“Every time you look up — these are angry people, it’s almost like it’s demonic that is driving them to kill and to maim and to destroy and to blow themselves up,” Robertson said of Islam. “It’s a religion of chaos.”
He went on to say, “I hardly think to call it a religion, it’s more of — well, it’s an economic and political system with a religious veneer.”
Court documents show that three weeks after the mosque firebombing, in unrelated encounters with police, Crawford ranted about Muslims, said Christians are capable of jihad and told an officer he resembled President Barack Obama.
The documents said Crawford told officers “only Christians could understand him, that he was a Christian warrior that they were persecuting,” and that “you will never know the truth about the mosque.” (via. Islamophobia-Watch)
A federal judge on Tuesday allowed a man accused of firebombing a mosque in Corvallis to be released to home detention.
After two days of arguments and testimony in U.S. District Court in Eugene, Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin ordered Cody Crawford released under the supervision of his mother. His trial was set for September.
Crawford has been held since August in the 2010 firebombing that burned an office in the Salman Alfarisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, where Somali-born student Mohamed Osman Mohamud sometimes worshipped.
The fire came two days after Mohamud’s arrest in an FBI sting at a Portland Christmas tree lighting ceremony. Mohamud is charged with using a loaned cellphone to dial a phone number that he thought would detonate explosives in a van near the tree.
Police said someone broke a window at the mosque two days later and threw in a container with a flammable liquid.
Crawford was indicted on charges of damaging religious property for racial reasons, which is a hate crime, and using fire to commit a felony.
Court documents show that three weeks after the mosque firebombing, in unrelated encounters with police, Crawford ranted about Muslims, said Christians are capable of jihad and told an officer he resembled President Barack Obama.
The documents said Crawford told officers “only Christians could understand him, that he was a Christian warrior that they were persecuting,” and that “you will never know the truth about the mosque.”
A former Catholic altar boy from northern Uganda, Joseph Kony has waged war in central Africa for more than two decades.
A video campaign launched by San Diego-based nonprofit, Invisible Children Inc., attempts to harness the power of the Internet–and especially social media, including Twitter, YouTube and Facebook — to stop Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The Uganda-based militia is infamous for killings, kidnappings, mutilations and torture in several African nations.
A 30-minute viral video exposes Kony’s enslavement and abuse of 30,000 children in Uganda, and has received over 10 million views since Monday. The documentary has garnered support from major celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna and Justin Beiber.
Kony attempts to justify his crimes in the name of Christianity, which is clearly a reflection of his own madness rather than a divinely inspired religion. However, the story begs the question: What if he were Muslim?
He claims that his Lord’s Resistance Army movement has been fighting to install a government in Uganda based on the Biblical 10 Commandments.
But his rebels now terrorise large swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, and he is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Regional armies are trying to hunt them down with the help of 100 US soldiers.
Mr Kony was due to sign a peace deal with the Ugandan government in 2008, but peace talks fell apart because the LRA leader wanted assurances that he and his allies would not be prosecuted.
Born in the early 1960s in Odek, a village east of Gulu, Mr Kony is remembered as an amiable boy.
“He played football and was a brilliant dancer,” one of his former classmates said, recalling the rebel leader’s days at Odek primary.
The LRA’s aims were heavily influence by the Holy Spirit Movement, a 1980s group that represented the Acholi people of northern Uganda.
This teenager had her lips, nose and ears cut off by the LRA
The movement was formed by Alice Lakwena, a former prostitute who was believed to be Mr Kony’s cousin.
They felt excluded from power after northern leader Milton Obote was overthrown in a military rebellion, and eventually replaced by current President Yoweri Museveni in 1986.
Ms Lakwena promised her followers immunity from the bullets of the Ugandan army, but Mr Museveni’s troops defeated her movement in 1988 and she fled to Kenya.
After this defeat, Mr Kony founded his own rebel group which over the next 20 years has gone on to abduct thousands of children to become fighters or sex slaves.
Mr Kony himself is thought to have at least 60 wives, as he and his senior commanders take the pick of the girls they capture.
