Local News – Two killed in a Murder Suicide at local Detroit College

I was not going to blog about this, because I did not want to see this become another one of those “Crazy gun” stories, but seeing CNN is reporting it, I will:

Two people were shot and killed Friday at a community college in Dearborn, Michigan, in what police believe was a murder-suicide, an official said.
The Henry Ford Community College campus in Dearborn, Michigan, was locked down after the shooting.
Henry Ford Community College - Arts Building
A man and woman were found dead in a classroom building on the campus of Henry Ford Community College, Dearborn Deputy Chief Gregg Brighton said.
Investigators believe the man shot the woman but would not provide further information, Brighton said.
A shotgun was involved in the incident, which occurred in a classroom that was not being used, he said.
“We’re in the very preliminary stages,” Brighton said. “We’ve just made the scene safe. The crime lab is on the scene with detectives.” Video Watch Brighton describe the scene »
Police responding to a report of gunfire at the school had entered the south hallway of the Fine Arts Building when they heard another gunshot, Brighton said.
“We were in the building when we heard the shotgun blast, and when we finally got to that room, we had two deceased parties,” he said at a news conference. “We believe this is a murder-suicide.”
The campus was briefly in lockdown and will remain closed for the rest of the Friday, a school official said.
via Two killed in Michigan college shooting – CNN.com.

Needless to say, I was quite shocked that this happened. I have been to Henry Ford College before. For a testing session for my Technician Class (now called Tech Plus, I think…) License. For those that do not know, I am a licensed Amateur Radio Operator. (or Ham Operator…) I am not active at the moment, I need a new H.F. Antenna. But Anyhow, I have been to that college once for a testing session. Also, A friend of mine went to Henry Ford College for Automotive training. Henry Ford Community College is exactly 7.32 miles from my house, according to Mapquest. I do not have any details on the shooting, other than what the local media is reporting, that the families and police are searching for answers (Via WXYZ-TV):

(Via WXYZ-TV)

Also, the victims family is speaking out, this via WDIV-TV in Detroit:

Friday night, Asia McGowan’s family spoke.
McGowan is described as an inspiring actress, singer and dancer.
“That was her favorite thing, dancing, singing and film,” said McGowan’s mother Pamela Peterson. “She wanted to do it all, she had nothing but life in her and I don’t understand how it was snuffed out today.”
“That’s one thing that I admire about my cousin, she very, very ambitious. If there wasn’t a way, she was going to make it happen. I’m at a loss for words,” said cousin Rashida Morris.
“She was beautiful, an aspiring actress and dancer,” said Turahn McGowan, who added that his daughter had planned to try out for the Fox network’s “So You Think You Can Dance” talent competition.
Peterson said her daughter was not romantically involved with Powell.
Investigators said that it appeared Powell made several advances but was turned down each time.
Police said McGowan was rehearsing a scene in the empty room at Henry Ford Community College when Powell barged in.

My heart goes out to this family, and my prayers go out as well. My the Lord help to try and make sense of this kind of an awful tragedy.

Awesome Local Story: Cop Saves Man from Burning Car

This for all those who believe that the police are our enemies:

The Video:

The Story via WXYZ-TV:

CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WXYZ) – Talk about a close call. A police officer raced into action and made a daring rescue to save a man from a burning car. And, just seconds after the man was pulled from the vehicle, flames devoured it.
Thursday morning Clinton Township Police Officer Mark Krutell noticed smoke billowing from outside Tower Automotive on Groesbeck south of Hall Road. At about the same time, a 911 call was placed that a man fainted inside his locked 2002 Ford Escort that was partially on fire in the parking lot.
When Krutell arrived, bystanders were trying to break open the window with rocks. The officer ended up smashing the glass with his flashlight, opening the door and dragging the unidentified man to safety. Seconds later, fire engulfed the car. All of this was captured on Krutel’s dash-cam video.
The man in the car apparently had some type of medical condition and passed out with his foot on the accelerator and the accelerator pushed to the floor. The car overheated and caught on fire.
The victim was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment of unspecified injuries. Inside the hospital, officers say he shook Krutell’s hand and thanked him for his actions.

This man is a hero and should be treated as such. I post this here because as of late the police have been getting a horrible rap for a few bad apples. This man went well beyond the call of duty and should be commended for it.

