The Lafayette theater shooter who murdered two and injured nine before putting his own lights out in Lafayette, Louisiana’s Grand Theater last night has been identified as Alabama drifter John Russel Houser. “Houser, 59, who killed himself, is among three people who died, police said. The other two were Mayci Breaux, 21, of Franklin, Louisiana, who died at the theater, and Jillian Johnson, 33, of Lafayette, who died at the hospital.” And from the report, Houser didn’t start the shooting intending it to be a suicide mission . . .

“It is apparent he was intent on shooting and escaping” before police forced him back into the theater where he shot himself to death, Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft said at the news conference, explaining that his 1995 blue Lincoln Continental was positioned near the exit.

Police found wigs and glasses in his car and motel room, Craft said.

Thankfully, we’ll be spared the expense and the spectacle of another Holmesian trial. And as expected, it took all of 12 minutes for first calls for more gun control laws to ring out.

The President was en route to Africa at the time of the shooting, so we’ve been spared his expressions of disappointment and deep thoughts on the situation. For now. But whatever he says, whenever he says it, it will no doubt be profound and enlightening. We can hardly wait.

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66 COMMENTS

  1. This is really suspicious, they found multiple disguises in his room, he had switch his license plates and was a “drifter”…

  3. What, exactly, is a ‘drifter” ? Sounds like someone that moves from place to place frequently. What does that description have to do with anything related to the shooting ?

    • My guess is that it goes to motivation. Since we know little about the shooter and his intentions every little detail gets scrutinized and inflated. The drifter moniker may give us insight the way it did with Oswald. He was a “drifter” who moved around a lot (NY, Louisiana, Texas) and in his case the lack of stability and inability to develop normal, lasting friendships with neighbors, coworkers and family was a part of his psychological profile that help us understand the why. It partially explained the source of his anger, disillusionment and thirst for showing the world that he was “somebody” important, despite experiencing a string of failures in his personal and professional life.

  4. So, as usual, when bad guy with gun is confronted by good guys with guns, his inner coward comes out, and he spares taxpayers the expense of a trial?

      • Dachau never had gas chambers. The few thousand Dachau prisoners killed by gas were transported to a different town for the actual gassing.

        • Which utterly misses the point of the statement. When only the police (and military) are allowed to have guns, what you have is what is known as a “POLICE STATE”.

  6. He was a “drifter.” people who have no fixed address and commit crimes are drifters or transients. homeless people never commit crimes

    I discovered this in the ’80s, when I read this headline: “Drifter kills homeless man.”

    I blame Ronald Reagan. before Reagan took office, we had bums, winos, tramps, hobos, transients, shiftless no accounts and drifters. when Reagan took office, the bums, winos, tramps, hobos, and shiftless no accounts all got promoted to “the homeless”, and all criminal behavior committed by people with no fixed address got assigned to transients and drifters.

    the thing is – in the story tied to the headline above, two homeless men got into a knife fight over the dry spot in the tumbledown shack they were holed up in. the winner is the one who lived. if the winner had lost, and the loser had won, the headline would have read:

    “Drifter kills homeless man.”

  7. I live here and it’s a shame – Lafayette is a nice, family oriented community with a lot of culture. Now, we get to be the center of everyone’s attention. Not fun. Went through it with Baltimore (trouble seems to follow me).

    We’ll have to endure days (or perhaps weeks) of the anti’s projecting their baggage on our community. It’s already started. One guy had the gall to post on Twitter that “Lafayette doesn’t need your prayers, they need meaningful gun laws” or some nonsense to that effect. This was from a guy who lives in Chicago. I think we do need your prayers and genuine expressions of sympathy more than we need a bunch of pontificatin’ and pronouncin’ on gun control policy.

  9. Yahoo already claims he’s a member of Tea Party Nation:

    “It appears that Houser was a member of Tea Party Nation, according to the group’s website.

