage situation was continuing, as a rightwing anti-government extremist took a 5 year-old autistic boy hostage -- you read that right -- after killing a school bus driver.

While the NRA tools in Washington could find plenty of examples of people using guns to protect themselves, they couldn't manage to come up with any examples which were actually on-topic. The issues being discussed were assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and expanded background checks. In no example the gun nuts offered did any of these figure into a gun owner's defense of their families. And, contrary to the panic you see among rightwing bloggers and pundits, no one's talking about taking anyone's guns away. The debate is whether to stop the sale of certain items and whether to make background checks actually mean something by requiring them with every gun purchase, whether it's in a sporting goods store, a gun show, or a want ad in the Shopper Stopper. So, in a very logical sense, the anti-regulation folks were unable to offer any real world examples to back up their positions. They did a lot of talking, but managed no defense.

Meanwhile, one of the crimes ongoing yesterday may have been a great example of all three of the issues being discussed: assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and meaningful background checks. In the case of the hostage situation, it's reported that the bus driver was shot four times with a 9mm pistol. The most popular 9mm in America is a Glock 17. And the Glock 17 was covered under the assault weapons ban of 1994.

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An Assault Weapons Ban, Piece By Piece

Let's get one thing clear immediately, the "assault weapon" classification is not some BS term meant to scare people away from certain guns. When someone tells you that the only differences between an assault rifle and a regular rifle are cosmetic, they're lying. The adaptations and customizations made to an assault weapon serve a purpose and that purpose is to make it easier to fire a lot of bullets in a short amount of time. To say there's no difference between a hunting rifle and an AR-15 is the same as saying there's no difference between a car off the dealer's lot and a street rod -- they look different because they are different.

There's a longer explanation here. But the shortest explanation is just as convincing: a "tricked out" AR-15 costs $1,000 at WalMart. Meanwhile, a regular deer rifle will cost you about 500 to 600 bucks. An example is here. It's very similar to a gun I used to use when I hunted deer. Out of 24 reviews at the site, 20 give this 500 dollar rifle five stars. It's not some cheap piece of junk. It's a perfectly good sportsman's rifle, used by hunters around the world.

Now, who in their right mind would spend twice as much for something that they know is different only in appearance? A gun is a tool. And anyone who pays that much more for a tool because they like the way it looks is a chump. There is obviously a difference and the people who love these weapons know it. When they say they "just look scary," they lie. And one person who knows this is Newton Police Chief Michael Kehoe.

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Meet the Newtown Truthers

I'm a little stuck as to how to start this thing, so I'll just throw the whole bunch of crazy at you right off the bat:

Sun Sentinel, Florida:

A communication professor known for conspiracy theories has stirred controversy at Florida Atlantic University with claims that last month's Newtown, Conn., school shootings did not happen as reported — or may not have happened at all.

Moreover, James Tracy asserts in radio interviews and on his memoryholeblog.com. that trained "crisis actors" may have been employed by the Obama administration in an effort to shape public opinion in favor of the event's true purpose: gun control.

"As documents relating to the Sandy Hook shooting continue to be assessed and interpreted by independent researchers, there is a growing awareness that the media coverage of the massacre of 26 children and adults was intended primarily for public consumption to further larger political ends," writes Tracy, a tenured associate professor of media history at FAU and a former union leader.

In another post, he says, "While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place — at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described."

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Assault Rifles are Different in More Than Just Appearance

If the American Family Association's Bryan Fischer serves any useful purpose at all, it's to prove conclusively that the American Family Association is a hate group. His views on the subject of homosexuality are pretty much identical to those of Fred Phelps and Phelps' thankfully small hate cult, the Westboro Baptist Church. The only real difference between Phelps and Fischer is that Phelps is willing to use the word "fag" and to protest funerals. They disagree on method and there the difference ends.

But Fischer's opinions aren't limited to criticisms of the Homosexual Menace. He believes he's Big King Expert on just about any subject under the sun, so long as there's a conservative take on it. Like his criticisms of the LGBT community, these other opinions are completely ridiculous. When it comes to identifying idiotic conservative opinion, Bryan Fischer is the low-hanging fruit. The worst of the religious right, he makes Pat Robertson look like a hippy.

I point all of this out because Fischer said something stupid yesterday. This should come as no surprise. But, as so often the case, Fischer's simply repeating a conservative talking point he'd likely heard from someone else. The reason Fischer's such an easy target is because he doesn't waste a lot of time dressing up conservative arguments to make them more palatable. He puts them bluntly, offering right wing talking points up in all their naked stupidity. I'm not picking on Fischer specifically, but rather the argument he so helpfully distills.

Raw Story:

“Whoever controls the language is going to control the debate,” Fischer explained in a recent radio broadcast obtained by Right Wing Watch on Monday. “They picked the word ‘assault weapon’ to make it sound bad, to make it sound mean. They’re trying to say the Second Amendment does not protect assault weapons.”

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There's No Defending Our Insane Gun Culture

The other day, I pointed out that the things gun apologists are saying in the wake of a Connecticut school shooting make no damned sense at all. My jumping off point was a statement from Mike Huckabee that suggested the shooting was the result of a lack of religion in schools. It's hard to get past how offensive that is, but I managed. There are countries in the world that are more religious and more violent, while barely religious countries exist that are much safer than the US. When you compare the US to the rest of the world, gun apologists' arguments fall apart.