New Information on the PA Shooting

First off, information on what has been said by the shooter, this gives more insight into this guys mental state:

Via The Philly Inquirer:

Richard Poplawski thought that Police Officer Stephen Mayhle was faking being dead as he lay in front of a home in the Stanton Heights section of the city on Saturday morning. So he shot the officer again “to make sure.”
He also shot Officer Paul Sciullo II a second time as he lay inside the house “just for the hell of it,” according to investigators.
In interviews with police, Poplawski, 22, showed no remorse when describing the deaths of Officers Mayhle, Sciullo and Eric Kelly, who were shot as they responded to a 911 call placed by Margaret Poplawski, the suspect’s mother.
Investigators said Richard Poplawski maintained a cold demeanor as he answered their questions, occasionally yawning.
He also said he thought he had killed as many as five police officers, including Timothy McManaway, who was hit on the hand by a bullet or shrapnel while trying to rescue Kelly.
“Yeah, I thought he was dead,” Poplawski told police.
Another officer, Brian Jones, broke a leg while scaling a fence behind the house.
Poplawski engaged in a lengthy gun battle with police, firing an AK-47 from his bedroom window and exchanging hundreds of rounds of gunfire with SWAT officers before surrendering.
Poplawski, who was wearing a bulletproof vest, was hit multiple times in the leg during the four-hour standoff, and he called friends and told them he was going to die.
The gunman later told investigators he had planned for police to kill him. But he changed his mind and agreed to surrender, hoping to go to prison so he could write a book.

I’ve wrote about this before, so search for the guys name and look for it. But this here tells me, that this guy is nothing more than a cold-blooded killer. He ought to spend the rest of his life in jail. Something else that bothers me:

Via AP:

The mother of a man charged with killing three Pittsburgh police officers told a 911 dispatcher he had weapons, but the dispatcher didn’t relay that information to officers, the official in charge of county dispatchers says.
The dispatcher should have asked more questions about the weapons, but didn’t, and certainly should have told officers so they could take necessary precautions, Allegheny County Chief of Emergency Services Robert Full told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“There is no excuse. It could have been handled better, without a doubt,” Full said in Tuesday’s editions.
Richard Poplawski’s mother, Margaret, had dialed 911 Saturday morning to summon police after threatening to evict him
[….]

9/11 Transcript:
In a recording of the call that county officials played for the newspaper, Margaret Poplawski sounded impatient as she called 911 at about 7 a.m. and asked for police to come take her son out of the house.
“Are you moving or what? Or the police gotta come?” she asks.
“Does he have any weapons or anything?” the dispatcher asked.
“Yes,” the mother said. After a long pause, she added, “They’re all legal.”
“OK, but he’s not threatening you with anything?” the dispatcher said.
Without answering, Margaret Poplawski mother said, “Look, I’m just waking up from a sleep. I want him gone.”
“OK, we’ll send ’em over, OK?” the dispatcher said.
“Sounds good,” the mother said, as the call ends.
Police union president James Malloy said officers would have responded differently had they known Poplawski had weapons.
“You approach the house with a different attitude. You approach the house from a distance,” said Malloy, a retired police sergeant. “You park your car a distance from the house so you can hit the dirt.”

Obviously, there was a direct case here of negligence by the 911 operator. This message should have been directly relayed to the police on scene, but it was it, and now three police officers are now dead. Of course, the Liberal Blogs or the Liberal MSM won’t touch this aspect of the story, because they are too busy blaming the Conservative media for the shooting itself. When in all honesty, it would have avoided, had someone done their job properly.

From the "Oh this is just flippin' great…." Stack: Americans Electricity Grid in U.S. has been Penetrated By Spies

Think of this the next time you start to turn on the light or crank up the laptop, or anything else for that matter:

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”
The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”
Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet
via Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies – WSJ.com.

To be fair, this most likely has been going on since before Obama ever took office. Most likely the Wall Street Journal released this to remind America that we are still under threat from terrorist attack. Unlike some of my fellow Conservative blogger, I will not use this as a chance to attack The President. But rather I will hope that our President does gear up for a decent defense budget. Further more, I hope everyone up on “The Hill” will read this an realize that terrorist threats still do exist.

