ETA: I lost that bet pretty quickly. Not only is he a white supremacist (see comments for quotes from his website), he's waaaaaaaay older than I'd expected. Guy's a WW2 veteran, a member of MENSA, author of an anti-Semitic book, and likely a certifiable paranoiac.
ETA AGAIN: And apparently a convicted felon, stemming from an incident in the early eighties where he tried to arrest the Federal Reserve. Meaning he's prohibited from having guns.
ETA AGAIN: Wow. Quoth the perp:
ACTUALLY, on the road to Damascus — brooding about Rome, relishing the bloody image of the disciple he had stoned to death; sweaty, sore footed, thinking of the blasphemous ravings of the Nazarene — Saul had an incredible, earthshaking IDEA. A light-bulb inspiration. He, Saul — a Roman citizen — suddenly realized how he could destroy Rome! Saul trembled uncontrollably with fear and joy. He would simply promulgate the insane teachings of Jesus! What better way to destroy a Nation — any Nation — than to undermine her hubris; her gods, ethics, mores, history, her gene-pool — in short, Saul would DESTROY ROMAN CULTURE. Then, as night follows day, with her foundations rotted, the Roman Empire would FALL. Saul decided to begin the HOAX by inventing a miraculous encounter on the road to Damascus with the reincarnated Jesus the Christ!
Toward that end — no different than Hollywood script-writers today — Saul created a bogus a la Spielberg docu-drama stuffed with lies, miracles, guilt trips, betrayal, virgin birth, eternal damnation, salvation — a scenario appealing to the superstitious, vulnerable, ignorant yearning sheep — he named his hoax “Christianity.”
That's pretty damn out there: CHRISTIANITY IS A JEWISH CONSPIRACY.
ETA AGAIN: The security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, has died in the hospital. In pace requiescat. I've seen reports that he traded fire with the killer after being shot, and others that the killer was brought down by the other security guards; regardless, Johns performed his ultimate duty: the time the killer spent fighting Johns and his colleagues was time that he didn't have to kill museum patrons. Condolences to Johns's family and friends, and thanks to the late Stephen Tyrone Johns and his surviving colleagues for a job well done.
Note, incidentally, how quickly this resolved. Very good work by the museum's security detail. This is how you stop active shooters: you kill them, or at the very least render them physically incapable of rendering further harm. (This is why, while I'm not opposed to requiring permits for civilians carrying firearms, I adamantly support the broadest possible latitude for where and when civilians can carry. Not that folks who lawfully CCW don't commit crimes, but they do it remarkably rarely, and the more people who are lawfully armed in any given place, the less chance any mass shooter will get to make the headlines he's craving.)