    The Hatewatch Blog, which is run by the Intelligence Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, uncovered that Houser posted about his fondness for Hitler, neo-Nazis and lone wolves on several online forums.”

    http://news.yahoo.com/john-russell-houser–what-we-know-about-louisiana-movie-theater-shooting-suspect-134806223.html

      • You likely already know this but many leftists tend to think that Hitler and Neo-Nazi-ism is in the same vein as extreme conservatism (as a form of fascism similar to the fascism of pro-lifers). Obviously this is yet another leftist fantasy based on lies. But speaking as a classical liberal trapped in the leftist utopia of New Jersey I’m just retelling what I hear the drones repeat often enough to believe.

      • If you are genuinely that stupid then you should excuse yourself from any and all political discussions.

      • .his fondness for Hitler, neo-Nazis…

        So he was a Socialist, i.e. a Progressive?

        He was an FDR New Dealer which is the same as a Nazi.

    • ” “He had Tea Party-radical Republican views on everything. ” Typical hate-filled rightwing ammosexual. Delusional. Should never have been allowed to have possession of a firearm.

      • This was an act of psychosis, not an act of hate. This guy was a loon. The only hate filled posts here are yours. This will be my last feeding of the troll. Enjoy your day. And if you had any decency or respect for others you’d change your name.

        • His time ran out on the library internet computer and now had to go back to Mommies basement and take his meddies.

        • Which tea party? Last I checked, there were several organizations calling themselves that these days (or some variation thereof), with no coherent common platform.

      • He had a criminal record and had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility, but you think he should have been barred from firearm ownership because of his politics? Those are some messed up priorities.

      • If men like him were ‘typical’ then all the authoritarian nutbars like yourself would have been found in a pool of their own blood and excrement long before now.

  10. This is one more reason why I hate going to the movies. The main reason is that most movies these days are terrible, but now I can tell the GF that I don’t want to be shot by a psycho.

  15. Louisiana has very lax gun laws. Why didn’t some ammosexual “good guy with a gun” take out the shooter? Or is the “good guy with a gun” just a myth?

      • Maybe this guy doesn’t consider police officers to be good guys with guns? Because their unusually fast response time is what forced the shooter to retreat back into the theater and take his life.

        • The left typically doesn’t consider the police to be good guys (except when they want the police union votes). See Furgeson, Baltimore, et al.

        • Call it fast if you want, but 12 minutes is a hell of a long time to wait when the lead starts flying.

    • Because the Grand Theater prohibits customers, even those with a permit, from possessing a firearm while in their theaters. State law gives private property owners the right to create gun free zones like this one. So this is an example of one of your “common sense” policies at work.

    • You really need to see a pshrink about your “ammosexual” obsession. I don’t believe you’ve made a single post without the word “ammosexual” included. You must have some real homophobia issues going on. And as I’ve mentioned before, as a practicing Roman Catholic, your blasphemy REALLY offends me. I’d suggest you go to confession while you still have a chance. Frankly, I don’t understand why Robert hasn’t banned you yet. He’s pretty darn tolerant as blog owners go, but there’s no good reason he has to put up with your hatred and calumny.

      Tom

      • He has no problems offending anyone who may believe in God with his idiot screen name, but I’ll give anyone one guess as to how he feels about the Washington Redskins…

      • Give him a break, he is dyslexic. Dog needs help even getting the letters in his name in the right order.

      • but there’s no good reason he has to put up with your hatred and calumny.
        But he is rather comical and since Mikey B numbers left, we need some good entertainment.
        I think some people on this blog take this clown too seriously.

    • “10 mass murders caused by far-right ammosexuals” ? Flying a plane into a building relates how to a gun crime? Shooting one person qualifies as “mass murder”? What drug are you on? i think you are very delusional, given your chosen screen name.

      • The left has a very funny standard of what mass murder is. One guy (marxist spouting liberal) who flies a plane into an IRS building is a mass murder, but when Mao’s policies directly kills millions of people over the course of a few years during the Communist Cultural Revolution, nothing to see there.

