Via Ry we find the Spokemans Review tells us all we need to know about the Moscow shooter. The following is just a sample:

Jason Kenneth Hamilton, the man responsible for the deadly shooting spree in Moscow, Idaho, was a card-carrying Aryan Nations member...

...

Hamilton had an extensive criminal history in Idaho, Arizona, California and Oklahoma, including arrests for violent crimes, domestic battery and drugs, according to court records obtained Tuesday by The Spokesman-Review.

...

He was arrested in September 2005 for attempted strangulation of his on-again, off-again girlfriend. A jury convicted Hamilton of a reduced charge of misdemeanor domestic battery in June 2006.

As he was awaiting trial, he was arrested for allegedly grabbing another woman by the hands and throwing her to the floor, injuring her. The case was dismissed.

Prior to moving to Latah County, Hamilton was charged with felony aggravated assault in 1992 in Lake Havasu, Ariz., and placed on probation. He was charged a few months later with possession of marijuana and driving with a suspended license; both charges were dismissed.

Hamilton was arrested in 1995 by the Tulsa, Okla., city police on a cruelty to animals charge that was reduced to malicious injury. He was sentenced to a year in jail, but the sentence was suspended.

He needed to be locked up a long time ago. But you never know for certain until it's too late.

See also Ry's report on the conversation we had today at lunch about the police response.

It is not a help. In fact, it's a hindrance and it greatly places people in danger. The police are liable to shoot someone with a gun.

Dan Weaver
Moscow Police Chief
May 21, 2007
UI senior tried to help but became victim
Referring to Peter Husmann who grabbed his pistol and went to help stop the person shooting up the Latah County Courthouse.
[I'm in total agreement with Weaver. In addition the evacuation and care of Husmann consumed resources that could perhaps have been better allocated to other tasks had Husmann not been collecting bullet wounds. If you are there when the shooting breaks out and can stop the shooter then by all means do so. But you don't leave a safe area and seek out the shooter. There may be some exceptions such as when the police will not be arriving for many minutes or perhaps hours and your loved ones are in danger but Husmann's actions were clearly wrong. This event took place just outside the Sheriff's office and maybe three blocks from the Moscow Police Station. In this case the police response time could be expected to be within one or two minutes and perhaps even in seconds. A person out of uniform with a gun in hand in these circumstances when the police arrive have special names--they are call a "Target" or "Bullet Magnet". I understand Husmann's motivation. I am glad there are people willing to put themselves in danger to help others. But this wasn't the time or the place.--Joe]

It turns out that the Moscow shooter had multiple issues.  According to the police chief, the guy had been convicted of domestic violence, had tried suicide earlier and failed, had been involuntarily committed to a mental facility.  In the past he had told people he was going to off himself and take others with him.

Saturday night he went to a local bar and had some drinks, then went and killed his ex, then attacked the courthouse complex.

Side note:  Though several major news sources said there was an SKS "assault rifle" involved, spoke of ten-round clips, etc., and repeatedly showed a photo of an SKS, there was in fact no SKS.  There was an AK and an M1A used-- a big difference to people who know guns, but of no real significance otherwise.  The lesson here is that rumors can spread like wildfire and be totally wrong.

There is the issue of urban response and combat tactics, which leave me curious.  The guy apparently was shooting at anything that moved.  He was on a hilltop surrounded by mostly residential streets and a high school, but also surrounded on two sides by solid buildings.  What do you do?  That's my question, and I don't have a good answer, mainly because I have no exact details and maybe never will have them.  IF (if) there is guy in a parking lot firing shots at everything around him (was he maneuvering? was he behind cover?  we don't know) he might be a fairly easy target for someone intent on stopping him.  Certainly a SWAT team arriving hours later was in this case of no use.

These are my thoughts and questions.  It is a given that the occasional, random douche-bag will go off like this.  What are the best ways to handle it?

Via Dale and the Lewiston Morning Tribune we have more information about the suspect in the shooting over the weekend:

Crime scene investigators began searching the suspect's brown, single-story house at 1020 Juliene Way. Neighbors gawked at the FBI suburbans and a Kootenai County crime scene trailer parked out front. The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisted with the search.

