Shooting at Washington Shipyard

It was rhetoric, not actual violent action. You are smart enough to see that.

That what they all say just before going on a killing spree........

Where were Gibbs and Ziva during all this?
They could have stopped this immediately, before anyone got hurt.

That went over my head.

Mother Jones

13 people were killed in a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, DC, after a gunman opened fire shortly after 8 a.m. on Monday. That number included the gunman, reportedly a 34-year-old man from Texas, who was shot and killed by law enforcement personnel after a lengthy standoff. On Monday afternoon the FBI was looking for two other men it believed were involved in the shooting, but as of Monday night it began assuming that the gunman had acted alone.

Monday's attack represents the largest mass-casualty event in the District since a 1982 plane crash, and the fifth mass shooting in the United States since the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.

As is often the case with breaking news events, numerous initial reports turned out to be false. The shooter was not 50-year-old Rollie Chance, whose ID badge was found in a car near the shooting scene and matched the description provided by law enforcement. Nor was there any corresponding gunfight at nearby Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. (To jump to the latest updates, click here.)

UPDATE, September 16, 2013, 3:40 p.m. EDT: Officials are identifying the suspected Navy Yard shooter who died after the killing spree as Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old man from Fort Worth, Texas.

UPDATE 2, September 16, 2013, 4:16 p.m. EDT: Navy Rear Admiral John Kirby confirms that Aaron Alexis was a Navy aviation electrician's mate and served from May 2007 to January 2011. And via the NBC station in Dallas-Fort Worth, here is Alexis' Fort Worth 2010 arrest report.

UPDATE 3, September 16, 2013, 4:38 p.m. EDT: The FBI posted this to their website, and is "asking for the public's assistance with any information regarding Alexis." The page includes this image:

Aaron Alexis FBI
Via FBI.gov
UPDATE 4, September 16, 2013, 4:59 p.m. EDT: Fort Worth Star-Telegram staff describe meeting Alexis—when he was a waiter at a Thai restaurant:



UPDATE 5, September 16, 2013, 5:49 p.m. EDT: Spencer Ackerman reports:

According to a Navy document, Alexis is not listed as having served overseas, but is listed as receiving the National Defense Service Medal and the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.

UPDATE 6, September 16, 2013, 5:55 p.m. EDT: According to the SPD Blotter, Aaron Alexis was arrested by Seattle police in 2004 for "shooting out the tires of another man's vehicle in what Alexis later described to detectives as an anger-fueled 'blackout.'"

UPDATE 7, September 16, 2013, 6:25 p.m. EDT: The US Navy has released the biographical information of alleged Navy Yards shooter Aaron Alexis. The former Aviation Electrician's Mate 3rd Class was most recently stationed with Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 46 in Fort Worth, Texas, from February 1, 2008, until January 31, 2011.

UPDATE 8, September 16, 2013 6:52 p.m. EDT: According to the Tarrant County District Attorney's Office, Alexis was also arrested on September 4, 2010, by Fort Worth police after being accused of recklessly discharging a gun, ABC News reports. "It was determined that Alexis was cleaning a gun in his apartment when it accidentally went off," the DA's office said in a statement. "A bullet entered an apartment upstairs. No one was injured."

UPDATE 9, September 16, 2013 7:06 p.m. EDT: From the Twitter feed of CBS executive producer Charlie Kay:




UPDATE 10, September 16, 2013 7:35 p.m. EDT: According to the police report from the tire-shooting incident, Alexis attributed his actions to being present during "the tragic events of September 11, 2001," and described "how those events had disturbed him." Detectives later spoke to Alexis' father, who told them he'd participated in rescue attempts on 9/11 and later suffered from anger-management issues related to post-traumatic-stress syndrome.

The Seattle Times has more detail on the outcome of Alexis' gun-related arrests. Detectives in Seattle referred the tire-shooting case for charges, but the City Attorney's office says it never received the police report and thus never pursued the case. In Fort Worth, Alexis was released from jail the same day that he was arrested for discharging his gun in his apartment building. A spokesman for the Tarrant County DA said he was never charged with a crime.

UPDATE 11, September 16, 2013 8:26 p.m. EDT: An anonymous federal law enforcement official tells USA Today that Alexis did not appear to have an escape plan, and it was not clear that he was targeting specific people.

UPDATE 12, September 16, 2013 9:04 p.m. EDT: Does the shooter's race tell us anything about the Navy Yard attack, as some commenters have implied? Not if you look at the data. As MoJo's Lauren Williams writes: "16 percent of the 67 mass shootings that have occurred since 1982 were committed by black shooters, including the alleged Navy Yard shooter, while 66 percent were committed by whites."


UPDATE 13, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 2:01 a.m. EDT: Police have released the names of 7 of the 12 shooting victims.

UPDATE 14, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 10:22 a.m. EDT: According to CNN correspondent Pamela Brown, the "FBI Washington field office...confirmed gunman was NOT armed with AR15. Spokesperson says 1 shotgun and 2 pistols recovered."

UPDATE 15, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 10:43 a.m. EDT: The AP reports that Alexis "had been hearing voices and was being treated for mental problems in the weeks before the shooting rampage, but was not stripped of his security clearance..."

UPDATE 16, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 10:48 a.m. EDT: A Time exclusive:

A soon-to-be-released government audit says the Navy, in an attempt to reduce costs, let down its guard to risks posed by outside contractors at the Washington Navy Yard and other facilities, a federal official with access to the report tells TIME.

The Navy "did not effectively mitigate access-control risks associated with contractor-installation access" at Navy Yard and other Navy installations, the report by the Department of Defense Inspector General's office says. Parts of the audit were read to TIME by a federal official with access to the document.

