It might be accidental, but there's no question that a student brought a gun to school, put it in his backpack, and now two students are in the hospital after being injured by gunshots.

Via KTLA-Los Angeles:

A Gardena High School student brought a gun to the campus in a backpack Tuesday, and the weapon discharged -- possibly accidentally -- injuring two students.

Despite earlier reports of three shooting victims, a Los Angeles Unified School District spokesman said only two students were shot.

"Our indication is that a student took a gun to school in a backpack, and that that student had dropped the backpack and consequently the gun discharged," LAUSD spokesman Robert Alaniz told KABC. "We're not quite sure how both the students were injured, but we do know we have two injured students transported to the hospital.''

Police said the weapon was recovered, and the student was arrested shortly before noon in a classroom that was filled with students and one teacher.

Evidently the student dropped the backpack and the gun went off, hitting two students, and the hits weren't just a grazing shot, either.

Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Jamie Moore told the Associated Press that two victims have been transported, one in serious and one in critical condition.

As the parent of a high school student and a human being, I cannot tell you how angry it makes me that any student would bring a gun to school and put my child in danger for what? For WHAT? What possible reason would ANY student have for putting a gun in his backpack before he left for school.

Enough. Guns serve one purpose: to kill. They have no business in our schools, our supermarkets, our malls, or anywhere else.

After the contemptible jerks at Westboro Baptist Church announced their plan to picket little Christina Taylor Green's funeral this week, Tucson residents came up with a plan to block them from view of people attending.

CNN:

They're planning an "angel action" -- with 8-by-10-foot "angel wings" worn by participants and used to shield mourners from pickets. The actions were created by Coloradan Romaine Patterson, who was shocked to find the Topeka church and its neon signs outside the 1999 funeral of Matthew Shepherd, a young gay man beaten and left on a fence to die in Laramie, Wyoming.

"We want to surround them, in a nonviolent way, to say that our community is united," Gilmer said. "We're a peaceful haven."

"You don't mess with Tucson," said Gilmer, 26, who described it as "a little dot of blue in a sea of red."

Good for them. They've gotten a huge response from the community, too:

But political persuasions don't matter, she said. Republicans, Democrats, independents, right, left and center -- they've all offered their support. Forty-two people have signed up on a Facebook page called "Build Angel Wings for the Westboro Funeral Counter-Protest and Meeting" and more than 4,500 have signed up on another page to "Show Support for the Families of the Tucson Shooting Victims."

"People, businesses, they're all donating material and money to build the angel wings," said Gilmer, who is helping organize the action. And, she added, they're donating to a fund created to help pay for services for the victims of the shooting.

Here's the Facebook page if you want to show your support for them.

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The Tucson Police Department have identified Jared Lee Loughner as the shooter in custody in today's shooting of Rep. Giffords and Federal Judge Roll. I've posted a video above posted to YouTube last month by user "Classitup10", who identifies himself as Jared Lee Loughner, resident of Tucson, Arizona. Here's a screen shot of his YouTube profile:

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Loughner spends a lot of words in his video talking about mind control and currency, which carries echoes of Glenn Beck's rhetoric, particularly with regard to currency and revolution.

The cable news stations, including MSNBC, are already trying to spin him as a "loner" who was surely not influenced by anything or anyone other than his own thought life. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, ten victims are in the hospital, five in critical condition (including Rep. Giffords). There are six fatalities, including a nine-year old child and a Federal judge. If any "adult conversations" are to be had, I'd say they should center around the impact of a constant drumbeat of violent rhetoric on the airwaves, the halls of government, and the Internet.

I'll update this with more information as I find it.

Update #1: Here's a link to a backgrounder on Loughner. The more info that emerges, the more I'm convinced the real crime here is ignoring cries for help from people who do not appear to be living in reality. It certainly looks as though he was retreating into a world where most of us do not live.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Kidnapped aid worker Margaret Hassan was believed to be dead Tuesday after a video received by Al-Jazeera television showed a hooded figure shooting a blindfolded woman in the head. pistol into the head of a blindfolded woman wearing an orange jumpsuit, Al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout said. "She was presumed to be Mrs. Hassan," he told The Associated Press.

The station initially said it would air parts of the video, but Ballout then said it would not.

Obviously, this is going to do wonders for our image in Iraq:

WASHINGTON — In a significant blow to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Thursday threw out the indictment of five former Blackwater security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 wounded.

The judge cited misuse of statements made by the guards in his decision, which brought to a sudden halt one of the highest-profile prosecutions to arise from the Iraq war. The shooting at Nisour Square frayed relations between the Iraqi government and the Bush administration and put a spotlight on the United States’ growing reliance on private security contractors in war zones.

Investigators concluded that the guards had indiscriminately fired on unarmed civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified assault near the crowded traffic circle on Sept. 16, 2007. The guards contended that they had been ambushed by insurgents and fired in self-defense.

A trial on manslaughter and firearm offenses was planned for February, and the preliminary proceedings had been closely watched in the United States and Iraq.

But in a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington wrote that the government’s mishandling of the case “requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants.”

In a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” the judge wrote, investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shootings. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.

Let’s say that you’re a run-of-the-mill teabagger looking to set yourself apart from the mob. Nazi/Hitler signs tend to go over well, but that’s so not original. You could strap an assault rifle to your back – like this guy did outside an Obama speech – but that’s so not subtle.

Do not fret. Thanks to Zazzle.com, you can find just the right product to push you over the edge from workaday winger to racist extremist.

