The murderous events at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland Thursday are sure to send politicians and pundits to the mats again in their fight for gun control. But details are already emerging which work against the narrative that guns caused these murders — Dork VanIdiot (not his real name) had a history which suggested he was a mass shooter waiting to happen. It wasn’t gun laws that failed the five victims Thursday (with a shotgun, incidentally, not the media’s fictitious creation — the dreaded “assault rifle”); it was the system.
— Capital Gazette (@capgaznews) June 29, 2018
A woman — as of yet, unidentified — claims VanIdiot had previously stalked, harassed, and sued her. Furthermore, she warned a former police representative that “he will be your next mass shooter.”
Speaking to local station WBAL 11, the woman said Dork was “a f***ing nut job.”
WBAL reporter Jayne Miller tweeted that VanIdiot’s seemingly random obsession with the woman forced her to relocate three times, sleep with a gun, and even change her name.
Woman who was stalked, harassed, sued, and scared away to another state by suspect in fatal shooting of 5 at Capital Gazette in Annapolis told me he became, for no obvious reason, "fixated" with her..caused her to move 3x, changed her name, and now sleeps with a gun.
— Jayne Miller (@jemillerwbal) June 29, 2018
Furthermore, Brennan McCarthy — an attorney who, in 2011, represented a woman VanIdiot stalked — told USA Today, “Of the thousands of people I’ve dealt with in court, this guy stuck. I was extremely scared that he was going to do something to me and my family.”
McCarthy said VanIdiot’s was “the worst case of harassment and stalking I have ever encountered in my career.”
He recounted some of Dork’s efforts:
“He was communicating by telephone, by text, by Facebook, by instant messaging, and he was just saying outrageous things like, ‘you should kill yourself.’ He wrote to her work saying, ‘She is a bipolar drunkard and you should fire her.’ She actually lost her job.”
In the aftermath, the Capital Gazette ran a column warning of the risk related to sharing personal information with strangers on the web. The series was called “[Dork] wants to be your friend.”
VanIdiot was none too pleased: he filed a defamation lawsuit against the Gazette. Furthermore, he contacted the woman he had stalked and demanded she give him any material she possessed from his stalking conviction.
At publishing time, it is unclear whether these two women are the same.
It seems this is yet further evidence that we have a problem in this country: failing to act on persons who show incredible signs of impending, murderous violence.
But once those people are recognized, what can we do, what should we do, and how can we do it? Please let me know what you think in the Comments section below.
For more on mass shootings, check out my articles on The Guardian’s solution, Hollywood’s answer, and the issue of resultant lawsuits.
For something totally different, here’s my coverage of Jimmy Kimmel’s conversation with Jim Acosta.
For a lighter note, enjoy my piece on what I like about Trump.
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Tomorrow this Capital page will return to its steady purpose of offering readers informed opinion about the world around them. But today, we are speechless. pic.twitter.com/5HzKN2IW7Q
— Capital Gazette (@capgaznews) June 29, 2018
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