Holocaust Museum Shooting
06/11/2009
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A man named James Von Brunn shot up the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, killing a security guard, and being shot himself. Kathy Shaidle has a round-up of links from around the Internet. Despite his being named Von Brunn, this is not a case of Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome—he claims to have fought on the American side in World War II.

He is an 88-year-old mental case who apparently tried to take the Federal Reserve Board hostage in 1981, and served several years on attempted kidnapping and weapons charges. [Profile: Alleged Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn]

I don't know of anyone who approves of this kind of attack, but I can expect it to be blamed on people like me.

My position on this particular kind of attack, whether practised by neo-Nazi mental cases like Von Brunn, or much more often, by amateur jihadists and other exponents of Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome, is that it should be dealt with by

  1. The death penalty for murder (the District of Columbia has no death penalty)
  2. Fighting back, preferably with a gun 
The Holocaust Museum has armed guards. It also, as Clayton Cramer noted,  had
had a very large and obvious sign at the entrance warning that concealed weapon permits from other states were not valid in DC, and that anyone found with a weapon on them (as they passed through the metal detectors) would be arrested and charged. This was the only place in DC where I saw such a sign, and I thought it was a bit odd.

Of course, it also meant that the shooter knew that he was attacking a place where he was guaranteed that only uniformed personnel would be able to shoot back. Another triumph of gun-free zones.

Again, the District of Columbia has had  for many years the most savagely restrictive anti-gun laws in the nation, worse than New York and New Jersey. So the victims are almost always unarmed. In a similar incident in 1998, a schizophrenic travelled from Montana to shoot up Congress, killing two members of the Capitol Police. There's really no way that all these attacks can be prevented. Immigrant Mass Murder, on the other hand, would happen less if there were fewer immigrants.
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