He sees himself as a spirit medium.
“They will tell us what is going to happen. They say ‘you, Mr Joseph, tell your people that the enemy is planning to come and attack’,” he has explained.
Young abductees who have escaped from the LRA say Mr Kony would tell them he got his instructions from the Holy Spirit and would often preach in tongues.
“I will communicate with Museveni through the holy spirits and not through the telephone,” he once said.
He has created an aura of fear and mysticism around himself and his rebels follow strict rules and rituals.
“When you go to fight you make the sign of the cross first. If you fail to do this, you will be killed,” one young fighter who escaped from the LRA told US-based Human Rights Watch.
“You must also take oil and draw a cross on your chest, your forehead, and each shoulder, and you must make a cross in oil on your gun. They say that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Mr Kony appears to believe that his role is to cleanse the Acholi people.
He uses biblical references to explain why it is necessary to kill his own people, since they have, in his view, failed to support his cause.
“If the Acholi don’t support us, they must be finished,” he told one abductee.
Christmas massacre
Six years ago, Mr Kony broke his silence and was interviewed on camera in his jungle base at the time in north-eastern DR Congo.
He was surrounded by some of what he estimated were his 3,000 heavily armed fighters, and insisted he was not the monster he was portrayed to be.
“Let me tell you clearly what happened in Uganda. Museveni went into the villages and cut off the ears of the people, telling the people that it was the work of the LRA. I cannot cut the ear of my brother; I cannot kill the eye of my brother.”
He gave the interview at the start of delicate peace process brokered by the authorities South Sudan.
But the negotiations saw splits in LRA ranks and Mr Kony’s deputy, Vincent Otti, who played a key role in the talks, died in mysterious circumstances.
It is believed he may have been murdered on the orders of Mr Kony, who refused to sign the deal.
The LRA later went on a major offensive, carrying out a massacre on Christmas Day 2008.
On that day and over the following three weeks, the LRA beat to death more than 800 people in north-eastern DR Congo and South Sudan, and abducted hundreds more.
To date Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents ever.
Andrew Adler wrote that he thinks Benjamin Netanyahu should assassinate President Barack Obama because he is not pro-Israel enough. Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents out there and still you got the nutbags on the Right who want him dead.
Imagine if an American Muslim publisher had wrote this? He would be getting water-boarded in Guantanamo as we speak. Also, you could bet that the condemnations from Muslim leaders would barely be recognized, unlike in this case, where the outrage at Adler’s statements from within the Jewish community is highlighted very well.
NEW YORK – The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.
Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”
Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”
Adler apologized yesterday for the article, saying “I very much regret it; I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all,” Adler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And in an interview with Gawker.com, Adler denied that he was advocating an assassination of Obama.
The op-ed in Atlanta Jewish Times.
The American Jewish Committee in Atlanta last night issued a harsh condemnation of Adler’s article, saying that his proposals are “shocking beyond belief.”
“While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?” said Dov Wilker, director of AJC Atlanta. “Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”
Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, also blasted Adler on Friday, saying “There is absolutely no excuse, no justification, no rationalization for this kind of rhetoric. It doesn’t even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage. Irresponsible rhetoric metastasizes into more dangerous rhetoric. The ideas expressed in Mr. Adler’s column reflect some of the extremist rhetoric that unfortunately exists — even in some segments of our community — that maliciously labels President Obama as an ‘enemy of the Jewish people.’ Mr. Adler’s lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he’s fit to run a newspaper.”
The only thing that will give us a shot at building a democracy in an Islamic land is a mass conversion of its people to biblical Christianity. So that means if we want to see freedom come to those darkened, benighted lands, we should be sending missionaries in right after we send in the Marines to neutralize whatever threat has been raised against the United States. So we say to them, look, if you don’t want our missionaries, fine, that’s your choice, we’ll take our missionaries and our Marines, we’ll take them home, but we’re gonna let you know we have no hesitation about returning with lethal force if the forces in your country threaten us again. This time it’s Marines and missionaries, next time it’ll be Marines and missiles.