One thing that does bother me. This report is one of those, “New York Times” kind of reports. No direct quotes, just anonymous sources. That tends to make me disbelieve the report. How come the people providing this information, cannot just go on record. Another thing is that it the people doing this, is not Al-Qaeda, it is China and Russia. Which I highly believe will not try anything stupid. However, I believe the U.S. will be a bit less inclined to call China to the carpet on the situation of North Korea.

This will be an interesting story to follow, if there is anymore information released.

Reality is a dish served cold

It seems that Israel is unimpressed by the hope and change montra of Barack Obama.

Via the Jerusalem Post:

“Israel does not take orders from [Barack] Obama,” Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) said on Monday, responding to an earlier statement by the US president in which he reaffirmed his administration’s commitment to all previous understandings between Israel and the Palestinians, including the process launched at Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007.
Erdan, who is also the liaison between the cabinet and the Knesset, praised Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Beiteinu), who only last week said Israel was not bound by the Annapolis talks because it had never been approved by the cabinet or the Knesset.
“In voting for [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu the citizens of Israel have decided that they will not become the US’s 51st state,” said Erdan, who was representing the coalition in a Knesset discussion of Lieberman’s controversial statements. He added, however, that “Obama is a friend of Israel and the United States is an important ally, and everything between us will be the result of communication.”

As the title of the post states, reality is a dish served cold; the crew of the of the USS Liberty found this out on June 8, 1967. When Israeli forces supposedly accidentally bombed one of our ships during the six day war. I say “supposedly” because much information has surfaced in the last couple of years, that the bombing was totally intentional. Much, if not all of this information has been suppressed by the main stream media and by the United States Government up until very recently.

I have always held the opinion that Israel does not see the United States as an true ally. But more of a useful idiot. Because of the overwhelming support by Christian Zionists who somehow or another see Israel has their rightful home; which if someone actually did study their Bible and learn how to interpret it properly, they would see the Zionism is nothing more than a man-made lie to produce money for a sin-depraved Nation and for a group of people going to straight to hell for rejecting Christ as their messiah.

However, there is a good reason for the continuance of the furtherance of this manufactured lie; Money. The money raised by the Zionist shills is good for Church Business and good for the shills that peddle this idiotic doctrine. Having said all the that, it is good to see that for a change that one of Israel’s leaders has finally decided to speak freely about what Americas real role in Israel really is, instead of the well manufactured lie that they have been peddling to the Christian World for so long.

The Federal Government cracks down on the Scam Mortgage Loaners , except for the most important one

So much for enforcing the law….:

The Obama administration has already unveiled its plan to stem the rising home foreclosure rate, but with foreclosure scams also increasing, the administration today announced a multi-agency effort to crack down on scams that prey on struggling homeowners.
“Just as this administration has intensified our efforts to help American homeowners, those who would seek to prey on the most vulnerable are intensifying their tactics as well, often through purported mortgage modification and foreclosure relief companies,” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said at an announcement in Washington. “These are predatory schemes designed to rob Americans of their savings and potentially their homes.”
The FBI is currently investigating more than 2,100 mortgage fraud cases, up 400 percent from five years ago
via Feds Crack Down on Foreclosure Scams – ABC News.

Hip Hip Hooray, Obama is enforcing the law! Well, perhaps not. 🙄

Judicial Watch reports that the two biggest corrupt lenders; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack, have broken the law for years. What excatly is President Teleprompter and his attack Dog Tim Geithner AKA Eddie Haskel doing about this?

*crickets*

You guessed it! Not a damn thing……. So much for all the “Hope and Change” and a new direction in America. As I long suspected a very long time ago, it is simply more of the same from an empty suit, who’s big on speeches and low on substance.

Update: Hello to all the Freepers reading this! 😀 Please take a look around, you might just like it here. 🙂

Obama says "We're not at war with Islam"

I really don’t get why this is new, as Bush said this as well. But Here goes!:

Barack Obama, making his first visit to a Muslim nation as president, declared Monday the United States “is not and will never be at war with Islam.”
Urging a greater partnership with the Islamic world in an address to the Turkish parliament, Obama called the country an important U.S. ally in many areas, including the fight against terrorism. He devoted much of his speech to urging a greater bond between Americans and Muslims, portraying terrorist groups such as al Qaida as extremists who do not represent the vast majority of Muslims.
“Let me say this as clearly as I can,” Obama said. “The United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. In fact, our partnership with the Muslim world is critical … in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject.”
The U.S. president is trying to mend fences with a Muslim world that felt it had been blamed by America for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
via Obama declares US not at war with Islam- AP.

