Man Who Feared Obama Would Ban Guns Kills Three Cops
IN Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski has murdered three police officers during a domestic disturbance call. Poplawski feared that Barack Obama would ban guns.
Police did not immediately release the gunman’s identity, but his friends identified him as Richard Poplawski, 23. They described him as a young man who thought the Obama administration would ban guns.
A sick irony:
One friend, Edward Perkovic, said Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said Poplawski feared that President Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he “wasn’t violently against Obama.”
Spotter: LGF.
Posted: 4th, April 2009 | In: Media Comments (16) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
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July 6th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Percy, in answer to you queries, which I don’t find picky or personal on your part to ask them.
I have never owned a gun. My father never permitted guns or hunting rifles to be kept in our home. He strongly felt guns and children were not a good mix. My brother and other relatives in Pennsylvania do own hunting rifles they use for hunting during deer season. I grew up around the hunters in my extended family, Percy, so I had no ‘fear’ of guns. But it only took one time when I was 12 to watch my uncle shot with a rifle - accidentally - to make me vow that I’d never touch a gun nor ever permit one in my home when I grew up nor permit any children I might have to ever be around one.
I got involved in the Gun Control Group years ago, Percy, for a worthy cause to do work for in my spare time. Percy, it is not hysteria re guns being so deadly today. Read any newspaper over here, Percy, and everyday you’ll read of a killing or killings by use of guns. The police right now in South Caroline are searching for the man who has gone around randomly shooting people the last few days - so far he has killed 5. It is no joke when working in DC one never knew when a bullet was going to come their way walking on the streets to work. Ten years ago on Mother’s Day I received a phone call from a Policeman saying they needed my help. They were at the scene of young Black teen laying in the street shot and dead and all he had in his pocket was my name and my phone number. So, I went and sick to my stomach driving there not knowing who I’d see. It was Curtis the young man who mowed my lawn for me, he had been shot for reasons and by who the Police never found out. Could have just been a stray bullet meant for someone else.
Percy, I could never pick up a gun and shoot anyone in self-defense. I’ve always kept a big dog, protection breeds, in my house for protection. Yes, I know someone could shoot them trying to get in but the noise a large breed makes giving an alert of any noise outside one’s house gives one time to call the police.
July 6th, 2009 at 8:16 pm
Josh has already been put to bed with his plastic cowboy gun under his pillow.
July 6th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
…and would you ever have used it?
July 6th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Cheryl, please don’t think I am being picky or personal but have you ever owned a gun? ..
July 6th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Josh, now that you have opened Pandora’s Box - look at how many women are killed by guns daily in domestic violence cases. When the Right to Bear Arms was written it was not meant for guns to be used for : children to kill children; children to kill their parents or other adults; teens to slaughter other teens in schools or on the streets; adults to slaughter teens in colleges or slaughter adults in malls or meetings; parents to kill their children; a spouse to kill their family members; a person to blow their own brains out; criminals to commit crimes. The list could run to fill a page, Josh, on what guns are now used for to bring tragedy.
Instead of the NRA out there rebel rousing the gun loving folks, many who are now, by the way, rushing out buying up assault weapons that were once illegal, just in case laws are passed to once again make them illegal, they should be working diligently with committees to write more stringent laws on gun ownership. The world today is filled with rage, Josh, and it is far too easy to pick up a gun and solve whatever the problem perceived is with a bullet.
http://endabuse.org/userfiles/file/Children_and_Families/Guns.pdf
July 6th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
Josh, problem with my comment on Assault Weapons?
http://www.blnz.com/news/2007/09/14/Assault-weapon_attacks_rise_Miami_iami.html
July 6th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Sorry Anorak - here is the link to what I posted.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/04/07/richard_poplowski/
July 6th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Listen Dipshit, didn’t your Mother ever tell you it is not polite to call a lady names, even if you did end it with “Honey.” What part of what I wrote set you off, since you are obviously a gun owner? The part about the NRA being responsible for the three Police being shot? Below is an article you aren’t going to like but being a ‘fuckn idiot’ I’ll post it anyhow. To this ‘fuckn’ idiot’ this says it all!
“They’re coming to take our guns away”
Cop killer Richard Poplawski is an extremist. But amid the deafening din of the right wing’s anti-government rhetoric, how extreme is he?