Remember the Muslim man who behead his wife? It was all over the news and Islamophobes made big hay out of it. Turning a tragic case of domestic violence into a Crusade against Islam. Bill Maher also attributed the act to Islam.
Now we have a case of a man named Bijendra Kumar, likely Sikh or Hindu who beheaded his girlfriend in front of her classmates. Will we blame Sikhism or Hinduism now? No, that would be wrongheaded and illogical but just imagine if he were Muslim!
PATNA, India — Police say that a man armed with a large knife beheaded an 18-year-old woman at her school in front of her horrified classmates in eastern India.
The attacker later told police he was in love with the victim but her parents wouldn’t allow them to marry.
Police official Pravin Kumar Singh said Thursday that officers arrested Bijendra Kumar on suspicion of killing Khushbu, who uses only one name. He allegedly attacked her a ceremonial curved weapon called a khukri as she was leaving her classroom Wednesday in the eastern city of Ranchi.
Authorities say the blade sliced her head off and she died instantly. Kumar was quickly mobbed by the other students and handed over to the police. Singh says Kumar told the police that he had also intended to kill himself.
I can’t help but wonder why folks are so afraid to call the mass shooting in Tuscon, Arizona an act of terrorism.
The fear of the “T” word seems almost palpable in describing the gruesome events that took place this past Saturday. There is little explanation or reasoning for the omission, except that it’s very obvious what most Americans won’t call 22-year-old Jared Loughner. It goes without saying that the man is deranged. Fairly obvious that he’s unstable. But, tell us what we don’t know. Get straight to the core of the matter here. Let’s not fool ourselves and everyone else struggling to make sense out of it. Loughner is a terrorist, clearly fit within the strictest definition of the term.
While other top public officials tip-toed around it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton almost went there, just short of dropping the “T” word. Instead, she chose “extremist.” While clearly holding back, it was one of the braver rhetorical stands we’ve heard in the past few days. Her comparison to the Middle Eastern “extremism” we routinely see plastered on global headlines is sure to raise a few brows and ‘how-dare-she’ remarks back home, especially since she said it while in Abu Dhabi.
But, let’s keep it real. The “T” term gets quickly applied within every second a suicide bomber blasts a busy street corner in Pakistan or when a crowded European commuter train is vaporized. We find some sort of geopolitical logic, however violent and horrific, to explain the indiscriminate mass killings of innocent civilians in various corners of the world. Even before responsibility is investigated or admitted by some obscure political fringe group wanting their spot blown, we’re already using the “T” word.
When a “crazy” white guy with a gun, wound up on polarized talking points and manifestos, indiscriminately kills innocent Americans in broad daylight, it takes several days in the aftermath before the larger public will even accept a hint of premeditation. Typically, the collective American psyche will initially trivialize the event by calling the perpetrator “deranged” or “mentally unstable.” The social response script is fashioned to fake us into a false sense of security. It’s isolated, they say. Just one crazed nut with a gun.
That dude who flew his plane into an IRS building? Isolated. Or the cat who waited for, scoped, then killed three Pittsburgh police officers? Crazy. What about the man who shot at the Panama City school board then shot himself? Off the edge.
Brown skin man with bombs strapped to his torso? Oh, that’s a terrorist.
Yet, in every instance, the “isolated” or “crazed” Americans each expressed some form of political reasoning for committing the act. Loughner, whose elaborate musings are outlined in lengthy Internet entries on MySpace and YouTube, was apparently hanging with anti-government dudes who probably have posters of Sarah Palin in a bikini brandishing a semi-automatic prior to the attack.
So, what’s the difference between a mass political killing in Tuscon, Arizona and the same in Any Town, Middle East?
Part of it is that we don’t want to accept that Americans are actually capable of politically motivated destruction. Clearly, the level of invective in our political discourse has reached a feverish pitch in recent years, matched by the worrisome lack of civility and old fashioned decency we use to pride ourselves on. It’s another conversation, but we’re much meaner, much more hyper-competitive and much less compassionate — some can fairly argue with that assessment, especially after 400 years of slavery and institutional racism peppered by mass lynching. We don’t want to admit it, but we all talk about how foul our social attitude is these days.
