Why a man with a gun was aiming to shoot up the office of the Governor of Colorado remains unclear, although there are clues that the man — who was shot dead by a security officer — was mentally unstable. - Click here for complete story.
The incident made us recall a similar shooting by an assailant of a security guard in the Illinois State Capitol a couple years back — and a shooting in the U.S. Capitol, right outside Tom DeLay’s office in 1998.
According to Wikipedia:
The United States Capitol shooting incident of 1998 was an attack on July 24, 1998 which led to the death of two United States Capitol Police officers. Detective John Gibson and Private First Class Jacob Chestnut were killed when Russell Eugene Weston Jr. entered the Capitol and opened fire. Chestnut was killed instantly and Gibson died during surgery at George Washington University Hospital but not before wounding Weston, who survived. Weston’s exact motives are unknown, but he does suffer from a mental disorder and maintains a strong distrust of the federal government. As of 2007, because of diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, he remains in a mental institution and has yet to be tried in court.
There have been other shoot outs in governmental buildings over the years, too many to list.
The shooting in Colorado occurred in a state that champions carry-concealed rights and where the NRA reigns supreme. It is also the state that Columbine High School is located in.
That doesn’t mean that there is anything especially unusual as far as guns in Colorado is concerned, which may be part of the problem.
America has never really gotten over a mythological cultural embrace of the “Wild West” and the alleged power of the gun to avenge all grievances. It’s not surprising that unstable individuals view handguns or assault weapons as means for carrying out personal vendettas.
After all, it is our gun culture — enhanced by a well-entrenched gun lobby — that is obsessed with imbuing firearms with some sort of omnipotent power.
So, it is perhaps tragically ironic that our legislative bodies, which give the gun lobby its way, become the victims of gun violence.
An armed society is not, after all, a polite society. It’s just a powder keg waiting to explode, and explode it does on a daily basis.
