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You’ll Never Guess Who Time Magazine Thinks the Marine Corps Shooter Is.

jimmiebjr | October 29, 2010 | 3 Replies

What a noxious piece of “reporting” this is.

The average Marine is younger than those in the other military services, and more likely to be a trigger-puller. Youth and weapons probably explain this rash of recent shootings at Marine targets in the Washington area, including a second fusillade at the National Museum of the Marine Corps at Quantico, Va., late Thursday or early Friday.
The targets – the museum twice, a Marine recruiting station, and the Pentagon – suggest a severely disgruntled Marine (probably a former Marine, but leathernecks insist there are only Marines and retired Marines). He’s likely acting alone, defense officials believe. Last week, ballistics tests confirmed that the first three shootings all came from the same gun.

Do those targets really suggest a disgruntled Marine or could they more easily suggest another type of suspect? It’s just as easy to believe the suspect is someone who, due to the elevated rhetoric of the past eight years about the military, might have gotten it into their head to express themselves a bit more directly. I honestly don’t know the answer. This shooter could be a Marine or it could be a disgruntled left-wing loon or even someone we have even thought to suspect. Who knows? Maybe there’s a gun-crazy ex-girlfriend of a Marine out there who is responding badly to a breakup? There really is no way to tell because we simply don’t have enough evidence. What we do know is that one or more people using a high-powered rifle is shooting up U.S. Marine Corps buildings and, so far, no one has been hurt.

Mark Thompson, ace blogger for Time Magazine, doesn’t know any more about these cases than you or I. He’s guessing about the culprit and the motivations behind the attacks. The FBI has its suppositions but that’s all they are and, given that agency’s track record for predicting sniper suspects, Thompson should be showing more than a little bit of skepticism. Surely, as a journalist as a prestigious news magazine, Thompson remembers the DC Sniper cases of 2002 during which authorities spent weeks searching for white male suspects driving a white van or box truck. That suspect profile was built from little to no evidence and turned out to be wrong in every detail. I suspect that Thompson’s uneducated guesses will turn out to be equally wrong.

Though they do suggest that he and his employer have a few unresolved bias issues, wouldn’t you say?

(via John MacCormack’s Twitter feed)