But, as we enter this 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, we are afraid to accept the comparisons. While the North vs. South battle lines disappeared with every history lesson, we can see a scary repeat of similar passions which led to the first cannon shots at Fort Sumter in 1861. Congress, in the 1850s, was also a scene of unadulterated political mayhem, Members beating each other senseless on the House floor and Senators drawing guns on one another. While it’s not that bad today, we are seeing an alarming deficit of decorum in the House chamber which, if left unchecked, could lead to unbridled outbursts of ideology we’ll end up regretting one day.
We’d be irresponsible not to reassess our national discourse. There are serious consequences to the ideological bubbles we’ve created while we self-isolate ourselves in Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts, interacting only with those we agree with.
Disagreeing is our national legacy and right, but how we disagree is a national discipline we should embrace before Tuscon becomes the norm rather than the exception.
James Wallace Fall married his 10 year old niece and justified it through the Bible. Not an accepted practice amongst most Christians, though in parts of Africa and Latin America with Christian majorities older men marrying young girls still happens.
Imagine if he were Muslim this would be blamed on Islam, and we would be hearing stories about how the Prophet Muhammad was a pedophile, etc.
The marriage took place during a family vacation to Yellowstone National Park during the summer of 2001.
Before long, James Wallace Fall began alternating nights in the beds of his 49-year-old wife and his new “bride” in Mound.
Fall, now 58, saw nothing wrong with the fact that the bride was his niece or that she was 10 when they “married,” according to Mound police.
He told the girl that it was God’s will that they marry. He told police this justified their union, legally and morally.
“He absolutely believes what he’s saying,” said Jami Wittke, a detective with the Mound Police Department, who interviewed Fall. “He said the Bible tells him that it’s OK to have a relationship with your niece, to marry someone” that young.
Fall was arrested in January and charged with criminal sexual conduct by the Hennepin County attorney’s office.
Part of the reason for Fall’s confidence in his own righteousness, say people who know him, is that he sees himself as being chosen by God.
“I’ve talked to family members and more than one has said Jim Fall believes he’s a prophet of God, of Christ,” Wittke said. “They were afraid of him.”
His wife, Rosemary Fall, was also arrested after the unidentified victim, who is now 19, told police that her aunt had known about the arrangement and done nothing.
“She was well aware of everything that was going on,” Wittke said. “The investigation shows she was told about it while still at Yellowstone.”
Wife, niece denied abuse
James Fall, who will be in court later this month, cited quotations from the Bible to support his position, police said. The passages, many from Corinthians, largely deal with sex and marriage.
“Everything is permissible for me,” from First Corinthians 6:12, was one of Fall’s favorite passages, police said.
“The wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband,” from First Corinthians 7:4, was another.
The arrangement, investigators believe, lasted for almost nine years until the young woman walked into the Mound Police Department in January and bore witness against her uncle.
The niece told investigators that Fall maintained the relationship through coercion, threatening to kick her and her two brothers out of the house if she didn’t go along.
In recent years police were called to the home to talk with Fall’s wife and the niece about alleged abuse, but both denied it, according to police reports.
“He really believes that this is OK,” Mound Police Chief James Kurtz said. “I don’t know how long he’s believed that.”
‘A firm set of beliefs’
James Fall has been in the Hennepin County jail for weeks awaiting trial.
He is scheduled to be in Hennepin County District Court later this month as part of a custody hearing involving a 16-year-old nephew living at his home who was taken away by the county after the sexual abuse allegations surfaced.
David Risk, Fall’s lawyer, said he will ask the court to conduct a mental health evaluation on Fall to see how competent his client might be.
Fall’s punishment, Risk said, might ultimately hinge on his religious beliefs.
“From a religious perspective this is very unusual,” said Risk, who does not expect to use polygamy or religious freedom as a defense. “We need to explore his mental health. Mr. Fall has a firm set of beliefs. That is something we will have to look at. Some of his beliefs are outside the norm and would cause someone to question his competency.”
