Mom loved her guns
by digby
I don't know if the right wingers have been able to process this latest mass shooting in a way that makes sense to them yet (they've been all over the place calling the shooter a black nationalist or a Muslim or a violent anti-Christian atheist) but this should provide some food for thought:
According to multiple reports, the shooter’s mother boasted online about her arsenal and feared that gun ownership would soon be restricted.
“When the mood strikes,” Harper reportedly wrote on Facebook, “I sling an AR, Tek-9 or AK over my shoulder, or holster a Glock 21 (not 22), or one of my other handguns, like the Sig Sauer P226, and walk out the door.” Shotguns, she said, “are a little too cumbersome to open carry.”
According to officials, the Harper family moved from Torrance, California to Winchester, Oregon, in 2013. “I moved from So. Calif. to Oregon, from Southern Crime-a-mania to open carry,” Harper noted in that same Facebook post advocating for open carry laws.
Harper, a registered nurse who shared an apartment with her son, spoke “openly about her love of guns,” according to one of her patients.
“She said she had multiple guns and believed wholeheartedly in the Second Amendment and wanted to get all the guns she could before someone outlawed them,” Shelly Steele told the New York Daily News. Steele hired Harper to provide care for her sickly teenage son and said that Harper enjoyed talking to her husband, an avid hunter and former member of the military, about taking her son to shooting ranges.
Steele said that Harper complained to her husband that the shooting range nearest their home “wasn’t very private.”
“You needed to have a range master with you, and she didn’t like anyone watching,” Stelle explained, “she wanted more privacy.”
“She told my husband she just purchased some new guns a few weeks ago and took him shooting. I thought the whole situation was very strange. If you know your son has mental health issues, do you encourage a fascination with guns?”
Obviously, I don't know about this particular case, but the Newtown killer's mother also provided her son with guns apparently in some vain hope that it would help him with his mental/emotional issues. Also, she was a big gun proliferation zealot who bought into NRA propaganda.
Maybe that isn't such a hot idea.
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