By Gary Kamiya
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Read more: Gun Control, Rush Limbaugh, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Right Wing
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
This undated photo released by the Pittsburgh Police shows Richard Poplawski.
April 7, 2009 | It would be convenient to pretend that Richard Poplawski, who killed three Pittsburgh policemen on Saturday with an AK-47, was just a right-wing nutcase. A devotee of the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Poplawski believed that the United States was controlled by a secret Jewish cabal that had a master plan to abrogate freedom of speech and use the U.S. military to police Americans.
It would be easy for us to cordon Poplawski off, pretend that his ugly and paranoid worldview had nothing to do with the Obama hatred spouted by the American right. But the truth is that Poplawski’s hateful views cannot be separated from the increasingly extreme ideology and rhetoric that characterize the contemporary American conservative movement. As his friend, Edward Perkovic, told the Associated Press, Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on the way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.”
Such obsessions don’t come out of a vacuum. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the GOP have been whipping up hatred and fear of Obama and “liberal Democrats” for years. Joined by the National Rifle Association, which has run false and irresponsible ads claiming that Obama is planning to take away Americans’ guns, they have encouraged and helped to create a pathological right-wing subculture in which free-floating hatred of “the government” mixes with a maniacal fetish for guns. Poplawski is the diseased fruit of that ugly tree.
Yes, Poplawski dwelt in the most extreme part of the right wing. He is responsible for his action. You can’t tar every conservative because a pathological murderer shared some of his or her core beliefs. There has been no epidemic of shootings carried out by whacked-out readers of “The Turner Diaries.” Only the most unhinged neo-Nazi wing of the right will defend Poplawski’s actions, just as only the most brain-dead “radicals” defended Lovelle Mixon’s shooting of four Oakland police.
But the Lovelle Mixons of the world do not have a powerful media machine, not to mention a major political party, loudly whipping up fears that policemen are coming into black communities to terrorize their inhabitants. With the collapse of the GOP into the party of Rush Limbaugh, and as Limbaugh and his ilk grow ever more reckless in their attacks on Obama, the boundaries between “respectable” right-wing paranoid hatred and “extreme” right-wing paranoid hatred are getting more blurred. Right-wing fanatic du jour Glenn Beck teased his recent Fox show with images of Hitler, Stalin and Lenin and said that he was wrong to say that Obama was leading America to socialism — because Obama is actually a fascist. “They’re marching us towards 1984,” Beck intoned. “Big Brother, he’s watching.”
If the demagogues on the right had any conscience, the Poplawski case would force them to realize that their shrill ravings border on incitement. But they won’t. There are ratings to be maintained and a rabid base to be catered to. If every now and then some disturbed member of the base loses it, it’s not their problem.
Poplawski’s black-helicopter and anti-Semitic ravings put him at the outer edge of the right. But his paranoid fear that Obama was going to take away his AK-47 is mainstream among conservatives. That fear, fomented by the NRA and echoed by right-wing commentators from Lou Dobbs to Limbaugh, is ubiquitous online. A right-wing, pro-gun Web site I Googled at random, Theodore’s World (slogan: “The PC Free Zone Gazette is American first and Conservative second. It is never anti-American!”), highlights several stories about black men who killed police officers. Commenting on one incident in which the suspect was wounded by another policeman, someone posting as “Bob F” writes, “It’s too bad when the cop’s partner shot back, he only wounded him. Now the taxpayers are going to have to pay for medical treatment and prison. The cost of a bullet is probably only .50 cents. Unfortunately, it’s only going to get worse on the streets as Obama and his minions disarm law abiding citizens while criminals run rampant.”
Much of the responsibility for this paranoia lies with the NRA. During the presidential campaign, the NRA ran ads that falsely painted Obama as coming for Americans’ guns. Screaming that he had a “10-point plan to change the Second Amendment,” the powerful lobby claimed that Obama planned to “ban use of firearms for home self-defense” and “ban the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns.”
The NRA’s ad was a tissue of lies and distortions. In fact, Obama has — characteristically — staked out an extremely cautious, centrist position on gun control, one that has disappointed many advocates of more far-reaching gun control laws. He has never called for banning the use of firearms for home self-defense, nor has he called for handguns to be banned. He has adopted the conservative “individual right” interpretation of the Second Amendment favored by the right wing and the NRA and opposed by gun-control groups, many legal experts and the New York Times. When he has called for gun control, his positions have been moderate. He has called for the registration of handguns, making the ban on assault weapons permanent, closing the gun show loophole that allows private transfers of arms, banning high-powered ammunition that could pierce policemen’s protective vests and for national legislation against carrying concealed weapons.
