In my perusal of progressive news sites on the Internet, I found that Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore and other progressive pundits would have you believe that the main issue in the Aurora massacre is ghastly world leadership in gun violence. Our gun-loving culture and our interpretations of the Second Amendment to the Constitution create an atmosphere that leads to repeated breakouts of multiple murder by firearms. Of course, mass shootings are much more complicated than that.
With respect to James Holmes and the mass murders at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the question of youth unemployment was raised by at least one writer. Another writer raised the issue of the enormous stress graduate students are under. And various writers and politicians, including Pres. Obama and Mitt Romney, presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2012, use facile descriptions such as “mad” and “evil” to describe Holmes. I even saw one article on the Internet that used the typical description of these shooters: “loner”.
But I have seen so far only one writer who dared to ask a very important question, an answer to which would get to the proximate cause of the shooting. Where did this unemployed young person, who had once worked in a McDonalds, get the financial wherewithal to afford the arms, ammunition, body armor, and chemicals and other equipment with which he booby-trapped his apartment? And where did this young man, who, as far as we know, had no experience in a police department, with the military, or in a gang that had good connections to arms runners, get the training to rig the booby-traps in his apartment in a manner that police admitted was “not crude”? Thinking about these questions should make us think about the likelihood that however troubled Holmes was, he did not act alone in committing these crimes.
Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger”, who publishes the website NaturalNews.com, wrote an article shortly after the shootings, in which he said, “A decent AR-15 rifle costs $1,000 or more all by itself. The shotgun and handgun might run another $800 total. Spare mags, sights, slings, and so on will run you at least another $1,000 across three firearms. The bullet-proof vest is easily another $800, and the cost of the bomb-making gear is anybody’s guess. With all the specialty body gear, ammunition, booby-trap devices and more, I’m guessing this is at least $20,000 in weapons and tactical gear, much of which is very difficult for civilians to get in the first place. Comment added: Don’t forget the cost of all the training (thousands of dollars) and the bomb-making equipment. Holmes reportedly had 30 improvised grenades, mortars, binary liquids that explode when mixed, wires, exotic bomb equipment . . . this gets expensive very quickly (even if you can source this equipment!
“The mere manufacture of an explosive booby-trap device is, all by itself, a felony crime by the way. And remember: ‘Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes’ apartment is booby-trapped with a ‘sophisticated’ maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it,’ reported Yahoo News
“Question: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more? Certainly not in graduate school!
“All this leads to an obvious third party influence over all this. Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.”
I favor gun control, but even I acknowledge that more gun control would not have stopped this kind of shooting. Assault rifles should be banned. They serve no purpose other than to commit mayhem. You wouldn’t protect your home or business with them, and you certainly wouldn’t go hunting or sport shooting with them. But that wouldn’t solve the problem of a criminal acquiring an assault rifle that is already on the street. There should be some kind of ammunition purchase limit over time. But even a 500 to 1000 round limit over six months or a year would not have helped the situation in Aurora, because the shooter used much fewer than 500 rounds. Also, it is estimated now by the police that the shooter took months to amass his weaponry, so a patient mass killer could just wait to acquire all the armaments he feels he needs. And now with online shopping, one would have to wonder how purchases from multiple dealers would be tracked, and by whom? Don’t we already have too much surveillance by government?
Furthermore, Holmes had no record to suggest that he was the type of mentally unstable person or felon who should not have access to firearms. More background checks or waiting periods would not have helped. It appears that we have approached the limit of what legislation can do. Responsible exercise of Second Amendment rights requires something other than the law. To do more than a background check for mental illness or criminal record to ascertain whether one should have firearms now gets us into the spooky area of “Minority Report” style “pre-crime” predictions.
But while issues such as gun control, unemployment, and stress do need to be debated in our society, Mike Adams’ question is still out there: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more?
To this I add: “Why aren’t the media, especially the progressive media, discussing how Holmes could have afforded all that gear?”
My answer, based on my experiences reporting on the 9/11 tragedy, is that progressive media are proud of the fact that it focuses on the systemic problems. A look at the particular circumstances of the Aurora massacre in an attempt to answer Mike Adams’ question leaves the media open to criticism that they are engaged in so much “conspiracy theory”. And if you are a “conspiracist,” you lack the all-important “credibility” that makes your career.
Credibility is important, though not essential, as the business success of Fox News would attest. But you don’t gain credibility by looking the other way when an obvious question is staring you in the face. Someone had to finance Holmes’s acquisition of all that gear. Someone had to train him in the construction of booby-traps. We don’t know, at this point, who that someone or someones could have been, but there is some evidence to at least raise the question of whether government agents did it.