Juliene Way is in a rather poor, isolated, and unkempt part of town. While in high school our daughter Kim had a friend just a block or so further east she frequently spent the night with. The friends father was in jail and her mother, in her late 30's, was living with a 19 or 20 year old boyfriend. Then the boyfriend committed suicide and things got so messed up that Kim didn't visit much anymore. What I'm trying to say is that some of the people in this area of town have more than their share of problems.

I find it very interesting that the FBI and ATF are involved. Some Federal law(s) must have been broken. The first thing that comes to mind is that perhaps the SKS rifle had been converted to full auto. That would explain the reports of "automatic rifle" in some of the early news reports and what the assistant Police Chief said at the news conference yesterday. It's a little odd that Kootenai County would be involved too. Kootenai County is 90 miles north of Moscow.

Something that bugged me on the drive back to the Seattle area and as I was trying to go to sleep last night was that part of the Federal Building and Post Office were taped off by the police:

The picture above is looking north at the Post Office. The one below is looking south at the taped off area with the Post Office just out of the picture to the right. 5th and Jefferson is the intersection where the barricade is in the middle of the street. Use the two police cars parked there on 5th street for reference between the two pictures.

The Post Office/Federal Building is two blocks west of the dispatch center that was shot up. It's out of sight, down a hill, and on the opposite side of the building from the window and door that were shot up. But looking at maps and where the police officer was killed it looks like bullets intended for him could have continued down the hill and street and connected with the Federal Building. I suppose this could also be reason enough for the Feds to get involved.

The next news conference is in 90 minutes. We'll all learn more then.

If a gun bill will pass because of the politics of a situation, you must see to it that its burdens are imposed upon a man because of a criminal background and not because he is an ordinary citizen and perhaps poor.

Gen. James H. Doolittle

From the air we have these pictures. At the center bottom is the Latah County court house, sheriff's office and dispatch center. The at the junction of the white roofed north-south building with the darked roofed east-west building is the dispatch center where the first shots occurred. If we could stand in the parking lot you could see through the glass in the door through a glass window into the dispatch center itself. There were three people in the dispatch center when the bullets came through the glass. Two women, one a trainee, and a man. They called for help and were escorted to the basement where the jail is.

At the press conference they reported the dispatch center was messed up pretty good. There is broken glass everywhere, bullet holes in the wall, and some equipment was broken, etc. They have an alternate dispatch center at the drivers license office at a shopping mall at the east end of town. They opened it up and are "back in business".

It was at this Sheriff's office that I got my Idaho concealed carry permit. I taught a NRA Personal Protection firearms class in a room at the north east end of the courthouse, just across the street from the high school.

The Moscow police officer that was killed came to investigate and was shot some place outside. The second officer shot was a Latah County Sheriff's officer who was attempting to come to first police officer's aid.

Just north of the court house is another white roofed building. This is the high school Xenia attends. The shooter entered the building just to the east of the high school which is the First Presbyterian Church and killed the caretaker.

Police attempted to negotiate with the shooter but to the best of my knowledge never got a response from him. The last shot heard was about 1:00 AM this morning. This was probably a self inflicted gunshot to the head.

When I arrived about 7:30 this morning the police were still taping off the area:

I walked their perimeter as did numerous news people:

There were lots and lots of police present. Officers from Lewiston, Whitman County (just to the west from Washington State), and Washington State University Police officers came. Idaho State Patrol from Coeur d'Alene to Twin Falls (by airplane from hundreds of miles away) were there as well. The ISP will be doing the investigation since both city and county police officers were victims.

The Sheriff's deputies below were well armed. AR-15's or maybe M-16's. I did not see any unloaded guns or unsafe gun handling. All appeared to have iron sights.

The picture above and the one below were taken facing north at the intersection of sixth and Adams at the south west corner of the Latah County Courthouse, Sheriff's office, and jail. In the picture below you can see the radio tower for the dispatch center. One block further north is the Moscow High School.

The 9:00 AM press conference was at the Moscow City Court House at 3rd and Washington. It was well populated with news crews:

(Photo by Xenia)

Xenia and I took lunch to Barb at the hospital. While waiting for her to meet us across the street at Therapy Central I took a picture of someone lowering the flag outside the hospital to half-mast:

Update: Complete video of the press conference Xenia and I attended is here. It includes my question about the SKS rifle being an automatic.

