As usual, the best coverage comes from the Brit papers:
The Air Force trainee who killed three and injured eight when he opened fire at a naval base in Florida assailed the United States as ‘a nation of evil’ before he went on his shooting rampage, AFP reports.
The man, first identified by NBC News as Saudi national Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, opened fire inside a classroom at Naval Air Station in Pensacola early Friday morning. Police quickly responded to the scene and he was shot dead.
US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said the suspect was a second lieutenant attending the aviation school at the base.
Meanwhile six other Saudi nationals were arrested near the base shortly after the attack, as investigators began to probe a terror link.
Go here to read the rest. Maybe this tragedy will end the farce of making military bases “gun free” zones. Additionally, when our “allies” from the Middle East, other than Israel, are training on military bases, armed security teams need to be near at hand.
Update: We have a much bigger problem here than one gunman:
No one was ready to jump to any conclusions yesterday but the gap between what we suppose and what we know is getting a lot smaller. The AP reports that shooter Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani held a party to watch mass shooting videos earlier this week. Other Saudi pilot trainees were at the party:
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The Saudi student who fatally shot three people at a U.S. naval base in Florida hosted a dinner party earlier in the week where he and three others watched videos of mass shootings, a U.S. official told The Associated Press on Saturday.
One of the three students who attended the dinner party videotaped outside the building while the shooting was taking place at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Friday, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity after being briefed by federal authorities. Two other Saudi students watched from a car, the official said.
The official said 10 Saudi students were being held on the base Saturday while several others were unaccounted for.
Obviously this raises all sorts of questions, starting with this one: Were other people in on this plan? My first thought was that obviously the guy filming the building knew what was coming and was set up to record it for propaganda purposes. That could be the case but it’s also possible he heard a commotion and took out his phone. It’s incriminating but not absolutely clear…yet.
Go here to read the rest. The US is a net exporter of oil now. Let the Saudis find some other place else to train their terrorists pilots.
An Army friend of mine who trained as a Cobra helicopter pilot once told me of commanders having to “pass” foreign-national pilots even if they weren’t qualified because the stigma of having failed would have been just too much on a return to their home country. Can’t help but think that may have played a role here. Mix in a little Islamic theology and you have a bomb.
Gun-Free Zones Kill.
My son is still in the Army. He habitually concealed carries a .45 semi-auto pistol. When he goes on post, he doesn’t even keep the weapon in his truck: the consequences of being caught armed on the post too severe.
Better dead than armed.
I am very concerned when I see Muslims working in commercial nuclear power, or becoming commercial aircraft pilots, or heading up key positions in other industries that can impact public health and safety, particularly the military and the police. The 1st Amendment to the Constitution rightly protects freedom of religion, but unlike other religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, etc., Islam is a political as well as a religious movement designed to subject all non-Muslims under Dhimmitude. Of course at no time should a person be singled out because he is of Arabic or Iranian or Pakistani descent. But the politico-religious ideology that is Islam was founded by a psychopathic pedophile monster deranged with lunatic hallucinations of grandeur, and that ideology must be eradicated from the face of the Earth. I do not think Islam is capable of reform; therefore, until Islam undergoes what the ancient Romans called damnatio memoriae, we will continue to be afflicted by Muslim-inspired terrorism.
Since it’s Saudi Arabia, he may have been allied with one of the royals (or been one of the royals) who are upset about the reforms going on, too.
Two of the teachers who were supposed to be in the area weren’t. A pilot and his mother-in-law who also teaches in that section of the schoolhouse stopped to pick up coffee on the way to work and were later than they expected– arrived about 15 minutes after the shooting. Thank God for small favors….
(Navy gossip chain– sailor I know worked with the mother in law when she was enlisted.)
After considering all this, why are Navy brass allowing know security risks into places where great damage can be done? It’s not just this Muslim Air Force trainee from Saudi Arabia. Gabriel Antonio Romero of Texas. Romero, a machinist’s mate auxiliary fireman, assigned to the submarine USS Columbia SSN-771 went on a shooting rampage a few days ago at a Naval shipyard in Hawaii. This person who murdered two others and then committed suicide had been assigned anger management classes and was facing Captain’s Mast, yet he was assigned topside guard duty with a rifle which he used on others?
https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/sailor-who-killed-two-and-himself-at-pearl-harbor-navy-shipyard-reportedly-faced-nonjudicial-punishment-1.610090
This is totally messed up. You don’t let Muslims on military bases, much less be a part of the US military, and you don’t give a loaded rifle to a sailor facing Captain’s Mass and attending anger management counselling!
By the way, if either shooter was a white Christian conservative, we would never hear the end of how racially motivated these shooting were. But one was done by a Muslim Arab and the other by a Hispanic likely drug or alcohol addled. Those little facts will never ever be publicized.
If you’re going to ban Muslims for being a security risk, you’re going to have to add anybody with cartel connections or who has family in Mexico, too– oh, and anybody with gang ties.
The foreign nationals come here to train, as they have for over a century, to try to make it so we don’t have to fight. The American trained Japanese officers told their superiors that America wouldn’t react as believed, and were right. There’s also been several cases where things in really horrible countries went less horrible because they had a couple of American trained officers.
Which is probably why the pilot targeted the program…although, given the other reforms in Saudi Arabia right now, they may have removed the implicit pressure to pass them no matter what and the guy was going to flunk out.
The Pearl Harbor thing is a mess on par with that crash where they found out the training program was non-existent; the shooter was, per sailor chain, getting actual psychological care on the going-to-process-out level. His watch captain should be charged, assuming they even had anybody else qualled for the watch. (If not, LOTS of system gutting needs done.)