At the end of my original post about the rave party shootings last weekend I said
Washington gun owners, Seattle and King County ones especially, are going to have a rough time of it for a while, I think.
And so it begins.
The police department for the City of Seattle is hiring James Alan Fox to try and figure out the shooter’s reasons behind the murders and his subsequent suicide.
James Alan Fox is The Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice and former dean at Northeastern University in Boston. Â He has written sixteen books, including his two newest, The Will to Kill: Making Sense of Senseless Murder and Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder. He has also published dozens of journal and magazine articles and newspaper columns, primarily in the areas of multiple murder, juvenile crime, school violence, workplace violence, and capital punishment.
I read that and the rest of his bio and, not recalling ever hearing of him, went to look a little deeper. I read through the linked articles at the bottom of his bio page, but didn’t find anything too frightening about the guy’s view on gun control until I read his December 2005 column on the topic of Boston’s rising crime rate titled: We’re under the gun, so let’s register it.
City Councilman Rob Consalvo dreams of a gun-offender registry, patterned after the sex-offender database. Still, I wonder why we don’t just register the guns — all guns.
While each of these proposals has some appeal, at least symbolically, it remains questionable whether they will take more than a nibble out of gun crime. It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic with a paper cup. Guns flow into the region faster than we can remove them through confiscation or voluntary surrender.
Massachusetts is swimming against a very strong national tide vigorously fueled and financed by the powerful gun lobby. We know there are WMDs (Weapons of Mass. Destruction) out there. Sadly, Congress and the president seem more concerned about gun owners’ rights than gun victims’ rights.
And there you have it: “Guns are bad and they turn gun owners into murdering machines, so let’s automatically assume that all guns will be used to kill and violate their owners right to privacy. After all, it is the government’s job to protect everyone, right?”
This is the attitude that the Seattle Police Department will be paying for, a bill that will probably be in the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, by the way, so that we might be allowed a peek into the mind of a murderous loser who had no social life, no job prospects beyond pizza delivery and was a drug user who was more likely than not highly intoxicated when he commited the act.
For an inkling of the intoxication that goes on at raves, you might want to read Raging Dave’s post on his experience working door security at a Crystal Method show.
Personally, I don’t want a peek that far into the murderer’s mind. All I want is a toxicology report. But it appears that no one outside of the killer’s immediate family will get that.
From Sound Politics:
(Rich) Pruitt, (spokesperson) of the SPD, read me an e-mail to the department from Dr. Richard Haruff, Director of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. Among other things, Haruff stressed that the results of Huff’s toxicology report – which Haruff told the SPD will be known in 10 to 14 days from today – cannot and will not be released to the public without consent of Huff’s legal representative, or his family.
The way is paved. The grating is done and the asphalt spreader is loaded and ready to lay down some fresh black-top. Seattle’s anti-citizen firearm ownership Chief of Police is bringing in an anti-gun Top Gun and the evidence that it was a human crime and not one of an inanimate object initiating murder will be held back from the truth seeking public.
Add all of that to the half-assing the search for evidence encapsulated in this report of how the SPDÂ tech-detectives are saying that, to paraphrase, “There are too many viruses on his computer and we can’t get any information out of it. But that’s OK, there probably isn’t anything incriminating on it anyway.”
I am so glad I moved the hell out of that rathole of a city. My only hope is that the disease doesn’t infect the rest of the state.
I’m a frequent reader, occasonal commenter here, and am setting myself anon on this one for that reason.
In my misspent youth I occasionally attended raves. I partook in chemical warfare more frequently, usually preferring the outdoors or a home free from “imperial entanglements,”– mine or a friend’s. I would probably make an excellent drug and alcohol councellor for kids, because I’ve used a huge percentage of what’s out there. Don’t do anything anymore, besides drink an occasional beer. I grew up.
The problem isn’t the rave scene, it’s the drugs that people take there, combined with the effects of long-term usage on the mind, as well as any potential mental illnesses amongst the users. I cannot, honestly, name one person that I’ve known who went schizo or worse who didn’t use hallucinogens. I’ve known quite a few, more than the average person of my acquaintance. The only people who can top me are those who have been involved in the drug culture for a VERY long time. I’m going to go off the line here and say that hallucinogens, in a controlled environment, when aided by a knowledgable person, can be a very useful tool for some people (therapeutic usage in the 50s with LSD in a controlled environment was generally highly successful). They are also potentially a terribly dangerous thing in the hands of novices, or in unsafe settings.
The thing with raves is that a huge percentage of the kids in attendance have no idea how this stuff works. When you are out of your damn mind because you “took two more” because you didn’t feel anything after half an hour, you are going to be barely able to take care of yourself. That’s why you have kids collapsing at shows– dehydration, exhaustion, you name it, I’ve seen it.
And when the nutters go to these events and take a bunch of psychedelics, look for the violence. In the same way that Ecstasy encourages people to open up to each other, it also removes other inhibitions. And a pissed-off, borderline maniac loser is going to be made very antisocial and pissed off at a rave, especially when he’s out of his mind on God knows what. The hippy-dippy idiots who think they know everything don’t understand this, as they think it’s some kind of a love drug, but it’s not.
Huff’s comments to one partygoer tell us everything! “What’s going on here? I mean, what’s really going on here.” He was a nutjob.
But politics takes precedence over sense, especially here in Seattle.