Keep your scumbags to yourselves

I haven't opined about the freaky chic who killed three people at the University of Alabama because there is information still coming in.

As it turns out, she shot her brother to death with a shotgun some time ago, and she was also a suspect in an attempted bombing. There are lots of pundits hemming and hawing about all of this, but I want to put things into reverse order to see what I can see.

So we start with the shooting at the University of Alabama. As the press writes it, she is the accused - as in, she has not been convicted yet; and in our justice system, this makes sense as we err on the side of Liberty instead of on the side of guilt. But everyone can see what's at the end of the trial. She is presumed innocent, but she was caught in the act of mass murder, and there is no doubt that the gun was being wielded by her. It was Amy Bishop. The rest is just a process of showing the evidence, because that's what we do.

So this woman is a known violent sociopath. She murdered three people and tried to murder several more. This type of person is remarkably and fortunately rare in the world. You bump shoulders with thousands of people every day, and perhaps one of them is a sociopath, who may or may not be of the type who can pick up a firearm and take lives indiscriminately. Amy Bishop is that type.

So we have an attempted bombing of a Harvard professor. Amy Bishop and her husband were suspects, but were ultimately not charged. The MO was basically the same as with the UA shooting. Of however many people suspected of mailing the bomb to the professor, how many of them were of the type of person mentally capable of committing a bombing murder? Think about that. She definitely has the smarts, and we know that she definitely is capable, and we know that the motive is starkly comparable to the recent shooting. I would say that the ATF had the right person, but not enough evidence. No one was ever convicted of that attempted bombing, so it's not like they found the real violent scumbag.

Third, we have the shooting of her brother which she was also definitely involved in. After an argument with him, she fired a shotgun "at least three times," killing him with a shot to the chest. She then ran out of the house and attempted to carjack a passing motorist at gunpoint. She is a known violent sociopath that murdered three people with a firearm.

I'm not going into the "missing files" stuff. Conspiracy theories should not lose merit simply because they are conspiracy theories, but for the point in this post it is moot. My point was to draw attention to what we know -- that Amy Bishop is known to be capable of horrific and violent acts -- and plug that into past events that she has been a part of.

I also wanted to assert that states that let violent sociopaths walk free endanger the lives of us all. It was local law enforcement that let her slide for shooting her brother, but it is also the responsibility of the state to ensure that justice is served.

Mayors and governors often whine about guns from other states causing crime in their backyard, but they need to look to their own to solve violence problems. Scumbags from their neighborhoods wandering around mine are way more dangerous than any gun they buy in another state.

Keep your scumbags to yourselves.