From what I understand there are some that are not happy about the statement underlined above. Ed Morrissey weighs in here:

Obama spoke in the tradition established by Bush over the last seven-plus years of emphasizing that America did not declare war on Islam. That’s been obvious through our partnership with Islamic nations, such as Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, just to name a few. And he’s right; the last thing we would want to do would be to declare war on a billion people just on the basis of their religion. The more we can keep the Muslims on the sidelines, the better off we are in fighting against the radicals.
However, the AP wants to pretend that this is some new effort by the US to assure Muslims of our intentions. It decidedly is not, and perhaps a mention that Bush tried making these same assurances for almost his entire presidency would be in order here.

Well Ed, When your name is George and you are a Christian white man from Texas, it is a bit harder to sell that idea. Let’s face it; Obama is a black man with a Islamic middle name, it’s just going to be easier to sell that idea for President Obama; than it was for President Bush. I believe the majority of “Americanized” Muslims understood this, but it was the Muslims abroad that felt it was an attack on the Islamic Faith.

I just hope that Obama is able to make that sell. Because the last thing we need is war with Islam itself.

Honestly, When are Journalists and Bloggers going to get a clue?

This is going to most likely be with of those kind of posts, that is going to cause a bunch of people to either like me a whole lot, or it is going to going to cause a good number of people to hate my guts. Either way, I could honestly give two shits, because I am just sick and tired of the damned media and the damned Blogosphere reporting half truths and outright bullshit. Yeah, I am in on of those kind of a moods right now. So, be warned this might veer off into bad language and poor manners.

I was over looking at the HotAir headlines and I saw this:

Surprise: Pittsburgh cop-killer was anti-semitic, white supremacist, Alex Jones fan

My initial reaction was, “Oh Shit… here we go, profiling someone who most likely isn’t anything like, what they’re trying to say.” Needless to say, my gut feeling was correct. The link leads over to Charles Johnson’s Blog, Little Green Footballs, who gleefully reports a story written by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

Richard Andrew Poplawski was a young man convinced the nation was secretly controlled by a cabal that would eradicate freedom of speech, take away his guns and use the military to enslave the citizenry.
His online profile suggests someone at once lonely and seething. He wrote of burning the backs of both of his hands, the first time with a cigarette, the second time for symmetry. He subscribed to conspiracy theories and, by January 2007, was posting photographs of his tattoos on white supremacist Web site Stormfront. Among his ambitions: “to accumulate enough ‘I punched that [expletive] so hard’ stories to match my old man.”
“Crazy to me is going through the motions,” he wrote on his MySpace profile three years ago. “Crazy to me is letting each day slip past you. Crazy is being insignificant. Crazy is being obscure, pointless.”
No longer obscure, the 22-year-old is charged in the worst police shooting in the modern history of Pittsburgh. No one is calling his actions anything but pointless.
“He was really into politics and really into the First and Second amendment. One thing he feared was he feared the gun ban because he thought that was going to take away peoples’ right to defend themselves. He never spoke of going out to murder or to kill,” said Edward Perkovic, who described himself as Mr. Poplawski’s lifelong best friend.
Mr. Poplawski’s view of guns and personal freedom took a turn toward the fringes of American politics. With Mr. Perkovic, he appeared to share a belief that the government was controlled from unseen forces, that troops were being shipped home from the Mideast to police the citizenry here, and that Jews secretly ran the country.
Believing most media were covering up important events, Mr. Poplawski turned to a far-right conspiracy Web site run by Alex Jones, a self-described documentarian with roots going back to the extremist militia movement of the early 1990s.
Around the same time, he joined Florida-based Stormfront, which has long been a clearinghouse Web site for far-right groups. He posted photographs of his tattoo, an eagle spread across his chest.
“I was considering gettin’ life runes on the outside of my calfs,” he wrote. Life runes are a common symbol among white supremacists, notably followers of The National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group linked to an array of violent organizations.