    • Nazi = National Socialist = by definition, left-wing, not right-wing. So, you can mark Joseph Stack (who quoted Marxist ideology in his manifesto), and Frank Roque off your list. And “white supremacy” is not a right-wing ideology; it is a racist ideology. So you can mark Timothy McVeigh and members of “The Order” off that list.

      Are you really this stupid?

      Also, you don’t really want to keep a body-count score on left-wing nuts vs. right-wing nuts. Or, maybe you do. Please, don’t throw me into that br’ar patch…

      • Let him keep score. Leftist ideology has claimed over 100 million lives in the last century alone. From Mao to the Weather Underground the left owns political killings. Our legacy is that we support freedom, and while occasionally someone will use their freedom to ill effect, that’s a worthy tradeoff over the murderous tyranny this fool supports.

        OK I’m done wasting my time on idiocy. Back to guns!

      • This is how Joseph Stack, included in your asinine list of 10 “right-wing” mass murderers, ended his manifesto:

        The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

        The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

        So, troll on, troll. You beclown yourself more every time you post.

      • Klanners and white supremacists tend to vote Republican and to be ammosexuals. The Nazis were no more socialist (remember that Hitler hated Stalin and Russia) than today’s Republicans can take credit for freeing the slaves. Of course, you are an idiot and probably really believe the stupidity that you posted. No problem – you’ll be in a FEMA camp soon enough and you can tell your fellow loons all the revisionist history that you want to.

        • Point of fact, the person who started the KKK was a democrat, and the founder of planned parenthood started it because she believed in eugenics. More Republicans voted for the civil rights act than democrats. And of course, there was never a big shift in the GOP as claimed by so many of the left. As Reagan would say, it’s not that leftists are ignorant, its just that they know so much that isnt so.

      • >> Nazi = National Socialist = by definition, left-wing, not right-wing

        Not by definition, by self-appointed name, which means exactly nothing. Otherwise you would be forced to conclude that Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democratic republic.

        Nazism is neither left-wing nor right-wing. They called themselves “Third Position” for a reason. There were some genuine socialists in NSDAP early on – most notably, Gregor and Otto Strassers – but Hitler purged them shortly after coming to power precisely because he wanted none of that sort of thing. The “socialist” part of the name was retained because it was an established, popular brand, and because it was good propaganda to get the working masses to work for you.

        • Read the Nazi’s 25 points, and get back with me. They were socialist. “Third way” simply meant that they differentiated themselves from the Bolsheviks and the Capitalists, but on the left-right spectrum (American, not European), the Nazis were still very much left-wing.

          • The 25 points date to a very early period in the history of NSDAP, and were actually to a significant extent drafted by the original members of said party (like the founder Anton Drexler, who also gave it its name). Most of them were socialists, yes. Hitler himself was not fond of these points later on, and generally tried to dodge the questions on them.

            Nazis really were such an eclectic mix of ideologies that they cannot be classified on the 1D “left-right” scale (much like many other non-mainstream ideologies, such as libertarianism). Their (actual, implemented) economic program, for example, had points that were both traditionally associated with the left (welfare state) and the right (support of large capital, suppression of unions). Their social policies were almost uniformly conservative, though – pro-nuclear family, pro-traditional gender roles, anti-abortion, anti-homosexuality etc – which is why they tend to be classified as right-wing usually. Though their position on religion was also neither here nor there, supporting it as part of those social conservative policies, but suppressing those manifestations of it that were counter to their racism.

    • I have to ask, is it only “far-right” that are ammosexuals? What would you call a strongly liberal homosexual gun owner with a couple of ARs in his gun safe (and don’t you dare tell me that such don’t exist – I know two personally).

  17. Seeing the comments about being bi-polar or manic depressive makes me wonder if he was on or had been on a ssri medication. Haven’t a number of recent shooters had a history with an ssri med?

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