So it comes as no surprise that the hackish George Will offers his own completely illogical take on things.

Raw Story:

[...]

“We ought to bring in Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago,” [Will] insisted. “Chicago is an epidemic of violence with young, largely unparented — that is, no father in the home — adolescent males. That’s a problem quite separate from this.”

The conservative columnist also worried that the massacre of 20 children at an elementary school in Connecticut would be used to “ratchet up the security of schools and elsewhere in public spaces.”

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Registration Fraud May Give the GOP a Taste of Their Own Medicine

They say Karma is a bitch. After pushing voter ID to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote Democratic, the Republican Party is at the heart of a growing scandal over voter registration fraud. That would be the same crime the right -- falsely, it turned out -- accused ACORN of doing. It was a crime so heinous that ACORN had to be defunded, thereby killing off the organization. Logical consistency demands that the GOP must meet a similar fate.

But no one's seriously going to demand the organizational death penalty. Still, this may be in the neighborhood.

Los Angeles Times:

[A California voter registration fraud scandal] has also raised anew the question of whether the state should ban firms that pay workers for each voter they register or signature they secure on a petition rather than paying them an hourly rate. Workers have an incentive to cut corners under such arrangements, according to Assemblyman Richard Pan (D-Natomas), who has proposed barring the practice in a bill that is on the governor's desk.

Registration fraud's becoming a bit of a scandal for Republicans. The story broke big in Florida, followed by the California story this weekend.

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Guns, Nazis, and Conservative PC Taboos

Earlier this week, I wrote about the tendency of the right to wrap themselves in the cloak of victimhood whenever there's a mass shooting. I failed to mention that part of the reason for this is clearly distraction. In the temple shooting in Wisconsin, so many rightwing memes come into play -- the anti-immigrant fever, the right's soft-on-gun-crime positions, the belief that everyone but Christians (and Jews, who I guess are honorary Christians) are inherently un-American, the bigoted view of Muslims as turban-wearing "ragheads," etc. People on the right desperately want to avoid talking about all of this, so they claim to be victims whenever something like this happens.

For example, over at Media Research Center’s NewsBusters site, we learn that referring to neo-Nazis as "far-right" is the worst thing ever. MRC is a rightwing BS factory that pretends to be a media watchdog -- like Media Matters for America -- but is in reality an attack dog sicked on any media outlet that fails to slavishly adhere to conservative spin and rightwing political correctness. There, we learn that "CNN Smears Political Right, Labels Wisconsin Shooter's Racist Neo-Nazi Band as 'Far Right'."

I wish I were kidding. The term "far-right" is now banned in connection to Nazis -- as it's been historically applied fascists since they came into existence -- under wingnut PC. The only things that are "right wing" are good things, never bad things, and the concept of conservatism gone mad must never, ever be discussed. Such things are taboo.

Once the mantle of victimhood has been assumed, we don't have to talk about all the things conservatives and racist fanatics inarguably have in common -- i.e., the aforementioned the love of guns, hatred of immigrants and non-Christians, etc. Instead, we talk about how the real victims are always American conservatives. And this is a distraction we can ill afford.

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In Any Mass Shooting, the 'Real Victims' are Always Conservatives

It wasn't long after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was critically wounded and six people were killed in Tucson that we learned that the real victim of gunman Jared Lee Loughner was Sarah Palin. People were being mean to Sarah, just because she'd run an ad putting Giffords in crosshairs. It was terrible.

Now that a racist nutjob killed six people in a Milwaukee Sikh temple, we're slowly learning the most important aspect of that crime -- that the real victim is Michele Bachmann. Turns out some random people on Twitter thought her bigoted anti-Muslim witchhunt might've had something to do with all this (Sikhs are often confused with Muslims) and that means everyone on the left is after Shelly -- because random people on Twitter speak for every liberal.

And of course, this all traces back to the source of all conservative victimhood: an unreleased Department of Homeland Security report saying that "right wing extremists" posed a greater danger after the economic downturn and the election of America's first black president. Despite the fact that "right wing extremist" means people like racist nuts who might shoot up places of worship, the right took up the mantle of "right wing extremist" -- I guess because playing the victim card is so important that you'd actually identify with neo-Nazis and survivalists to play it.

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Rightwing Election Fraud in Wisconsin Recall

The Wisconsin recalls of Gov. Walker and Lt. Gov. Kleefisch are now underway and in full swing. But, if the recall effort is moving forward, so are Republican dirty tricks.

Caledonia Patch:

Residents who signed legitimate recall petitions may never have them counted by the Government Accountability Board.

A Caledonia resident, who asked not to have his name used, told Caledonia Patch that he and at least two other people in Racine are collecting signatures to recall Scott Walker, but have no intention of turning them into the GAB. Instead, they want people to think they've signed the petition, but not actually have their signatures count.

They are doing this to sabotage the recall effort, the resident said.

"The man claimed he had already collected 150 signatures at Walmart and Pick'n Save on 27th Street in Franklin yesterday," according to the report. "However, when asked to produce the documents, he said, he would need to think about showing them to Patch. He said he won't be turning them into the GAB, but hasn't destroyed them."

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