Not only are there recent developments which may be related, but government incompetence (pardon the redundancy) was involved in part of this:
Here's a story that depicts Evan Ebel as "Ebel Evil", which contrast other accounts (one of them mentioned here) of him being more sympathetic than it'd seem at first glance.
As has been pointed out, a woman has been arrested and charged with buying the gun for Evan prior to his crime spree. Expect the usual cries to "strengthen" background checks to keep this from happening. And when they get loud about this, point out that Evan was released 4 years prematurely.
"The parolee accused of killing Colorado's prisons chief may have been released four years too soon, according to Department of Corrections and Fremont County Court documents."
That shows we don't need more gun owner control, we need more math control. We need to close the government arithmetic loophole! This murdering little punk (if the allegations are true) got out four years early because of what amounts to a clerical error. That's not a gun control problem, that's a government control problem.
It gets more complex - It was speculated that Evan was in Texas to meet up with another white supremacist group. That group (the Aryan Brotherhood) has been accused of being involved with murdering an assistant district attorney down in Texas. Now the DA and his wife were found murdered in Texas last weekend:
"The bodies of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, were found in their home Saturday, Kaufman County sheriff's Lt. Justin Lewis said. Authorities would not comment on a motive."
They were killed in their home, but the curious thing is that according to this article the DA had been carrying a handgun constantly since his assistant DA was murdered a few months before.
"McLelland said he carried a gun everywhere around town, a bedroom community for the Dallas area. He figured assassins were more likely to try to attack him outside. He said he had warned all his employees to be constantly on the alert."
So he carried a firearm when out and about and realized there was a potential threat to his life, yet was killed in his own home. What's more perplexing is that this story claims he may have been shot at 20 times, while his wife was shot once. The story does acknowledge there have been varying statements about the number of rounds fire and how many times the DA and his wife respectively were shot.
Now I've been hearing on the radio that some government agents have speculated there was a drug cartel connection. I'd be disinclined to believe that, since if it was a drug cartel, they'd have dropped an "Operation Fast and Furious" AR or AK at the murder scene to make the cops look bad.
What it seems is that the DA and his wife were killed at his home not unlike the prison chief here in Colorado. Since Evan was killed in Texas it's not unreasonable to assume he was there to murder the DA. After Evan was killed the group he was working with or for found someone else and likely used similar methods (i.e. dressing as a pizza delivery driver, or a utility worker, or some other commonly seen professional) to get to the DA.
It's purely speculative though, and until more details about the DA's murder are released, speculate is all that can be done.
Whatever the details are, government employees have been increasing their level of protection. I see no reason why that should be limited to folks with a .gov paycheck. Evan allegedly started off by murdering a pizza delivery driver, so just because you don't have a dog in a particular fight doesn't mean you may not become involved.
Posted by Publicola at April 3, 2013 05:26 AM | TrackBack