Some of the main stream media coverage is here:

• 3 Wounded in Idaho Shooting, Police Say
• Two killed, three wounded, in Idaho shooting
• Officer dies after Idaho shootings
• Hundreds more

Xenia and I got back from the press conference a few minutes ago.

Two police officers were shot. The first one shot took multiple hits at about 11:31 PM last night. He wasn't able to be evacuated until 12:05. He was dead on arrival. The second officer was shot a few minutes later and was taken to Gritman hospital (where Barb works) his condition is "serious". A private citizen was shot in the same time frame as he came out of his house and approached the area to "try and help". He has been in surgery for hours and his condition is satisfactory.

The police did not fire any shots. None of the police officers could determine the exact source of the gunfire. The shooter is believed to have started shooting while on the street then moved to the church nearby where additional shots were fired. At about 1:00 AM this morning the last shot was fired. About 5:45 AM three police entry teams went into the church while a diversion was taking place at the opposite end of the building. They found two people dead inside. One of them had a rifle next to him and is believed to be the shooter.

David Duke, assistant Police Chief, reported that a "SKS type rifle" was found. Earlier he had said the rifle was an "automatic" so I asked, "You said the rifle was an SKS but the SKS is not normally fully automatic. Are you sure it was a fully automatic rifle?" He only clarified to say, "It was an SKS type rifle. The exact rifle has not been determined." He also said that four empty magazines were found. He did not know the capacity of the magazines or the type of ammo used.

Barb came home a few minutes ago to change her clothes after a patient vomited on her (unrelated to the shooting). She reports police officers are outside a patient room at the hospital.

Xenia wanted to go to the press conference. One of her best friends, Jessa, is the daughter of the Paster of the Church where final shots were fired. Jessa wasn't answering her cell phone and calls to the house went unanswered. Xenia reports on her Live Journal here. At the press conference we learned, indirectly, that Jessa's father is OK.

More later after I take a shower and get some breakfast.

Update: The best coverage I have seen so far is from the Daily News (you need an account to read the article but Dale has a copy up) and KXLY. KXLY has officer Newbill's time of death wrong. He was probably dead at the scene and certainly was dead on arrival at the hospital.

You're alive!

Ry Jones
7:16 AM May 20, 2007
[I was in bed. A call came in from Ry and those were the first words he said. He then told me what he knew about the shooting in Moscow were I live. I went to investigate. I took lots of pictures and had a minor confrontation with the police. Xenia and I just now got back from the Press Conference. More blog posts and pictures to follow.--Joe]

Inside sources claim the gun control community (Sarah Brady, et al) are urging D.C. Mayor Fenty to stay away from the Supreme Court and just try to rewrite the D.C. ban to allow very restrictive handgun licensing a la New York City.

Joe Waldron
May 18, 2007
GOAL Post 2007-Final Legislative Update from Olympia
[Exactly two months ago I said they should do this--If they were smart.--Joe]

One of the marvels of the United States has always been Her "Melting Pot" status, wherein people from all walks of life, from all around the world have come together to produce the most successful society in human history.

That's why it bugs me when I hear people who should know better discussing the political situation in Iraq, for example.  We hear about the various and disparate groups in that country having trouble coming to an acceptable "power sharing" agreement.  What does that mean-- power sharing?  That's something that might be arranged between one king or one dictator and another, or between rival gangsters, but in a free society?

No, Grasshopper!  In a free society all individuals have the same rights, so the term "power sharing" has no meaning.  That one race, religion or other demographic might outnumber another in a certain region is, rightly, of no consequence for the simple fact that they haven't the political power to trample on the rights of the minority.  If that ideal is not the foundation of their Constitution, then the Constitution needs a serious rewrite.

I am reminded of a quote from Ayn Rand (thanks to "The Smallest Minority" web site):  "The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities."

Its time more of the freedom-hungry people in Iraq understand and embrace this simple concept if they are to have any hope of realizing their dream.  It would be nice if more Americans understood it too.

I think that it is very unlikely that five justices on the Supreme Court are going to say that the Second Amendment means nothing. That’s what they would have to say to uphold the total ban on handguns that exists in Washington D.C.

