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The Highly Baffling Mystery of the Garland Shootings
I’m as perplexed as you must be:
Two gunmen have been shot dead after opening fire outside a conference on cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a suburb of Dallas, US police say.
They drove to the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland as the event was ending, and began shooting at a security officer before being killed by police.
The bomb squad has been called in to search their vehicle for explosives.
The event, organised by a group critical of Islam, included a contest for drawings of the Prophet.
Security had been high around the centre because of the controversial nature of the event, which included Dutch anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders as one of the keynote speakers.
But Garland Police Department spokesman Joe Harn said there had been no credible threats in advance, and it was not immediately clear if the shootings were related to the event.
I applaud Mr. Harn’s open-mindedness and unwillingness to rush to judgment. After all, there are so many other obvious reasons two men might be inspired to attack this event. Here are my top ten theories:
1) They were sore that Pamela unfriended them on Facebook.
2) Someone in the audience stole their parking space.
3) When they said, “Stop eating your popcorn so loudly, it’s ruining the exhibition for me,” they meant it.
4) They were in love with Jodie Foster.
5) That’s what too many Twinkies will do to you, everyone knows that.
6) Pacquiao was robbed, man.
7) Yet another out-of-control iPhone-v-Android feud.
8) That’ll show Geert that you can’t go through the express lane with more than 20 items in Texas!
9) They told Geller to stop playing “Hotel California,” but would she listen?
10) Geert should have known better than to mess with their Dungeons & Dragons character.
All equally plausible, right? We’ll just have to wait for the results of the investigation, I guess, but in the meantime, what’s your theory?
Published in General
Claire,
Pam Geller and her event probably just saved between 5 and 100 lives or maybe more. This two Jihadist psychopaths were like bombs with a random fuse waiting to go off. If this event hadn’t triggered them they could have gone after soft targets like they just did in France and elsewhere. They went for a target that was really prepared to shoot back and they are dead with minimum of damage, an excellent result.
It is the nature of Jihadists that they give you very few other options but to kill them before they kill you. This result is, for the moment, the best result. If we can do better in the future it will be because we focus on Jihad as the indicator of future behavior and stop wasting effort on extraneous factors.
Regards,
Jim
Winner!
I applaud Mr. Harn’s open-mindedness and unwillingness to rush to judgment.
A view to which he, and cops everywhere, are bound, however imperfectly they might implement it.
Cops are government representatives; leaving aside objectivity’s requirement not to publish conclusions before the facts are known as completely as they might be, cops cannot announce their conclusions prior to the investigation’s completeness.
We’re not cops; we can draw conclusions based on the facts available (which are not yet all of the facts known to the cops) to our heart’s content–both reasonable conclusions and those that fit predetermined outcomes.
I applaud the neighboring city’s cop’s refusal to prejudge.
Other, more responsible news outlets than the BBC, are making no bones about the connection between Islamic terrorism and the attack on the exhibitors, while the Garland police, and the FBI, continue to withhold judgment.
Separately, but relatedly, the Dallas Morning News opened an article prior to the shootings with this sentence:
For the second time this year, free speech and religious liberties are colliding at Garland ISD’s Curtis Culwell Center [where the exhibit and shooting took place].
There’s no collision there; the two are aspects of the same thing.
Eric Hines
You didn’t realize that shooting infidels is part of religious liberty?
To the extent the Dallas Morning News believes that, it certainly explains a lot about the media’s coverage of religious liberty issues.
It was a trap. It worked. Do it some more.
When I heard this on the radio I was thinking that everybody surrounding this attack were acting stupidly, both the event organizers and the attackers. Why have a specific Mohammed cartoon contest? and Why try attacking a right wing event in well armed Texas?
However, now that I have learned that Pam Geller was the organizer and Geert Wilders was the keynote, I realized that it was not just a Mohammed cartoon contest, it was a pro-western, anti-Islamic terrorist conference.
Now I just think the attackers were stupid.
A bit reckless with the lives of the attendees, no?
I think you had it right the first time.
Not to forget : The shots fired may not have been intended for the two victims. There are a lot of guns in Texas and they could have been holding target practice, or just celebrating the new train line from Houston to Dallas(Yee Haw!), and stray bullets hit them by accident.
We don’t have all the facts yet.
No.
I think you had it right the first time.
It’s never stupid to ridicule thugs, or to poke them where they’re most irritable. It draws them out.
Eric Hines
Isn’t it just a wee bit sexist to refer to her as a “wealthy housewife”?
