Saved by the cops

By Capt. Fogg

Who knows what Lloyd Woodson planned to do with his room full of weapons; some legal, some very illegal? It's not hard to guess from the little evidence the media gives us, hidden in the boiler-plate harem-scarum hoplophobic verbiage. Newspaper reports seem too involved with making the description of his collection as lurid as possible and not involved enough with evidence about his plans. Indeed, much of what the 43 year old, apparently African-American U.S. Navy veteran had in his motel room was illegal and scary enough: a grenade launcher, for instance, and a .50 caliber semi-automatic weapon with the serial numbers filed off. He was wearing body armor. I think we can dismiss the argument that he was not up to no good.

As usual, we get the "cache of hundreds of rounds of ammunition" statement, although a recreational shooter intending to spend a few hours at a shooting range might easily go through much more than that. We get "hollow point" as though that's not what one uses for hunting anything from rats at the dump, to rabbits to elk. But, no, Woodson had just come to town, had a map of a military installation and another map of "an out-of-state civilian community." Perhaps you have a road map in your car, too.

So was he planning to shoot up a Navy base? Sure sounds like it and I'm sure glad a suspicious bystander reported him and the New Jersey Police arrested him, but what surprises me is that I haven't heard the usual Fox-based outrage that this isn't being sold as a terrorist attack and that Fox isn't already shrieking about how Obama isn't running down the street yelling "terrorist attack -- run for your lives" as they did when the underwear bomber tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner.

That just proves that boy in the White House just isn't up to keeping us all safe, after all. The very idea that the New Jersey police would be able to stop an armed assault is part of Obama's plot to sell us on the idea that there's any other way to deal with terrorism than to be terrified into bombing some godforsaken piece of desert. It's a war on terror, you know, not a game of cops and robbers.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)