It’s true Obama has taken some earlier positions, regarding the regulation of handguns, that might lead some zealots to wonder if he was really a True Believer in Americans’ God-given right to pack heat. But none of those positions, and certainly not his careful current stance, could remotely justify the NRA’s hyperbolic and alarmist claims.
When the nonpartisan consumer advocate Web site Factcheck.org, run by the Annenberg Foundation, asked the NRA to explain its false and misleading statements, its public affairs officer simply replied, “We’re comfortable with what we put on there. We believe our facts.” Apparently the fact that their “facts” are not facts, but opinions, is of no concern to the NRA.
When accusations are based on ideology, not facts, they acquire an ominously conspiratorial tinge, one that plays into the psychopathologies of losers like Poplawski — or like Timothy McVeigh, whose life bears a disturbingly close resemblance to Poplawski’s. And you’d have to go back to Barry Goldwater to find a degree of conspiratorial paranoia equal to that being pumped out by the right today.
Opponents of any form of gun control have always painted themselves as law-abiding citizens who simply demand their constitutional right to defend themselves against armed evildoers. Theirs is a Hobbesian world in which law enforcement cannot be trusted to stop criminals. Hence their favorite slogan, “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.” Poplawski proudly subscribed to that belief.
If the right wing keeps whipping its troops into a frenzy by accusing Obama of being a fascist, gun-hating dictator, America may have a new group of outlaws to fear: freedom-loving, gun-worshipping “patriots” like Poplawski.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Josh, you’re clearly an American with an inferiority copmplex and probably a small penis to boot who will, I’m guessing, have your picture on a website somewhere showing you holding a gun. I suggest you hand yourself in to the authorities now before you do something stupid.
July 6th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I hope Cheryl’s response is as eloquent
July 6th, 2009 at 10:36 am
go on Josh - try and explain your point, I could do with a laugh…..
July 6th, 2009 at 9:44 am
I love a well reasoned debate, don’t you?
July 6th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Cherl…you a fuckn idiot plain and simple honey.
April 6th, 2009 at 8:53 am
well said, Dr E - that also applies to freedom of speech as well, as shown recently where certain individuals are allowed to spout anti-British society rubbish without any restriction, under the guise of “human rights”…. the pendulum can sometimes swing too far in the opposite direction, IMO….
what exactly is the law in the USA about the USE of guns…? we all know they are allowed to own them, but what exactly are they allowed or not allowed to do with them? or does “self-defence” absolve everything….?
April 5th, 2009 at 1:55 am
Americans - and Human Rights activists - have never understood the great paradox that exists where civilised society introduces law. As a society we have freedoms because, as individuals, our rights are restricted. Give the individual too many rights and the freedom of society always suffers.
April 5th, 2009 at 1:43 am
He used an AK-47 - a once banned assault rifle - to kill those three Policemen in PIttsburgh this morning.
The NRA has been the VOICE causing the hysteria of the rabid gun owners in this country to fear President Obama will ban all guns. Their NRA magazine sent to all NRA members is reading proof of that. One tries to reason now with any member of the NRA and tell them no the goal hopefully will be to take the assault weapons back off the streets, and the “war cry” of the NRA is heard loud and clear “if they ban the assault weapons they will ban our hand guns.”
Well, we can chalk up the deaths of three innocent young Policemen, who responded to a Domestic Violence phone call and were ambushed as they entered the house one- by-one, to the NRA with the hysteria caused by their ‘war cry’ Obama is going to ban all guns and to ex-president Bush for putting assault weapons back on the streets in 2004.
In two days we have now had 16 innocent people murdered in cold blood, then the one murderer of 13 innocent took his own life, and the one murderer of the three innocent Policemen today changed his mind, as he had intended to take his own life as he had been convinced that Obama is going to ban guns in the U.S.
Should all guns be banned in the United States? Damn right they should be! Yet, that is the Right all people in the United States have to own guns and has been upheld by the Supreme Court!