More on the Canadian Parliament shooting
Facts I’ve either read or heard today:
(1) A friend of the shooter reports that a few years ago:
“We were having a conversation in a kitchen, and I don’t know how he worded it. He said the devil is after him,” Bathurst told the CBC. “I think he must have been mentally ill.”
That seems extremely weak evidence, however, especially in a person who has recently converted to or is considering converting to a religion such as Islam. In Islam the devil, whose “primary characteristic…[is] hubris,…has no power other than the power to cast evil suggestions into humans and jinn, although the Quran mentions appointing jinn to assist those who are far from God in a general context.” So the shooter’s speaking the way Bathurst reports would not necessarily be a sign of mental illness.
(2) I repeat my question of yesterday: if Zehaf-Bibeau, the shooter, and Couture-Rouleau, a Quebec man who on Monday had run down two soldiers with his car, were both on watch lists and had had their passports revoked for planning trips to Muslim countries to join militant jihadists, why on earth were neither actually watched more carefully? It’s not as though blocking a jihadi from trips abroad is going to defuse his desire to fight you, it just will keep it local. And ISIS had called for attacks on the military. These two incidents should have been easy to predict, not just in general but in particular regarding both of these perpetrators.
(3) I haven’t seen an article about this, but I heard a Canadian commentator on Fox (unfortunately I didn’t catch his name) describe the shooting in more detail, particularly what occurred inside the building. He said that the way Zehaf-Bibeau entered the Parliament building was through a back door with lax security, although the front entrance has pretty good security. The back door is the way MPs usually exit. I imagine that Zehaf-Bibeau must have known about the lax security there and entered that way for that reason. There are guards at the exit but they are unarmed. So the shooter (much like the White House fence jumper who entered the White House not long ago) was able to get fairly far inside.
However (and this is where it gets really interesting, if this report is true), at the top of a staircase the shooter had to pass by two armed guards. Neither shot him, although they could clearly see he was armed and dangerous. The reason, according to the speaker, was that the hallway was full of schoolchildren finishing up a tour, and the guards were afraid of causing carnage among the schoolchildren (although it seems logical that they might have been even more afraid of the shooter causing carnage among either the schoolchildren or in Parliament itself). At any rate, making a split-second decision, one of the guards grabbed the end of the shooter’s rifle and jerked it downward (perhaps trying to get it away from him?) and was shot, although not fatally. The other doesn’t seem to have done anything; at least not anything effective, and the shooter kept going down the hall.
Zehaf-Bibeau had gotten very close to the entrance of Parliament when sergeant–at-arms Kevin Vickers shot and killed him. Vickers, a former member of the RCMP, has a largely ceremonial role now. He has an office towards the end of the hall near the entrance to the House of Commons, heard the commotion and violence, “grabbed his sidearm” (that’s a quote from the guy being interviewed on Fox), stepped out into the hall, assessed the situation rapidly, and shot Zehaf-Bibeau dead. If not for Vickers and his sidearm (which may have been something he carried as a private citizen rather than in his official capacity?), I am almost certain we’d be reading a different, and much more dreadful, story today.
It is pretty clear that Zehaf-Bibeau wasn’t intent on killing random people; he didn’t fire at the schoolchildren or other visitors. He targeted the soldier at the tomb, and he was going for the government officials. Only Vickers and his sidearm stood in his way.
CNN kept saying “one man,” one man “stopped the intruder”– I wanted to scream “one armed man.” Would that we give our schoolchildren the protection given Canadian politicians!
Given past terrorist incidents, such as the Beslan School terrorist attack and of course Israel, Canadians are lucky that Zehaf-Bibeau’s focus was on getting at the politicians. It won’t last, sooner or later children will be the focus, nothing strikes deeper terror into a society than attacking children.
Of course its counter productive because nothing enrages people more than targeting innocent children.
Canada has a lesson to learn here; to the fanatic totalitarian ideologist, pacifism and ‘neutrality’ are an invitation to aggression. Hitler demonstrated that but apparently the lesson didn’t take with the sheeple.
Perhaps a certain percentage of human beings are cognitively incapable of grasping that those in the West don’t have to do anything to be an Islamic target and that nothing they might do will remove them from Islam’s target list.