Holmes received funding during his graduate studies from the NIH (National Institutes of Health). He was one of six students in his class who received such funding. Who gets the funding and for what reason is a decision made by the university, in this case the University of Colorado. But we don’t know what the criteria are or what say, if any, the government has in the university’s decision-making process. We also don’t know what he was being funded for. Was it money for books, tuition and living expenses? Or was it for carrying out a particular project, and if so, what kind? Holmes was going for a PhD in neuroscience, so we know that neuroscience is a field that interests the government very much.
As Mike Adams noted, Holmes calmly surrendered to police in the parking lot of the theater and he warned them about his booby-trapped apartment. If he had been interested in causing the most bloodshed possible, why did he not “go out in a blaze of glory” by having a shoot out with the police in the parking lot? Was he protecting his “handlers”?
As we all saw on the Internet, Holmes looked drugged and dazed in his first court appearance. The man who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was drugged against his will in jail. Did this happen again with Holmes?
If the government was aiding and abetting these crimes, the question is “why?” Mike Adams believes it is to drum up support for the UN small arms treaty, which he believes is a pretext for sending foreign troops into the United States to confiscate American guns. I believe that is it is to distract people in the wake of the LIBOR scandal, which implicates several American financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, and to raise public fear level to justify further police state measures.
The fear level has also been increased across the pond with word out that the corporation that had the contract to provide security for the Olympic Games did not have adequate numbers of people to do the job. Great Britain has pressed police and military into service to fill the gap. There are also no-fly zones, and guns atop residential buildings to stop any possible terror attacks. But on the ground, at least one reporter has said that security has not been a problem, at least for the media. I do not suggest that there should be little or no security at the Olympics, but did the United Kingdom really need to get so carried away?
Both the United States and Great Britain for various reasons have an interest in keeping up the fear level so that they can mandate more and more surveillance as these two nations, once proud to have been among the freest in the world, descend into a nightmare of fascist police state tactics. It is the job of the mass media, both progressive and mainstream to shed light on government actions. Where are they? Busy making sure that you focus elsewhere. The progressives, especially, will tell you that you have to focus on the system not on the individuals. But if the government periodically supports false-flag operations, is that not the system? And what is a system but a collection of individuals?
Kéllia Ramares-Watson, an associate editor for Intrepid Report, is an independent journalist in Oakland, CA. Her email address is theendofmoney@gmail.com.
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The elephant in the room: Who paid for the Aurora massacre?
Posted on August 7, 2012 by Kéllia Ramares-Watson
In my perusal of progressive news sites on the Internet, I found that Bill Moyers, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore and other progressive pundits would have you believe that the main issue in the Aurora massacre is ghastly world leadership in gun violence. Our gun-loving culture and our interpretations of the Second Amendment to the Constitution create an atmosphere that leads to repeated breakouts of multiple murder by firearms. Of course, mass shootings are much more complicated than that.
With respect to James Holmes and the mass murders at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, the question of youth unemployment was raised by at least one writer. Another writer raised the issue of the enormous stress graduate students are under. And various writers and politicians, including Pres. Obama and Mitt Romney, presumptive Republican presidential nominee in 2012, use facile descriptions such as “mad” and “evil” to describe Holmes. I even saw one article on the Internet that used the typical description of these shooters: “loner”.
But I have seen so far only one writer who dared to ask a very important question, an answer to which would get to the proximate cause of the shooting. Where did this unemployed young person, who had once worked in a McDonalds, get the financial wherewithal to afford the arms, ammunition, body armor, and chemicals and other equipment with which he booby-trapped his apartment? And where did this young man, who, as far as we know, had no experience in a police department, with the military, or in a gang that had good connections to arms runners, get the training to rig the booby-traps in his apartment in a manner that police admitted was “not crude”? Thinking about these questions should make us think about the likelihood that however troubled Holmes was, he did not act alone in committing these crimes.
Mike Adams, the “Health Ranger”, who publishes the website NaturalNews.com, wrote an article shortly after the shootings, in which he said, “A decent AR-15 rifle costs $1,000 or more all by itself. The shotgun and handgun might run another $800 total. Spare mags, sights, slings, and so on will run you at least another $1,000 across three firearms. The bullet-proof vest is easily another $800, and the cost of the bomb-making gear is anybody’s guess. With all the specialty body gear, ammunition, booby-trap devices and more, I’m guessing this is at least $20,000 in weapons and tactical gear, much of which is very difficult for civilians to get in the first place. Comment added: Don’t forget the cost of all the training (thousands of dollars) and the bomb-making equipment. Holmes reportedly had 30 improvised grenades, mortars, binary liquids that explode when mixed, wires, exotic bomb equipment . . . this gets expensive very quickly (even if you can source this equipment!