Read the rest here.

UPDATE 17, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 11:00 a.m. EDT: WSB-TV Atlanta has the document showing that Aaron Alexis was "issued a citation after a disturbance at a nightclub on Chamblee-Tucker Road and Interstate 285" in Atlanta, Georgia in 2008. He was cited for "disorderly conduct after DeKalb County police said he damaged furnishings inside the club and yelled profanities outside."

UPDATE 18, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 3:46 p.m. EDT: The names of all 12 victims in the Navy Yard shooting have been released.

UPDATE 19, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 3:59 p.m. EDT: The Washington Post reports:

The lawyer for SharpShooters Small Arms Range and gun shop in Lorton [Virginia], J. Michael Slocum, this afternoon released a statement saying that Aaron Alexis purchased a Remington 870 shotgun and about two boxes of shells on Sunday.

Slocum said Sharpshooters ran a background check on Alexis through the federal National Crime Information System database and was approved.

UPDATE 20, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 4:32 p.m. EDT: Read the just-released Department of Defense Inspector General report on Navy access for contractors here. The report found that 52 convicted felons had received "routine, unauthorized installation access, placing military personnel, civilians, and installations at an increased security risk." The reason, the inspector general found, was because the Navy "attempted to reduce access control costs."

UPDATE 21, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 4:44 p.m. EDT: Fox News reports:

Aaron Alexis was described at different times during his 2007-[2011] stint as a full-time Navy reservist as an "eager trainee" with "unlimited potential," who displayed a "get it done" attitude...[A 2008 evaluation] called Alexis, who was 34 when he died, a "talented technician" who meticulously carried out his duties as an aviation electrician's mate, working on aircraft electrical systems. It also praised him for work he did off the Georgia military base where he was stationed, calling him "community minded," and noting that he "dedicated over 10 hours of off-duty time to the Atlanta Food Bank distributing food to needy individuals in the metro Atlanta area."

A box on the review that read "must promote" was checked.

Also see our interactive map of 67 mass shootings over the last three decades. To examine the full data, click here for the Google Spreadsheet view.

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Washington (CNN) -- While no specific reason has been given as to what spurred him to fatally shoot 12 people at Washington's Navy Yard, Aaron Alexis' overall mindset came into sharper focus Tuesday -- including a history of trouble in the Navy and psychological issues.
That past includes a Newport, Rhode Island, incident on August 7, more than five weeks before Alexis was gunned down after single-handedly pulling off America's latest mass shooting.
Describing himself as a Navy contractor, Alexis told police he believed an individual he'd gotten into a verbal spat with had sent three "people to follow him and keep him awake by talking to him and sending vibrations into his body," according to a police report. Alexis said he hadn't seen any of these people, but insisted they'd followed him between three hotels in the area -- the last being a Marriott, where police investigating a harassment complaint encountered him.
Read the police report
There, Alexis told authorities the unseen individuals continued speaking to him through walls and the floor, and that they used "some sort of microwave machine" to send vibrations into his body to keep him awake.

He added, according to the police report, that "he does not have a history of mental illness in his family and that he never had any sort of mental episode." Nonetheless, a police sergeant alerted authorities at Naval Station Newport to Alexis "hearing voices." Reached Tuesday, officials at the base referred CNN to the FBI, which declined to comment.

It's not known if this incident was in any way related to Monday's shooting spree.

And Ted Bundy was a Republican. The point is that it's immaterial.

It doesn't matter what the political affiliation of the perp was. The horror of it all remains . . .

I think that is gunka's way of saying he was a black guy.

he's not quite right that one...

The thing about inner voices gets into the kind of thing Julian Jaynes wrote about. The problem is that a person can't really get away from a voice inside his or her head. If that voice is telling the person to commit crimes or kill people, you've got a big mess on your hands, and you're talking about the kind of mess which more gun laws would not be likely to fix.

I would appreciate if people would ignore people like gunga snack on this thread.

The damn Navy when he was a member knew the shooter had problems but there seems to had been not help offer to him.

In fact instead of getting him help the navy washed their hands of him by discharging him.

We live in a strange society where the check book is open as far as building and maintaining prisons for a far larger percent of our total population then any other nation on earth but that river of cash is not there to short stop problems before they results in such outcomes as a pile of bodies laying on floor of the navy yard headquarter building.

Shrug of the shoulders, resignation, cynicism.

This bloodbath seems to be a déjà-vu: victims are routinely heroes, perpetrator is an ill mediagenic outsider, and the gun delusion goes on as before.

The TV show "NCIS" is set in the Navy yard where the shooting took place.
The names I mentioned are two of the characters on the show.

Which is the opinion of anyone from the outside looking in. I will never understand the mindset that sees freedom as selling any amount of automatic weapons to any individual, no matter how disturbed or deranged, without any background checks whatsoever.

The shooter did not use an automatic weapon.
He had a shotgun and two pistols.
They think he got the pistols from two guards he killed.

He still found it remarkably easy to get hold of weapons. If he wanted a shotgun licence over here the police would refuse him on mental health grounds, and our police, let alone security guards, aren't routinely armed.

It doesn't bother me, obviously you like living in a society where lunatics go on the rampage with guns on a regular basis.

Source

I think you've convinced these two guys to ignore me...

I feel fine. Thanks for asking.

You also have people sitting in your prisons for trying to defend themselves against armed intruders inside their own homes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Martin_(farmer)

It wouldn't be quite as sad if England had never been such a serious country in the first place.