Want to encourage, or joke about, President Obama’s death? Check out this line of "Bullet holes anti Obama Bumper Stickers:"

Don’t forget to pick up a t-shirt for that special woman in your life:

Maybe you’re a little paranoid about the Secret Service and would rather joke about killing the president’s supporters rather than Obama himself, no problem:

Or maybe you’d prefer to have your dog joke about killing the president instead. What’s the Secret Service gonna do, arrest Fido?

If you’d prefer to be a little more oblique about threatening Obama, while no less offensive, these are for you:

The above designs are all the handiwork of a single user of Zazzle named NOBAMAMAN (thanks go to the Active Art blog for discovering them). Bad taste isn’t against the law, but many of these designs are clearly beyond the pale – especially in an environment of heightened threats against the president.

Last month Zazzle banned a line of products which called on people to pray for Obama’s death. The company said the so-called Psalm 109 products “may be interpreted in such a way as to suggest physical harm to the President of the United States.” In light of this, we should be sure to call Zazzle’s attention to some of the above products. You can email Zazzle here, post in their forum, comment on their blog, or use Twitter.

UPDATE: Zazzle appears to have taken down the offerings.

[X-posted from Right Wing Watch]

Natasha Chart at Open Left:

Glenn Hurowitz recently wondered who's going to help Tibet bring down China, like the Russians were brought down in Afghanistan and the British in India.

International pressure and protest seems to carry no weight among the Chinese. Their government is still arresting monks for "unauthorized gatherings", they're still shooting and killing Tibetans. They've also been shipping weapons to Zimbabwe's dictator, who's currently ignoring the results of an election that voted him and his party out of power. They buy 90 percent of Sudan's exported oil, and sells them small arms destined for Darfur. Darfur, where the Sudanese government is carrying out air attacks against helpless civilian targets. Oh yes, and they're now the world's top carbon polluter, though the US still remains the top carbon polluter per capita.

Yeah, that Chinese government, complete jerks, tyrants, to put it charitably. People are surprised that the Olympic torch protests seem only to have stirred Chinese nationalism, surprised that the Chinese don't understand why people are angry. Still, I think Glenn asks the wrong question. Because who is it that raised China up? The lack of self-awareness in this situation isn't exclusive to the Chinese, people everywhere have an amazing capacity to accept almost anything as normal.

Indeed, let's cut right to the heart of the matter: whom else will we buy our shoes from?

I looked this up once when I was working at my community college paper in 2005. There was an editorial insistence on doing a fashion insert, so I contributed something about sweatshops and the offshoring of clothing manufacture. (I know, total killjoy.) I found a copy of that article in my old files, and according to the research that I'd done at the time, the US had lost over 860,000 textile and apparel jobs since 1993, and China was making 80% of the world's shoes.

Sure, if you have (usually) more money to spend, you can find shoes made somewhere else. But not everyone has that kind of time or latitude. Funny thing, though, now shoe manufacturers are closing down in China. Now that "many factories have to meet social obligations" and workers have been agitating for better pay, manufacturing jobs are slowly starting to leave China as they once left the US. Read on...

The Bonddad Blog: People are abandoning mortgages as prices drop, municipal bond rates are shooting through the roof, and the markets are falling. But Bubble Boy insists everything is copacetic.

Gristmill: A front for the coal industry is running some amazingly dishonest ads in advance of the Ohio presidential primary...and in other campaign news...

Ken Silverstein: John McCain's 'charitable contributions.'

Neurotopia: Convergent evolution of a gene that blocks HIV in monkeys.

War and Piece: Big trouble. More here, and here...

Sunday Bookchat: A man who was right about Iraq -- right from the start! A woman who was a mortal enemy of William F. Buckley's best buddy! An Obama critic who can't get over himself! From borderlands and bookshelves to comic books and Harlan Ellison --

Via CNN:

Pakistan's Interior Ministry backtracked Tuesday on its statement that Benazir Bhutto died because she hit her head on a sunroof latch during a shooting and bomb attack.

The government also published a reward offer in several national newspapers to anyone who could identify two suspects from the killing.

Interior Ministry spokesman Javed Iqbal Cheema told CNN the ministry will wait for the findings from forensic investigators before making a conclusion about her cause of death.

Cheema said he based his statement Friday about the sunroof latch "on the initial investigations and the reports by the medical doctors" who treated her at Rawalpindi General Hospital. Read on...

I won't begin to offer a theory or explanation, but it is significant that the Pakistani government has made this move. The release of the latest video of Bhutto's assassination has raised many more questions and it appears that pressure from the international community and media, as well as from Bhutto supporters has put the Pakistani Interior Ministry back on its heels.

Think Progress:

In its Action Update today, the Family Research Council (FRC) partially cast blame for the tragic shooting at a megachurch in Colorado yesterday on “the secular media.” In the e-mail, which was sent under the name of FRC Action President Tony Perkins, the group says it’s “hard not to draw a line between” the shooting and “hostility” by “some in the secular media toward Christians”:

It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday. But I will say no more for now other than that our friends at New Life Church and YWAM are in our thoughts and prayers.

When Perkins can't explain why this sick young man turned against his church and why God spared some people, but allowed others to be slaughtered, he sloughs it off on "evil secularists." Tony, do you think that the fact this kid was kicked out of the missionary school he shot up had anything to do with it? Isn't it possible that this rejection may have driven him to seek revenge? The secular media didn't reject this young man, nor did it give him access to the gun. Mr. Perkins, you might want to look at the real root causes of this tragedy rather than blaming secularists.