…And Ask Questions Later

It’s looking more and more like Miriam Carey, the Connecticut mother who was killed last year near the Capitol  was guilty of nothing more than having a panic attack around the wrong cops.

The DC Capitol Police first called it a terrorist incident.  Then, they said Carey was on drugs.

Now?  Apparently she was just a flustered driver who panicked over cops’ response to her driving:

Columnist Mark Steyn memorably remarked, “Ms. Carey does not appear to be guilty of any act other than a panic attack,” and, “We are told Ms. Carey was ‘mentally ill,’ although she had no medications in her vehicle and those at her home back in Connecticut are sufficiently routine as to put millions of other Americans in the category of legitimate target.”

But now, it is a certified fact that Carey did not even have prescription drugs in her system when she was shot to death.

Even before that confirmation, it became clear months ago that there was no good explanation for why Carey was shot, and the story disappeared entirely off the mainstream media radar.

It’s been six months since the shooting, and the DC Capitol Police still haven’t released their report on the incident.

The list of explanations for this other than “the cops are closing ranks to cover up a major screw-up leading to the death of an innocent, panicky woman” is fast dwindling through the lower single digits.

The traditional deflection against charges of excessive police power and force is “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear”.  The line is corrosively stupid on its surface…

…but if “making cops nervous” rates a bullet in the back of the head, then clearly even that very stupid line is wrong, these days.

The whole article is worth a read.

11 thoughts on “…And Ask Questions Later

  1. World Nut Daily is not a reliable source.

    The woman used her vehicle in a dangerous way, as a weapon. The cops were right. She was wrong. She was endangering herself and others, including her child.

    There is no reliable or accurate way to diagnose a panic attack from the available information. It does appear that Carey may have been schizophrenic. She had more problems going on than ‘a panic attack’.
    http://www.mentalhealthcenter.org/2013/10/mental-health-disorders-in-the-news-at-capitol-hill/#sthash.Ip29PsHO.dpuf
    “However, some confirmed reports do indicate that Carey was given a mental health evaluation in the past after telling Connecticut police that she was a prophet and making references to the President. The results of this evaluation are unknown to the public at this time. The evidence does seem to suggest that she was dealing with one or more mental health disorders.”

    Or maybe you’ve been around conspiracy theory wackos so long, that delusional thinking seems normal, or as normal as the radical right gets?

    As I’ve said before, Mitch, you are a sloppy researcher — rather like you missed that the Alabama shooter you were praising recently was not a good guy with a gun, defending the unarmed customers at a dollar store. Turns out – IF you had bothered to look at anything other than your right wing propaganda sources, like the local media where the shooting happened — you would know that the shooter appears to be a serial child rapist, and the man he shot was the real ‘good guy with a gun’, or less bad guy with a gun, anyway. Neither of them should have had firearms on the premises, which were posted no firearms.

    Looks like, per the witnesses, that the man waving the gun was not a threat to customers, and was not trying to rob the store. He WAS trying to confront the man who subsequently killed him, and two other people – possibly relating to one of the instances of child rape with which the shooter has been accused.

    Just one more example of our failed gun culture, and people taking the law into their own hands. We should be looking at ways to prevent people from shooting each other, not making it too easy for that to happen.

    But hey, at least when law enforcement gets something wrong, they are insured, and more accountable, unlike the average Joe Blow gun fanatic.

  2. Okay, I’ll play along, Dog Gone. If World Net Daily is not a reliable source, then some of the facts stated must be wrong. And you must know they’re wrong because you have checked with a more reliable source. Here are some of the facts that seem significant to me, please provide the source you checked that contradicts them:
    Driver was unarmed
    Driver broke no laws
    Driver had no drugs in her system
    Shooters violated policy by shooting at her

  3. Speaking of sloppy research, Doggone’s “source” is a hodge-podge of unnamed sources, while WorldNetDaily references the attorney for the victim, the police reports, and the coroners’ reports.

    If you want to see someone who uses garbage sources, Doggone, look in the mirror. Your very comment that claims poor sourcing is a textbook example of the same. Your “research” is to the Weekly World News what the Weekly World News was to the Wall Street Journal……not to belittle the Weekly World News too much, of course.

  4. Dog Gone said:

    “World Nut Daily is not a reliable source.”

    and:

    “As I’ve said before, Mitch, you are a sloppy researcher”

    The woman must write this stuff in a cave with no mirrors.

  5. Bubba,

    That’s the thing that’s really come to irritate me about DG to the point where even I don’t care to respond; scratch the surface of her condescension and her “research” is ALWAYS bogus; her “studies” are social-science metastudies; her “peer reviewed papers” are undergrad term papers; her “sources” are “Think”Progress and Daily Kos.

    There has not, to my knowledge in a few years of this, been a single exception.

  6. Seriously though, when do we get to hear this quote?

    “If I had an adult daughter, she’d look like Miriam”

  7. Regardless of the actual facts, apparently any source with which one on the left disagrees qualifies as “not reliable”, and therefore can be subject to childish derision…”World Nut Daily”, “Faux News”, etc…

  8. Mitch–thanks. It would be really refreshing if her errors in sourcing were things that aren’t taught in the first WEEK of any introduction to research or journalism, or for that matter aren’t self-evident–OK, your sources are anonymous, hence they are necessarily less authoritative than one willing to be named. Duh.

    For that matter, it would be nice if the New York Times and Washington Post would figure this out. My great uncle, who had the privilege of working with Ernie Pyle and was a Baton Rouge newspaper editor for decades, would be spinning in his grave if he knew what has happened to his beloved profession.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.