Seriously, does anyone do any kind of investigative journalism anymore? You see that line up there, that I have bolded and underlined? That is nothing more than a bunch of biased bullshit propaganda. I happen to have an account over at Stormfront.org, I use it for research purposes. I will be the first to tell you, that I do not agree with ALL of the stuff that is printed there. I will say this however, as I have written on this Blog many times, I have zero use for the Post Racial Racialism in this country, I also detest the identity politics of the left. I also whole heartedly reject the liberal idea of celebrating diversity. But I am just not wired to hate people, because skin color or race. I am sympathetic to the feelings of those over at Stormfront, I just disagree with their whole idea of a solution or their stance towards those of a difference race or color. My battle is purely a political one, not a racial one.

The reason I am bringing all this up, is because I saw the article about this guy supposedly being a “White Nationalist” and so, I went to stormfront and created a thread mentioning this. Very quickly it was pointed out to me, that this guy had posted all of one or two postings over at stormfront. A posting showing off a tatoo. Can someone tell me please, when did making a single posting over on a Forum, showing off a tattoo makes someone a hardcore white nationalist?

There are many people here to blame. The Post Gazette for not fact checking thier article. Blogger Charles Johnson for not checking this story out, and finally Blogger Allahpundit or Ed, who posted this headline over at Hotair. Come on people, we can do better than this. I can understand the liberal mainstream media, but Conservative Bloggers?

I mean, I have no idea what this guys true motivation was, but I can tell you, he was most likely not a true blue white nationalist. I can also tell you, that the White Nationalists do not, nor have they ever, condoned this sort of behavior. As user “PerturbedCitizen” of stormfront says, and I am sure that this can be taken as a statement from the site itself:

My deepest respect to the three fallen heroes, who do more for our country and the future of our kind on a daily basis than most people dream of. This board is not a meeting place for cop killers and psychos. Stormfront exists to discuss the future of the very families and the people men like those officers left behind. To honor a race of people that shape our world which those officers were very much a part of. They are the brightest and most powerful examples of what we cherish and devote our lives to protecting and paying tribute to.
To the public servants who wake up every morining and put your lives on the line to make my country a better place for my family to live, I salute you.
To the degenerates who do good folks harm and make our world a darker place, the time for honoring yourselves is coming to an end.

Now, on to a related subject. It seems that we have some idiots on the far left, who are now using this tragic event to take unwarranted potshots at Bloggers and media types on the right. HotAir’s Ed Morrissey points out this little gem taken from Kos’s Twitter feed:

kos-tweet

Now this is the same crap that has went on in the past, when Mr. Kos said screw them and then tried to cover it up.

Tommy Christapher Weighs in here:

Dana Houle is a Daily Kos frontpager, not some tinfoil diarist, and Markos is the public face of the liberal blogosphere. Granted, his influence isn’t what it used to be, but he is still the most recognizable, the most closely-associated liberal blogger out there.
When I saw his re-Tweet, I was stunned, and I hadn’t even heard about the Pittsburgh shooting yet. I thought he was talking about the shooting in Binghamton. When I looked back at Houle’s Tweet, and I found the story of the three policemen who were killed yesterday, I could not believe my eyes. As you can see, I tried to get Markos to explain his re-Tweet, unable to believe that these two would be joking about this at all, let alone hours after the tragedy. …
Maybe there’s something wrong with me, but I think this is shameful. This is the kind of thing I would probably delete at Political Machine. I don’t even see the humor in it, even setting aside the heartless ghoulishness involved.

One word to sum this up, well, actually two; Fucking Pathetic. It is no wonder that Time Magazine basically dismissed the DailyKos as an irrelevant Blog. I do not think that Irrelevant even begins to cover the surface of those ignorant bastards. But I will refrain from ranting anymore about them, they’re not worth the effort and bandwidth wasted.

Update: Right Voices links in, Thank you! So does Memeorandum, who has me on the list of blogs to scan, Thanks to Gabe as well.

Another Police Shooting in Pittsburgh, Man Paranoid about Obama, Liberal Bloggers Blame Conservative Media

This is sad. 🙁

Pittsburgh police say a man wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on officers during a domestic disturbance call, killing three of them.
Police chief Nate Harper says the motive for Saturday’s shooting isn’t clear.
Friends say the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and that he feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.
The three dead officers are Eric Kelly, Stephen Mayhle and Paul Sciullo III. Kelly had been on the force for 14 years and the other two only two years each.
Another officer was shot in the hand and a fifth broke his leg on a fence.
The gunman, 23-year-old Richard Poplawski, was arrested after a four-hour standoff.

via FOXNews.com – Shooter Wearing Bulletproof Vest Guns Down 3 Pittsburgh Officers, Upset Over Losing Job

It’s sad, but it is also sick; it seems now that some Liberal Bloggers are now blaming the Conservative media for this shooting. Which I think is a bunch of bull crap. As much as I know that it ticks off the left, but the truth of the matter is this. If someone is going to grab a gun and kill someone, they are going to do it regardless if they listen to Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Randi Rhoads or Stephanie Miller.