“The mere manufacture of an explosive booby-trap device is, all by itself, a felony crime by the way. And remember: ‘Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes’ apartment is booby-trapped with a ‘sophisticated’ maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it,’ reported Yahoo News
“Question: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more? Certainly not in graduate school!
“All this leads to an obvious third party influence over all this. Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.”
I favor gun control, but even I acknowledge that more gun control would not have stopped this kind of shooting. Assault rifles should be banned. They serve no purpose other than to commit mayhem. You wouldn’t protect your home or business with them, and you certainly wouldn’t go hunting or sport shooting with them. But that wouldn’t solve the problem of a criminal acquiring an assault rifle that is already on the street. There should be some kind of ammunition purchase limit over time. But even a 500 to 1000 round limit over six months or a year would not have helped the situation in Aurora, because the shooter used much fewer than 500 rounds. Also, it is estimated now by the police that the shooter took months to amass his weaponry, so a patient mass killer could just wait to acquire all the armaments he feels he needs. And now with online shopping, one would have to wonder how purchases from multiple dealers would be tracked, and by whom? Don’t we already have too much surveillance by government?
Furthermore, Holmes had no record to suggest that he was the type of mentally unstable person or felon who should not have access to firearms. More background checks or waiting periods would not have helped. It appears that we have approached the limit of what legislation can do. Responsible exercise of Second Amendment rights requires something other than the law. To do more than a background check for mental illness or criminal record to ascertain whether one should have firearms now gets us into the spooky area of “Minority Report” style “pre-crime” predictions.
But while issues such as gun control, unemployment, and stress do need to be debated in our society, Mike Adams’ question is still out there: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more?
To this I add: “Why aren’t the media, especially the progressive media, discussing how Holmes could have afforded all that gear?”
My answer, based on my experiences reporting on the 9/11 tragedy, is that progressive media are proud of the fact that it focuses on the systemic problems. A look at the particular circumstances of the Aurora massacre in an attempt to answer Mike Adams’ question leaves the media open to criticism that they are engaged in so much “conspiracy theory”. And if you are a “conspiracist,” you lack the all-important “credibility” that makes your career.
Credibility is important, though not essential, as the business success of Fox News would attest. But you don’t gain credibility by looking the other way when an obvious question is staring you in the face. Someone had to finance Holmes’s acquisition of all that gear. Someone had to train him in the construction of booby-traps. We don’t know, at this point, who that someone or someones could have been, but there is some evidence to at least raise the question of whether government agents did it.
Holmes received funding during his graduate studies from the NIH (National Institutes of Health). He was one of six students in his class who received such funding. Who gets the funding and for what reason is a decision made by the university, in this case the University of Colorado. But we don’t know what the criteria are or what say, if any, the government has in the university’s decision-making process. We also don’t know what he was being funded for. Was it money for books, tuition and living expenses? Or was it for carrying out a particular project, and if so, what kind? Holmes was going for a PhD in neuroscience, so we know that neuroscience is a field that interests the government very much.
As Mike Adams noted, Holmes calmly surrendered to police in the parking lot of the theater and he warned them about his booby-trapped apartment. If he had been interested in causing the most bloodshed possible, why did he not “go out in a blaze of glory” by having a shoot out with the police in the parking lot? Was he protecting his “handlers”?
As we all saw on the Internet, Holmes looked drugged and dazed in his first court appearance. The man who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was drugged against his will in jail. Did this happen again with Holmes?
If the government was aiding and abetting these crimes, the question is “why?” Mike Adams believes it is to drum up support for the UN small arms treaty, which he believes is a pretext for sending foreign troops into the United States to confiscate American guns. I believe that is it is to distract people in the wake of the LIBOR scandal, which implicates several American financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, and to raise public fear level to justify further police state measures.
The fear level has also been increased across the pond with word out that the corporation that had the contract to provide security for the Olympic Games did not have adequate numbers of people to do the job. Great Britain has pressed police and military into service to fill the gap. There are also no-fly zones, and guns atop residential buildings to stop any possible terror attacks. But on the ground, at least one reporter has said that security has not been a problem, at least for the media. I do not suggest that there should be little or no security at the Olympics, but did the United Kingdom really need to get so carried away?
Both the United States and Great Britain for various reasons have an interest in keeping up the fear level so that they can mandate more and more surveillance as these two nations, once proud to have been among the freest in the world, descend into a nightmare of fascist police state tactics. It is the job of the mass media, both progressive and mainstream to shed light on government actions. Where are they? Busy making sure that you focus elsewhere. The progressives, especially, will tell you that you have to focus on the system not on the individuals. But if the government periodically supports false-flag operations, is that not the system? And what is a system but a collection of individuals?
Kéllia Ramares-Watson, an associate editor for Intrepid Report, is an independent journalist in Oakland, CA. Her email address is theendofmoney@gmail.com.