Dated October 1, the news that the RCMP repudiates the handbook on dealing with muslims and terror/security written for the most part by muslims to which the RCMP contributed one section. In section 5 (not RCMP’s contribution) of the handbook, there is this: discontinue “inappropriate information-gathering techniques including … showing up at workplaces, intimidating newcomers, questioning individuals religiosity and discouraging legal representation.”
It appears, once again, actions are at variance with official statements. What is there to make of bending over forwards as a conciliatory gesture?
The problem is that the politicians didn’t declare the parliament building a gun free zone and post signs. That would surely have deterred Zehaf-Bibeau when he realized he was not allowed to bring in a gun.
Obviously, the intent was a mass assassination.
All small, quiet nations are going to have to change their security schemes.
This is also a ‘tell’ — it’s high time to reverse Muslim immigration.
They don’t bring anything that any infidel would want.
The influx is seen — by them — as a retail invasion.
Followed by a sitzkrieg — the battle of the births.
No, no, no: all this is Our Fault, remember? no matter What the muslims do: this is always and forever Our Fault here in the (somewhat) free and (somewhat) democratic and (somewhat) Christian West. The worse their atrocities, the greater Our Crimes.
So say the Leftwing Nutjobs. Yes, seriously. There is literally no way to get through to them. September 11th, with twice the body count of Pearl Harbor, just made them double down on their insane hatred of our civilization. I honestly don’t know what it would take to snap them out of it, but one “gun”man won’t do it.
They’ll be wailing for more gun confiscation from law-abiding citizens (since they’re already illegal for criminals); more “understanding” the perps; more pyschologizing, explaining, justifying, and sympathizing.
I heard on the radio that the general in command of Canada’s Air Force has already ordered his men to NOT wear their uniforms in public, so as not to provoke the followers of the religion of peace, I presume.
The only bright spot I see in all this is the prolonged standing ovation the Can. Parliament gave to Mr. Vickers, the Mountie who got his man and saved their lives. Somewhere underneath the Leftist rust and rot, the Canadians are still alive, and their true feelings shone through with vigour there.
I just wish we could take that reaction and enlarge upon it, but I’m not sanguine.
I also believe we will experience ‘lone wolf’ attacks and attacks from small terrorist cells. They will target schools, malls, hospitals, court houses, sporting events, and so forth. Think of the consequences of these attacks on our shaky economy. Simultaneous suicide bomb attacks at the NYSE and CME would devastate markets here and around the globe. Jihadist leaders are not stupid and they are well aware of our pc softness.
As far as I am aware there have been10 attacks by lone wolf jihadists on our soil dating back to early 2002. Unfortunately, under team obama these attacks are no longer considered terrorist attacks, but instead labeled work place violence. LIVs never learn that government bureaucracies protect themselves first and foremost. The neighborhood elementary school is not on their radar screens unless of course something terrible happens in which case the tragedy is seen as a tool for more gun control or an opportunity to blather about islamophobia.
Beverly,
I was in the Navy and was stationed at Naval Station Brooklyn in the late 1960s. We didn’t wear our uniforms in town (NYC) lest we be attacked by some peace protestor.
As the NRA says, the only thing to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun. Mr. Vickers was the good guy.
“he was going for the government officials.
I hope they remember that it was an armed guard who prevented that.
Looking at Vickers, I think he could take care of business with that mace, unless it were balsa wood or something.
I watched part of the RCMP Canadian press conference today (unfortunately they cut away from it and I couldn’t watch the rest) but, from what they said there in the part I saw, a lot of the facts you quote or mention above don’t seem to be correct. They repeatedly talked about the perpetrator running in the front door of Parliament. They even showed video of it. Unless, it’s one of those technical things where the side of the building facing the river is considered the “front” architecturally and the “back” is the entrance everyone drives up to from the street and in that sense the front. They also made no mention of children.
Also, he didn’t almost make it into the building, he made it past the guards and down a hallway well into the building. He was right outside or passed by the rooms that parliament members were gathering in for their private party meetings (i.e. caucuses, which is apparently a standard Wednesday happening). From what I gathered, if he had gone in either one of those rooms he would have had the opportunity to kill multiple members of Parliament. It sounds like he just didn’t know the layout and where to go. Then again, the video showed agents chasing right behind him as he ran in the front door so he might not have had time to do what he wanted.
Unfortunately, like I said, they cut away from the press conference so I don’t what details came later that I missed. Perhaps the presence of children came up at some.