Just finished watching the press conference from Aurora Colorado on the shooting.
Guy didn’t have much of a police record. He used a Glock .40 Cal, Rem 870 12 gauge, and a S&W M&P-15 rifle in the shooting. He was also wearing ballistic armor on most of his body.
No word on his motive, but this guy was loaded to bear. Does bring the subject of armor defeating rounds into consideration. They were branded “Cop Killers”, but it isn’t just cops who can get this stuff.
Very scary.
I wonder if body armor will be considered an attempt at resisting arrest.
Speaking of which, how DID they bring him down?
According to police he surrendered without incident. –
He surrendered- all according to the plan and agreement he made with DoJ to initiate and perform the exercise to create the event Soterobama needs to implement the UN gun treaty and exercise Executive Action laws…
Wish I was being saracastic in thinking this and had a tinfoil hat.
Armored up and, if I recall, openly surrendered to the cops.
So one thing we can tell is this guy did not want “suicide by cop”. He wanted to live.
Not only that, he wanted to get caught. Given the described equipment, his apparent intelligence (neurosciences PhD students are generally not stupid people), and the amount of preparation he had to put into this, it’s extremely likely that he could have come up with an escape plan that would have worked, especially if he wasn’t shy about pre-positioning and using explosive/incendiary devices (which he seems to have had plenty of, based on the booby-trapping of his apartment).
That’s a real good point
He had at least one tear gas device. Apparently had something else incendiary/explosive in his car. And his apartment was rigged.
He was even wearing a gas mask which even a single “lens” style would be damn face concealing in the dark. Meanwhile the two lens versions would be totally concealing.
All in all he could have tried to escape. And that’s not even the initial police response was anything other than SWAT and he tried to go North Hollywood.
Instead he turned himself in.
This guy wanted to kill a mess of people and he wanted to be caught afterwards.
The last I heard the guy told police that “I am the Joker,” and had dyed his hair to look like the Joker. Sounds as if he was very smart and very nuts (in the clinical sense).
If that’s the case, then if I were the cops I’d be looking for a secondary plot. The Chris Nolan / Heath Ledger version of the Joker did not do simple, one strike crimes like this.
I’ve also been wondering why he would have warned the cops about his apartment being rigged, rather than letting them find out the hard way. It sort of defeats the purpose of trapping it in the first place.
Perhaps the booby traps were set in the event he was killed by police, like a final payback. Generally speaking, mass murderers don’t want to get caught, just become infamous.
Generally, but in this case he surrendered without incident.
And depending on his armor level and how much ammo he had left, he didn’t have to do that.
Methinks he wanted to live and enjoy the infamy.
Could be the images in his head of the little girls he just shot got to him. One of the witness’s also stated when he first came in, he threw a gas can & a gun to the ground before shooting off the first shot into ceiling with a shotgun. They really need to stop posting this cowards face everywhere unless of course it’s with a rope around his neck.
This might be true. After all, he came to a midnight showing where there honestly shouldn’t be any children. Imagine if he had instead gone to a Pixar movie in the afternoon…
I dunno if I’m ready to buy that just yet. We’ll see. Plus they keep saying he dyed his hair red, while the Joker’s hair has always been green in every incarnation of comic, TV, and movies.
Red hair?
Hmmm…
Ronald McDonald? Wendy?
(Or maybe he’s just a nutjob and trying to figure out the “connections” that kind of deranged mind makes is pointless.)
Or it could be a misconstrued statement lapped up by a media who WANTS this to be somebody who thinks he was a comic book character.
He was wearing a gas mask because he imitated the attack by throwing a gas grenade of some sort into the crowd…but so many quickly were saying he was dressed as the villain Bane because that makes for a better news story than simply a guy dressed to kill.
And here’s part of what was done with the apartment
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/31290627/detail.html
“Loud Music Used To Lure People To Booby-Trapped Apt.”
The guy had gas and incendiaries. Though as the folks at GBC note, chains for the doors and gasoline could have done more too. As well as more gas to pop into the crowd.
And as they note (specifically Gay_Cynic) it’s something that the mutant actually chose a fairly inefficient mode of mass murder.
From CNN Wire:
— AR15 rifle: A rifle that commonly fires bullets .223 millimeter in diameter. Originally manufactured by Colt before its patent ran out, but now also made by others. Cost: around $900 and up. Its military version is a machine gun, which allows a shooter to fire continuously by holding the trigger down. The nonmilitary AR-15 is a semi-automatic which shoots one bullet at a time, with each squeeze of the trigger. Ammunition magazines for the AR-15 commonly hold five to 15 rounds.
— 870 Remington 12-gauge shotgun: One of the most popular shotguns in history. It can be modified to have a short or long barrel.
You gotta love the gun experts in the “news” industry. I never realized that you had to modify an 870 to get a short barrel.
.223 mm = .0088″. Wow! watch out for finger pinching if you reload these suckers. That’s even smaller those devastating .9mm bullets that we keep hearing about. In fact, it’s smaller than most sewing needles. (for you guitar players, it’s the same diameter as the high E string on a set of Super Slinkys)
I’ll give them credit for calling a magazine a magazine, but 5 to 15 round capacity? I’m no AR expert, but I thought the most common sizes (in the more sane parts of the US) were 20 or 30 round capacity.
And while I’m at it Beard, the expression is “loaded FOR bear”.