From the wikipedia page: “Geller spent most of the 1980s working at the New York Daily News, first as a financial analyst and then in advertising and marketing. Subsequently she was associate publisher of The New York Observer from 1989 through 1994.”
(FYI: The actual article is from the Washington Post, and in that publication the headline referred to her as an “incendiary organizer”, rather than a “wealthy housewife”. I’m more than a little disappointed in the National Post today.)
Mike: My only question is whether Texas allows fields to be baited.
That was a compromise after the first draft said “Jewess”.
No, a group of Anti-Islamist Terrorism meeting in Texas probably has more arms and protection than a NRA convention.
If I read the articles correctly these jokers did not even get near the attendees but got themselves killed by the outer security ring.
Not after they lawyered up which would have been about 3 femtoseconds after they were arrested.
Better that they’re dead pour encourager les autres.
My guess is that the attendees inside were probably better armed the the police outside.
…got themselves killed by the outer security ring.
A ring manned by 40 off-duty cops and security officers hired by the event’s organizers. Not much risk to the attendees.
Eric Hines
Ah, America lives! After all of the bad news lately we see local police handling the situation with courage and a calm, reasoned approach to community outreach.
A new paradigm is established. Solve the problem before the media shows up.
The sad thing is that now that the left has gained control of KickStarter so they can shut down the projects involving Christian beliefs and defending police officers in Baltimore. I bet they could really get behind a kickstarter for terrorist defense funding, just to show how high / open minded they were in protecting their rights.
Wait! Wait! ?You mean this wasn’t “baiting the fields”. Putting up a cartoon-drawing-of-Mohamed section, then ringing it with cops is rather like making a distressed animal call, waiting for the coyotes to come.
When I was in highschool, I busted my knee and had to get surgery. The very day my cast came off, one of my buddies grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard in good-natured roughhousing, but it caused an audible rrrrrrrrrip! sound to be heard in class, while I experienced the most awful pain I’ve ever felt.
Turns out what happened is that his shaking caused the scar tissue to break-up all at once, something that would have taken weeks of physical therapy to do otherwise. As my doctor put it “Tell your friend he did you a favor, but not to do it again.”
I think the same rule applies here.
It seems to me that the event in Garland is precisely the correct way to peaceably protest Muslim violence against free speech. I understand that cartoons and other depictions of Mohammed are offensive to Muslims, but the entire point of freedom of speech is that offensive speech is protected.
I find it difficult to believe that anyone attending the event would not understand that there was some risk involved. Frankly, attendance was an act of courage in the promotion of American ideals. It also appears that the organizers of the event provided appropriate security (or at least security that proved to be adequate in the circumstances).
Muslims should be offended, and often, and by someone who knows how.
Heck no, the A Team would have fired thousands of rounds and never hit anyone.
Considering that the CEO of the company which owns the paper is pretty darned Jewish (not to mention fairly right-wing), I don’t think that would fly.
And they also would have caused several cars to flip over without hurting anyone, too.
But in any case, after I heard the news of what happened to those terrorists in Garland, I couldn’t help but light up a cigar and say this:
For the first time in months I watched the first couple of segments of Hardball on MSNBC. Chris Matthews and his guest essentially believe that the people at that contest were asking for it. They say everybody knew something like this was likely to happen. It’s also offensive that the organizers are trying to spread the message that Islam is violent. The guest said again and again how people of all religions are violent.
Huh? So followers of Islam are no more likely to be violent than anybody else, yet the organizers should have known that this would happen. If a couple guys fired shots at a rally celebrating Roe v Wade, I wonder if Chris Matthews would say that the ralliers were looking for trouble by being so provocative as to celebrate something that so many people detest?
Just a few observations:
Although my house is a mere TWO MILES from the Curtis Culwell Center, I did not happen upon the scene a la Claire. I was oblivious to the nearby terrorist attack until I logged onto Twitter and saw all the what-has-Pamela-Geller-done-now traffic.
I don’t know, but suspect that the venue, being the property of the school district, is a gun-free zone.
Had Geert Wilders had the foresight to enter the US via Mexico, wouldn’t he be entitled to US citizenship?
Jim is correct. I was in attendance at the event in Garland. I was also outside when the shooting started. AFDI, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Geert Wilders, all of the contest entries, & the attendees wish the world would wake up this threat to our lives, freedom, & culture. Those who choose to ignore will one day be victims of Jihad. I’d really hate to have to say “I told you so.”