It is also especially unlikely during the heat of the 2008 election—and that is when it is going to happen—because it would be a rallying cry for the whole pro-gun committee. Just like an abortion decision that overturned Roe v. Wade would animate the pro-choice folks. That kind of political turmoil is something the court is sensitive to.

Dr. Robert Levy
April 19, 2007
Interview: The Way of the Gun
Mother Jones
[Mother Jones is typically a left wing news magazine. Levy is the lawyer is driving the Second Amendment challenge to D.C.’s ban on guns. Also known as the Parker case. I think it should have been "community" rather than "committee" but still--Levy has his act together.--Joe]

Big Brother gets to watch you in return for the false promise of increased security. From our worlds airports:

Faces are blurred, but not chests or crotches. Snoerwang said that was necessary because otherwise "women could just hide things by stuffing them in their bras."

...

Snoerwang said the images generated by the machine were not like photographs.

"They're kind of futuristic. There's nothing sexy about it," she said.

What does "nothing sexy" have to do with making it acceptable? And to who? There are people that find animals and fecal material sexy. Want to bet that there won't be a culture of some sort of deviants built around these photographs? And there will be names attached to the photos as well. Names are checked on your ID just before you go into the machines. People watching the images will snap pictures with their cell-phones or other miniature image capturing devices and associate the picture with the name from their friend checking the ID.

It will do nothing to prevent determined people from getting weapons on board. It only will catch those that are careless. In the mean time airport security costs billions. The airplane security game cannot be won with the current assumptions. It's time we considered the alternatives.

Before bringing my blog back online I did some performance testing while it was hosted on my own machine. This included tests with all the links, sitemeter, etc. visible. Most of the testing was done early (as in midnight until 3:00 AM) on Wednesday morning. Can you tell from my Sitemeter graphic?

And hey! Nuclear Winter will stop Global Warming! It's a two-fer!

Kevin Baker
May 14, 2007 2:16 PM
[From the comments to the post To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. Which, by the way, is an excellent post. I kept thinking that someday I would write down my thoughts as expressed by Kevin in this post. But it would have been a far more feeble effort than Kevin's well researched masterpiece.--Joe]

No hair transplants for me. I would consider regrowing it though.

There is a demand for change. Never have the risks of inertia been so great for France as they are now in this world in flux where everyone across the world is trying to change quicker than the others, where any delay can be fatal.

Nicolas Sarkozy
May 16, 2007
Sarkozy Gets Off to a Fast Start as President of France
[He also said France needs to get back to work. Sounds good to me.  And from the same article:

Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claims links with Al Qaeda, threatened in an Internet posting on Tuesday that it would wage “a bloody jihadist campaign” in France in the coming days in reaction to the election of the “Zionist crusader,” Mr. Sarkozy.

Ditto what Tamara said.--Joe]

The short story is here. Despite some coincidences I do not believe it had anything to do with PNNL/Battelle. Here is the slightly longer story I told my web hosting company:

I believe I have the answer as to why there was high CPU usage. The blogging software I'm using (dasBlog) has some very inefficient code for dealing with what it calls "Comment Views". When viewing a single post without the comments, for the same CPU usage, the number of views is over 100 times faster than when viewing with the comments.

I did some code and configuration tuning and was able to improve the performance by a factor of 2 to 3 depending on how I was testing it. There are still lots of room for improvement and I decided to just turn off the comments until the performance is more comparable to the performance without the comments. This eliminates the CPU intensive view type entirely.

This CPU expensive view mode probably normally isn't a problem except with the robots come visiting. They view the posts in all their view modes.

Would you please enable my site again?

Thank you.

I was up until 4:30 this morning getting it ready to go back online in crippled form (comments are disabled). I still have work to do to get comment views more efficient and then I'll turn the comments back on.

I need to get to work now but I'll update the story here by tonight sometime. I'll fill in the Quote of the day posts tonight sometime too.

The guy's as popular in France's Muslim ghettos as a bag of pork rinds, which rates another thumbs up in my book. If non-assimilating misogynist welfare leeches hate him, he can't be all bad.

Tamara K.
May 9, 2007
My reaction to the Frog reaction to the Sarkozy win...
[Sarkozy has a big job ahead of him. But his election gives me hope for a world where the Islamic extremist demands for world domination are thwarted.--Joe]