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Making Hay Over the Corpse of a Security Guard

jimmiebjr | June 11, 2009 | 20 Replies

Today, a white supremacist and anti-Semite named James von Brunn, walked into the lobby of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, pulled out a gun, and started shooting. He mortally wounded a guard before the other armed security guards shot him in the head and neck, killing him. The murdered guard’s name was Stephen Tyrone Johns. He was 39 years old, had just remarried less than a year ago, and was described by a former co-worker as “a soft-spoken, gentle giant.”

Reactions from the city government were…opportunistic. Two Democrats took the opportunity to bathe their gun-control flag in Johns’ blood and wave it as hard as they could.

“Today’s event should be a wake-up call for why we must work to fend off the controversial gun amendment that was most recently attached to the DC…Voting Rights Act, and will certainly resurface as part of future legislation,” said D.C. Councilman Michael Brown. “Loosening the District’s gun laws is a deadly proposition.”
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“Congress needs no more evidence than today’s tragedy, which occurred blocks from the White House, for the justification of the District’s strict gun laws, which protect the President, Members of Congress, D.C, residents, and millions of tourists who travel to Washington, DC each year to visit monuments and other sites like the Holocaust Museum,” said D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson in a statement.

Since the article mentions handguns exclusively, I serious doubt whether Mendelson or Brown had any clue in the world what sort of gun von Brunn used when they made their risible statements. As it happens, von Brunn did not use a handgun, or any other sort of gun that would suddenly become legal if the amendment passes. He used a .22 rifle. There is nothing in the amendment that could allow a crazed hatemonger to carry a loaded rifle on the streets of Washington, DC and the councilmen darned well know it.

Meanwhile, more than a few members of the mainstream left-wing blogosphere (joined by a couple blockheads on Fox News and an increasingly irrelevant Charles Johnson) are busy waving their own bloody flag, the badly-discredited DHS report that named about half the country as potential terrorists.

As Dr. Melissa Clouthier points out, the most visible anti-Semite in the world isn’t exactly a right-wing wacko and that von Brunn wasn’t exactly a fan of Christians. Anti-Semitism these days isn’t a hallmark of the right or the left, though Kathy Shaidle found that von Brunn’s hate was not exclusive to Jews. He also had a big hate-on for George Bush and was a hardcore Truther. Josh Marshall found that the shooter was also a “Birther” – someone who believes that President Obama is not a natural-born citizen. Of course, this leads Marshall, who apparently stopped looking when he found a piece of evidence he really liked, to say that von Brunn’s actions were “clearly of a piece with rising right-wing extremism and fringe violence that — uncomfortably as it is to say — is rising in tandem in the early months of the Obama presidency.”

I’ll enjoy watching Marshall explain how a man who hated Christians and George Bush and believed 9/11 was an inside job was a member of the “right-wing”.

I’ll let the final words on this come from Jules Crittenden, whose even-handed and reasonable post should be linked heavily tomorrow morning, and Mark Blumenthal, who remembers the graciousness of those who worked at the Museum.