Shooting at Family Research Council headquarters
Will media rush to judgment?
At approximately 11:35 a.m. eastern Casey Mattox of the Family Research Council tweeted that there had been a shooting at their headquarters in downtown DC. While few details are known, Mattox reports that a guard was shot.
Mattox reported that they were “on lockdown” on the 5th floor, and later made it outside. Mattox tweeted a photo a few minutes later, at 10:48 a.m. eastern:
A statement was released on the FRC Blog:
Incident at FRC Headquarters
Family Research Council President Tony Perkins made the following comments after an FRC security guard was shot this morning:
“The police are investigating this incident. Our first concern is with our colleague who was shot today. Our concern is for him and his family.”
The Family Research Council, a pro-Christian nonprofit, was named a hate group in 2010 by the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with such groups at the Ku Klux Klan, for its “anti-gay” positions. Professor Jacobson reported on SPLC’s exaggerations and false accusations in November 2010.
From the Family Research Council website:
Since 1983, Family Research Council (FRC) has advanced faith, family and freedom in public policy and public opinion. FRC’s team of seasoned experts promotes these core values through policy research, public education on Capitol Hill and in the media, and grassroots mobilization. We review legislation, meet with policymakers, publish books and pamphlets, build coalitions, testify before Congress, and maintain a powerful presence in print and broadcast media. Through our outreach to pastors, we equip churches to transform the culture.
The FRC also has been targeted by groups like the Human Rights Campaign. From the Human Rights Campaign website:
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Family Research Council (FRC) as a hate group because of their “propagation of known falsehoods — claims about [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] people that have been thoroughly discredited by scientific authorities — and repeated.”
It is possible this is a random act, and at this stage given that we do know the motive for the crime, we certainly do not want to jump to false conclusions.
We will update as more details are known.
Update: At 12:17 p.m. eastern, Mattox reported that a bomb squad was entering the building. ABC reports that a suspect is in custody and the guard who was shot in the arm is conscious and breathing.
Fox News is reporting the suspect disagreed with the Family Research Council’s policies:
The suspect “made statements regarding their policies, and then opened fire with a gun striking a security guard,” a source told Fox News. WJLA-TV7 reported the suspect was also shot.
Authorities were treating the attack as a case of domestic terrorism.
Neither the Human Rights Campaign nor the Southern Poverty Law Center responded to my requests for comment.
Update 5:42 p.m.: The Human Rights Campaign posted a joint statement, signed by the leaders of several LGBT groups, condemning the shooting.
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Comments
I found a couple articles which did at least a partial tally of Leftist violence, which, oddly enough, never really seems to get acknowledged by the Leftstream Media. The articles are longer and give nods to the violence and baseness of the poo-throwing, defecating-on-the-US-Flag_and-Police-Cruisers OWS, ultra violent OWS, the beat-downs of the wheelchair-bound by SEIU thugs, as well as others, and these:
Of Massacres & Media Myths, NY POST
and from the ACE OF SPADES blog: Why Not Just Call the Holocaust Museum Shooter a “White Supremacist” and “Anti-Semite”?
“Media assumptions that violence is right-wing are routine — and routinely wrong.”
On Friday morning, Brian Ross of ABC News speculated on live TV that James Holmes, the accused killer in Aurora, Colo., was a member of the Tea Party. A few hours later, Ross posted a short apology online; Holmes had no Tea Party connection.
Ross’ unfounded speculation wasn’t unusual (although the speed of his apology was). This was merely the latest case of media commentators jumping to the conclusion that violent attrocities should be attributed to members of the political right. Let’s look back at how often the media has falsely invoked Tea Partiers and other “right-wing nut jobs” in the past few years.
* December 2007 Matthew Murray. planned attacks on Christians at the Colorado New Life Church and Youth with a Mission (hated Christians)
* February 2010: Joe Stack flew his small plane into an IRS building … Stack’s suicide note quoted the Communist Manifesto.
* February 2010: University of Alabama professor Amy Bishop shot and killed three colleagues. Bishop was a lifelong Democrat and Obama donor.
* March 2010: John Patrick Bedell shot two Pentagon security officers at close range. Bedell was a registered Democrat and 9/11 Truther.
* May 2010: New York authorities disarmed a massive car bomb in Times Square. The perp was Faisal Shahzad, an Islamic extremist.
* August 2010: Michael Enright stabbed a Muslim cab driver in the neck. But Enright was a left-leaning art student who had worked with a firm that produced a pro-mosque statement.
* September 2010: James Lee, 43, took three hostages at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Maryland. Turns out that Lee was an environmentalist who viewed humans as parasites on the Earth.
* January 2011: Jared Lee Loughner went on a rampage in Tucson, Ariz. Turns out that Loughner was mostly apolitical — a conspiracy theorist who, to date, has been judged too mentally incompetent to stand trial.
“The trouble with this is that the media never calls anti-globalism thugs and rioters members of the “far left.” Nor do they deem animal rights extremists so. Nor gun-toting Black Panthers and black supremacists. Nor, of course, the murderer of William Long. Note that in all these cases where the malefactors would be categorized as somewhere on the left if we attempted to categorize them in a conventional system of politics at all.
But we don’t so categorize them, or rather the media doesn’t so categorize them.
Who burns car lots to the ground to protest industrialization and energy use? Members of the “far left” or “environmental extremists”? The latter, of course who, in the media’s telling, are entirely unrelated to the conventional spectrum of politics. Who throws stones through businesses’ windows and attack cops whenever the G8 or G20 is in town? Members of the “far left” or “anti-globalism protesters”? Again, the latter, standing wholly apart from mainstream political movements. And Al Qaeda…? Well, look: It’s a third-world “empowerment” movement that hates “zionism” and US hegemony. And further, the far left has supported or made excuses for a lot of such terrorist movements. (They still do, of course. Even with Al Qaeda.)”
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