DL Open Thread: Sunday, November 12, 2023
How Army Munitions Plant Arms Mass Shooters. With No Accountability:
The initials stand for the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant. Built during World War II, the federal site, in Independence, Mo., has made nearly all the rifle cartridges used by the U.S. military since it pulled out of Vietnam.
In recent years, the factory has also pumped billions of rounds of military-grade ammunition into the commercial market, an investigation by The New York Times found, leaving the “LC” signature scattered across crime scenes, including the sites of some of the nation’s most heinous mass shootings.
The plant, operated by a private contractor with Army oversight, is now one of the country’s biggest manufacturers of commercial rounds for the popular AR-15, and it remains so even as the United States supplies ammunition to Ukraine.
But more than one million pages of search warrants, police evidence logs, ballistic reports, forfeiture records and court proceedings compiled by The Times provide a sweeping accounting of how Lake City ammunition, once intended for war, has also cut a criminal path across towns and cities in nearly all 50 states.
Lake City rounds have been seized from drug dealers, violent felons, antigovernment groups, rioters at the U.S. Capitol and smugglers for Mexican cartels. They were confiscated from a man in Massachusetts who threatened to assassinate President Barack Obama and from a man at Los Angeles International Airport after he fired at a civilian and three T.S.A. agents, killing one.
Starting in 2012 with the massacre of 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., the rounds have been tied to at least a dozen mass shootings involving AR-15-style guns, including at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis — and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
A lengthy, but excellent article. Recommended.
Vatican To Ultra-Conservative Bishop: ‘You’re Fired.”:
Strickland is among the most strident high-profile U.S. Catholic clergy who have for years opposed Francis, saying that the pope’s theology violates their faith and that his apparent openness on social issues is an existential danger to Catholicism. They havepushed against Francis’s emphasis on social issues — such as protecting the environment, loosening migration rules, addressing poverty, and welcoming more women and the LGBTQ+ community. Francis has, in their view, promoted those issues over their antiabortion message — the top priority of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
But Strickland had tested the waters further, telling his flock that the pope is undermining the Catholic faith. He wrote in an August letter that an “evil and false message” had infiltrated the church, partially referring to the pope’s outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics. Strickland also endorsed a video that called Francis a “diabolically disoriented clown.”
There’s a place for him in a second Trump Administration. And in Hell.
Trump Promises Concentration Camps For Immigrants. Who couldn’t possibly resist those?:
If Donald Trump wins back the presidency, he plans to quickly detain millions of undocumented immigrants in vast camps in Texas, try to end birthright citizenship, renew a version of his effort to ban Muslims from entering the United States, and deny visas to foreigners whose politics his advisers don’t like, the New York Times reported Saturday.
The draconian measures are part of a “blitz” described by far-right Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller—as an effort to execute an array of problematic, and in some cases clearly illegal, steps to restrict legal immigration and deport millions before immigration-rights lawyers and federal courts can catch up.
Trump’s anti-immigrant plan is the latest detailed authoritarian blueprint to emerge from within the indicted former president’s brain trust. Trump, if elected, also reportedly plans to immediately invoke the Insurrection Act to “ allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations,” end civil service protections so he can fire large swaths of the federal workforce, and use the Justice Department to prosecute critics and political enemies.
He is who he tells you he is.
Netanyahu Chooses Annihilation. He is who he tells you he is:
Intense Israeli airstrikes have continued in Gaza after the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, vowed to press Israel’s advance into the territory with “full force” and laid out an uncompromising vision of a postwar settlement.
The bombardment on Sunday appeared concentrated around al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, the biggest such facility in Gaza, where much of the most intense fighting between Hamas and Israeli ground forces is taking place.
Medics and aid workers have warned patients will die unless there is a pause in the battle. Thousands more are trapped in other health facilities in the north of Gaza, as Israel’s campaign to “crush” Hamas moves towards its sixth week.
Despite growing pressure from even staunch allies, Netanyahu has so far rejected international calls for a ceasefire. “The war against [Hamas] is advancing with full force, and it has one goal: to win. There is no alternative to victory,” he said late on Saturday in televised comments.
Netanyahu also made clear he wanted Israel to retain overall security control after any conflict, “with the ability to go in whenever we want in order to kill terrorists”.
“There will be no Hamas. There will be no civilian authority that educates their children to hate Israel, to kill Israelis, to destroy the state of Israel. There can’t be an authority there that pays the families of murderers. There needs to be something else there,” Netanyahu said.
The comments appeared to rule out any role for the Palestinian Authority after the conflict, a solution favoured by the US and many European powers.
Yes, he is who he tells you he is: A genocidal war criminal.
BREAKING: John Carney Running For Mayor! The Delaware State News finally picks up the story. The News-Journal? Still in the dark. Perhaps permanently.
What do you want to talk about?
Good morning, Sleepyhead