The shooter who opened fire before worship services Sunday at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in Oak Creek and killed six people before he was killed by police is Wade Michael Page, a 40-year-old Army veteran, U.S. Attorney James A. Santelle said Monday.
He said officials believe he purchased the 9mm handgun legally in Wisconsin.
Page, 40, served in the military approximately between 1992 and 1998, Santelle said. Other sources familiar with the investigation said Page was assigned to psychological operations, or PsyOps. He apparently was last stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C.
As members of the Sikh community in Milwaukee and worldwide mourned the dead, details of Page’s background – his time in Colorado and North Carolina before his recent arrival at a duplex in Cudahy – began to emerge, including ties to white supremacist groups.
According to the Journal Sentinel’s report, Page had been tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that has studied hate crimes for decades, since 2000. Page was the leader of a racist white-power band and may have made a number of postings on the white supremacist website Stormfront.
As long as we’re policing the world and lying about it, we’ll keep on developing these Timothy McVeigh types. We’ve got to have more transparency in government and weapons owning in order to convince these soldiers that we know what we’re doing so they don’t think they have to take matters in their own hands.
Steve Benen has a thoughtful piece on this. Much food for thought.
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/07/13162665-revisiting-dhs-warnings-about-domestic-threats
Here’s another take:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/08/07/645421/right-wing-extremism/