After Corkins takes a suspiciously long time rummaging through his bag to produce identification, Johnson cannily stands up and walks around the desk to get a closer look at what Corkins is doing. Corkins bolts upright, gun in hand. Without the slightest hesitation, Johnson rushes Corkins, who fires twice. A bullet shatters Johnson\u2019s left forearm. \u201cAnd I just couldn\u2019t hear anything, my arm just kind of blew back. So at that point I was thinking: \u2018I have to get this gun,\u2019\u2009\u201d Johnson told The Weekly Standard. \u201cThat was my sole focus\u2014I have to get this gun\u2014this guy\u2019s gonna kill me and kill everybody here.\u201d<\/p>\n
From there, Johnson somehow manages to push Corkins across the lobby and pin him against the wall with his bad arm. \u201cI just started punching him as hard as I could, until I could feel his grip loosen,\u201d recalled Johnson. Eventually he takes the gun from Corkins with his wounded arm. Before long, Corkins is subdued on the ground. Corkins now admits that it was his intention to shoot everyone in the building. There\u2019s no question Johnson saved a lot of lives.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This was a genuine hate crime; the shooter, Floyd Lee Corkins, had a backpack full of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches he intended to smear into his victims’ faces after shooting them, apperently to suffocate the wounded.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Johnson was a hero.\u00a0 And you’ve heard scarcely a word about it in the mainstream media, who spent most of the past 18 months trying in vain to pound the utterly-non-bias-related Martin-Zimmerman case into a “hate crime”, and the past couple of years trying unsuccessfully to politicize the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings.<\/p>\n
And yet here was the real thing (and by no means for the first time).\u00a0 And…<\/p>\n
(crickets<\/em>)<\/p>\nThere are some illuminating contrasts between the media\u2019s handling of the political dimensions of the Family Research Council shooting and the shooting of Representative Giffords. In the latter case, the media rushed to assume political motivations and were quick to blame, of all people, Sarah Palin…there is no evidence whatsoever Loughner saw this map or that allegedly violent political rhetoric\u2014even \u201ccampaign\u201d is a term borrowed from war\u2014was in any way a cause of the Giffords shooting. That didn\u2019t stop serious news organizations from lending institutional credibility to the irresponsible allegations…though Giffords was shot in January 2011, as recently as this year in an article on gun violence the New York Times saw fit to remind readers that \u201cmany criticized Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential nominee, for using cross hairs on her Web site to identify Democrats like Ms. Giffords.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u00a0And NBC news fairly raced <\/em>to blame the Aurora shooting on the Tea Party.\u00a0<\/p>\nBy contrast, the media handled awkwardly the revelation that Corkins admitted to plotting mass murder as a means of furthering a popular liberal cause. \u201cA detail sure to reignite the culture wars that erupted around the shooting is the fact that Corkins told FBI agents that he identified the Family Research Council as anti-gay on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center,\u201d wrote the Washington Post during Corkins\u2019s trial in February. It\u2019s a little unseemly for a newspaper, when finally forced to confront actual politically motivated violence, to worry about the shooting\u2019s impact on the metaphorical \u201cculture war.\u201d Particularly when irresponsible actors in that culture war continue to get a free pass from the media.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The SPLC – cited with grave solemnity as an authority by rafts of lefty bobbleheads – has become a bit of a hate group in its own right:<\/p>\n
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was once a laudable civil rights organization that sued racists and violent extremists. Now it regularly demonizes anyone who runs afoul of its knee-jerk liberal politics, and despite this it is still regularly cited by the media as a \u201cnonpartisan\u201d watchdog. Some of the SPLC\u2019s newly targeted \u201chate groups,\u201d such as pickup artists, are merely kooky or distasteful. Others singled out by the SPLC, including Catholics who go to Latin mass or Christian organizations similar to the Family Research Council, are well within the mainstream. Tellingly, the SPLC doesn\u2019t just name the Family Research Council on its website\u2014it posts the council\u2019s address on a \u201chate map.\u201d That map is still on SPLC\u2019s website, and the organization refused calls to take it down after the Family Research Council shooting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But they won’t.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I bring it up because we’re seeing the same thing with the Widstrand beating in Saint Paul.\u00a0 Now, to be clear, there’s no evidence that it was a “hate crime”, per se; in other words, there’s no evidence that any of the youths stood on a soapbox and bellowed “I’m doing this because I Hate Whitey”.\u00a0 And for purposes of charging that brutal assault, evidence is what is needed.<\/p>\n
But you can see, feel and hear the nervousness in official Saint Paul and Minneapolis government circles; as crime as dropped in most parts of the Twin Cities, it’s stayed steadily well above average on the East Side, the North End, the North Side, Phillips.\u00a0 Parts of the East Side have been deteriorating before our eyes over the past decade, in a city that is generally mostly just stagnant.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And yet nobody in offical Twin Cities circles will call the elephant what it is.\u00a0 They hold official observances for the “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” misery-exploitation caravan – which exists to protest the deaths of children who look like the children of NPR executives – and studiously ignore the fact that black on black crime in the Twin Cities is astronomically higher than any other rate in the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a year ago yesterday that a depraved lefty walked into the national Family Research Council headquarters a\u00a0a pistol, 100 rounds of ammo, and the intention to kill every person in the office.\u00a0 He was stopped by a building manager and acting security guard, Leo Johnson, who, although shot twice, subdued the leftist gunman, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,24,17,79,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-culture-war","category-minneapolis","category-slander-files","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37866"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37871,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37866\/revisions\/37871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}