More strange details are emerging regarding the school shooting earlier this week. The shooter, 16-year-old Jeff Weise, wore a bulletproof vest during the attack. He apparently admired Adolf Hitler, and had posted online at the website of the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party (lovely sounding group, isn't it?), whose ULR is nazi.org. Wizbang quotes Weise as admiring the "ideals" of the group, and the often-irreverant Jeff Goldstein gets serious:
Moral: if a kid claiming to love Nazis threatens violence, take him seriously.
Jeff links to a blogger living near where the shooting occurred, who says the following:
The Red Lake Ojibwe reservation is about 40 minutes from the very northwest corner of the Leech Lake reservation where I live. I played sports against the Red Lake Warriors in high school. I played VFW and Legion baseball alongside a handful of friends from Red Lake on Bemidji's team in the early 1990s. I still see several of them each summer in the local softball league, and we take a minute to say hi, catch up on life. Despite the wrenching poverty and desperate squalor that infests much of the Red Lake rez - one of the poorest places you will ever see - the Red Lakers I know are (by and large) happy people, no different than you or me...Posted by kswygert at March 23, 2005 08:42 AMPerhaps the most frightening aspect of this for me - even more than the fact that this shooting happened in my back yard - is the fact that these school slayings have happened all across America and all across the socioeconomic spectrum...What has gone so horribly wrong? What has changed so drastically that school kids now work out their anger with shotguns and pistols rather that with fists and, in extreme cases, the occasional knife fight? And what can we hope to do to halt this disturbing trend?