The point here is this, this dude and the dude in New York had issues, seriously bad mental issues. The sad part is, that he had access to firearms. The State of Michigan and I assume the State of New York and Pennsylvania have very good gun laws that keep people from getting guns that have diagnosed mental illnesses. However, it cannot stop people who have issues that are not diagnosed. I mean, the Government is not a mind reader. The sad part is, that Liberals are going to use this as some sort of sick excuse to rally for more Governmental regulation and stripping of our Gun rights. I am afraid that is this simply not the answer.

The truth of the matter is that there are mentally ill people out there and they are going to do stuff like this, it is just a fact of life. I just do not buy the idiotic notion that the Conservative media, Glenn Back, Sean Hannity or any of the rest of them are to blame. There are millions of sane, rational people that listen to these programs on a daily basis and they have never done anything stupid like this.

Another thing that highly annoys me is this; is how the Media is trying to engage in the profiling of the shooter in New York. He is being described is a quiet type, who harbored some hatred towards America. Well, let me be the first to say that, I am, in fact, a quiet type. I’m not a Fred Flintstone type. I keep to myself, I’m not very outgoing at all. Hey, I am unemployed, except for this Blog. I don’t drive around wasting gas, it is called being smart and frugal. I feel like people with personalities like mine are simply unfairly being singled out. There’s nothing wrong with being an introvert. We quiet people tend to be thinkers. I also, the portrait being painted about those who value their gun rights is totally unfair. I believe in the second amendment, if I were living along, I would own a gun, I would register it; as I believe in complying with the law.

I just do not understand why the Left Wing Media and the Liberal Bloggers are using two major tragedies like these to try and further an anti-gun agenda and a Conservative Media hysteria agenda. It does sort of remind me of the Jewish hysteria agenda that Hitler started in Germany.

Update: Flopping Aces makes a very valid point, in reaction to this here:

I’m sorry, didn’t hear that kind of statement when this happened.

Update #2: There is now a facebook page with a petition to get the shooting in PA; Richard Poplawski charged with Capital Murder. I’ve signed it, I suggest you do as well. No matter what political stripe you are, this guy commited murder. He should be punished with such.

Tragedy in New York: shooter enters Immigration Center opens fire

This is a horrible tragedy 🙁 :

Via Press Connects:

At least twelve people are dead after a gunman went on a shooting spree inside the American Civic Center in Binghamton, according to preliminary information from state police.
A federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity told the Associated Press the shooter has been found dead in the building.
The law enforcement official said the gunman entered the building through the front while firing. He had already blocked the back door with his car.
At one point more than 40 hostages were being held in the building at 131 Front Street — 15 in a closet and 26 in the boiler room. At 2:40 p.m., Binghamton Police indicated the situation was over and that a SWAT team was making sure there were no people inside the building.
At 3 p.m., Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski said no one taken from the building is a suspect, including two men who were removed in plastic handcuffs. A report of a man fleeing the building was false, Zikuski said.
The building is currently secure, although the dead remain within it, Zikuski said. He would not say where in the building the bodies were located.
Sharpshooters from the Binghamton SWAT team were poised outside the building during the crisis, and the Endicott police bomb squad was also at the scene.
Scanner reports just before 1:30 p.m., indicate police were asking 26 people in the Civic Association to lie on the floor with the hands above their heads.
Police and ambulance crews began staging at Oak and Main Street, the site of the Binghamton High School, shortly after 10:30 a.m. today. Local apartments were evacuated and businesses, including a nearby nursing home, were placed under lockdown. The high school was also locked down.

I am writing about this to appeal to all political bloggers on all sides of the aisle. Please, let’s keep politics out of this, for the time being. This is not the time to engage in political dogmatic nonsense. This is a time of mourning for the families and the people in this area. I don’t think that it would be out of place to offer up a prayer for the familes involved in this horrific tragic event.

My personal prayers go out to all families of the victims. My God be with them all.