Wittke and other Mound police officers said Fall knew what he was doing and had ready arguments about what he did and how he lived.
Investigators have not been able to determine whether Fall, who calls himself a Christian, has any formal religious training. Wittke said she was told that Fall’s father was a minister at a church in Minneapolis decades ago.
Wittke said no one who knows Fall has come forward to say he needs medication or hears voices or somehow is not in control of his actions.
Sharron Angle calls for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and a "return" to Biblical Law.
Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle has made some very interesting statements about what could happen if the ballot box fails:
“You know, our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. In fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but, you know, if this, this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? And I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
“The nation is arming. What are they arming for, if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of their government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways? That’s why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?”
“I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This is not for someone who’s in the military. This is not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.”
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
So, is this incitement to armed insurrection? Is this a call to violence if “we don’t win at the ballot box”? What are the “Second Amendment remedies”?
Sharron Angle’s “stealth jihad” campaign against the U.S. government is waged on behalf of the Christian not Islamic flag. She doesn’t want to replace our secular and liberal form of government with Sharia law, but Biblical Law. If you think of Sharia as stoning adulterers, guess which book that comes from? It’s from none other than the Bible. (Of course, it would be unfair to link stoning–found in the Bible–to Sharron Angle, since her interpretation of Biblical Law may not entail this, but this never stops Christian right-wingers from saying every Muslim who believes in Sharia advocates a return to stoning.)
Anyways, here’s more about Angle’s background:
Sharron Angle, Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Nevada was, in the 1990s, a member of the Independent American Party, the Nevada affiliate of the Constitution Party. The Constitution Party is not merely a political party that supports the Constitution, but rather a party that promotes a very specific interpretation of the Constitution: based on founder Howard Phillips’ Christian Reconstruction.
The Constitution Party’s platform advocates “returning” American law to its “foundations” in “Biblical Law.” The notion that the First Amendment’s religion clauses provide for a separation of church and state is rejected…They contend that the founders always understood the U.S. to be a Christian nation founded on biblical law.
Can you imagine the reaction if she had been a Muslim? What if a Muslim candidate for public office – any public office, even if it is Chief Librarian (or the prestigious position of Miss America) – calls for “Second Amendment remedies”? What if a Muslim candidate for public office said, “If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” What if Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison said that, or any of the “army of Muslim spy interns” supposedly trying to topple our government? And what if these Muslims advocating violent overthrow believed in “returning” American law to Sharia-based law? Do you think that such a Muslim would have a semblance of a political career left?
I will tell you the answer: people would be saying that such a Muslim candidate should be sent to jail for incitement to murder and terrorism; that Muslim candidate would be demonized to no end. At minimum, he/she would be forced to resign, amid a fury of calls for his/her head. And Spencer, Geller, and Co. would be screaming “Stealth Jihad!” “Taqiyya!” “Dhimmitude!” until the cows…no, I’m sorry, the pigs come home.
This incident highlights the fact that right wing extremism–of which extremist Christians comprise a large chunk of–remains a grave threat to this country just as radical Islam does. Right-wing extremism is certainly more of a threat to our liberal way of life than the imaginary “stealth jihad” that loyal Muslim-American citizens are continually accused of–a fact that holds true even if it doesn’t conform to the narrative imagined by right wing Islamophobes. We also wonder: why are Muslim-Americans always skeptically cross-examined by Christian right-wingers about their loyalty to this country, but meanwhile these same Christian right-wingers openly call for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?
By SCOTT HEPPELL and JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer Scott Heppell And Jill Lawless, Associated Press Writer – Wed Jun 2, 7:05 pm ET
SEASCALE, England – A taxi driver drove his vehicle on a shooting spree across a tranquil stretch of northwest England on Wednesday, methodically killing 12 people and wounding 25 others before turning the gun on himself, officials said. The rampage in the county of Cumbria was Britain’s deadliest mass shooting since 1996 and it jolted a country where handguns are banned and multiple shootings rare.
The body of the suspected gunman, 52-year-old Derrick Bird, was found in woods near Boot, a hamlet popular with hikers and vacationers in England’s hilly, scenic Lake District. Police said two weapons were recovered from the scene.
Eight of the wounded were in the hospital, with three of them in critical condition. In a sign of the scale of the tragedy, Queen Elizabeth II issued a message saying she was “deeply shocked” and shared in “the grief and horror of the whole country.” She passed on her sympathy to the families of the victims.
The shootings had “shocked the people of Cumbria and around the country to the core,” Police Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Hyde said.
Police said it was too early to say what the killer’s motive was, or whether the shootings had been random. Some reports said Bird had quarreled with fellow cab drivers the night before the killings.
Peter Leder, a taxi driver who knew Bird, said he had seen the gunman Tuesday and didn’t notice anything that was obviously amiss. But he was struck by Bird’s departing words.
“When he left he said, ‘See you Peter, but I won’t see you again,’” Leder told Channel 4 News.
The first shootings were reported in the coastal town of Whitehaven, about 350 miles (560 kilometers) northwest of London. Witnesses said the dead there included two of Bird’s fellow cabbies.
Police warned residents to stay indoors as they tracked the gunman’s progress across the county. Witnesses described seeing the gunman driving around shooting from the window of his car.
Victims died in Seascale and Egremont, near Whitehaven, and in Gosforth, where a farmer’s son was shot dead in a field. Workers at the nearby Sellafield nuclear processing plant were ordered to stay inside while the gunman was on the loose.
Hyde said there were 30 separate crime scenes. Many bodies remained on the ground late Wednesday, covered with sheets, awaiting the region’s small and overstretched force of forensic officers.
Police would not discuss the identity of those killed, but local reports said Bird killed a 66-year-old woman near her home and a retired man who was out cycling.
A spokesman for the local health authority denied reports that Bird had tried to seek medical assistance Tuesday and said he was not known to their mental health services.
Barrie Walker, a doctor in Seascale who certified one of the deaths, told the BBC that victims had been shot in the face, apparently with a shotgun.
Lyn Edwards, 59, a youth worker in Seascale, said she saw a man who had been shot in his car.
“I could see a man screaming and I could see blood and there were two ladies helping him at the time,” she said.
Deadly shootings are rare in Britain, where gun ownership is tightly restricted. In recent years, there have been fewer than 100 gun murders annually across the country.
Rules on gun ownership were tightened after two massacres in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1987, gun enthusiast Michael Ryan killed 16 people in the English town of Hungerford. In 1996, Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and a teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland.
About 600,000 people in Britain legally own a shotgun, most of them farmers and hunters in rural areas. Witnesses described Bird as using a shotgun or a rifle.
Prime Minister David Cameron said the government would do everything it could to help the affected region.
“When lives and communities are suddenly shattered in this way, our thoughts should be with all those caught up in these tragic events, especially the families and friends of those killed or injured,” he told lawmakers in the House of Commons.
Local lawmaker Jamie Reed said people in the quiet area were in shock.
“This kind of thing doesn’t happen in our part of the world,” he told the BBC. “We have got one of the lowest, if not the lowest, crime rates in the country.”
Glenda Pears, who runs L&G Taxis in Whitehaven, said one of the victims was another taxi driver who was a friend of Bird’s.
“They used to stand together having a (laugh) on the rank,” she said. “He was friends with everybody and used to stand and joke on Duke Street.”
Sue Matthews, who works at A2B Taxis in Whitehaven, said Bird was self-employed, quiet and lived alone. Some reports said he was divorced and the father of two sons.
“I would say he was fairly popular. I would see him once a week out and about. He was known as ‘Birdy,’” she said. “I can’t believe he would do that — he was a quiet little fellow.”
Emergency services were still working late Wednesday to identify all the dead and inform their families.
Rod Davies, landlord of Gosforth Hall Inn near one of the crime scenes, said residents were “used to ‘neighbor’s cat missing’ stories making the news — not this sort of thing.
“There’s a lot of fear. A lot of people are expecting to hear names of people they know.”
___
Jill Lawless reported from London. Associated Press Writer Andrew Khouri also contributed to this report.
