One Moment's Remembrance, Please | Corrente

One Moment's Remembrance, Please | Corrente

This is a prime example of two things:
1. There are more than enough gun control laws on the books that are not being enforced. We do not need more laws, but more enforcement of the existing laws.
2. This guy has been known for years, but never picked up. Ask yourself WHY.

Actually, three moments of remembrance for men shot and killed in the name of hate, as the siege on American values and progress continues apace.

Let us stop and remember a moment for each of these Americans, whose murders were not, despite the spew of cable "news" and the calumny repeated by GOP leaders and the national media's "pundits," perpetrated by the dangerous Socialist left taking over the country.



One moment's remembrance, first, for the man most recently killed in the siege on America:

Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, who worked for six years as a guard at the National Holocaust Museum, where he was murdered day before yesterday. Johns' assailant has his share of notoriety already; but the two other museum guards whose actions helped stop the crazed octogenarian's attack deserve recognition.

CBS News reported that Johns was married and a father, and that the FBI's early statements liken his murder to domestic terrorism.

Museum Director Sara Bloomfield said Johns "died heroically in the line of duty."
"To me he was a pretty great guy. And when I heard about what happened I was just sad. And mad at the guy who shot him," Johns' 11-year-old son, Stephen Johns Jr. told (CBS correspondent Bob) Orr Thursday.
...
"We know what Mr. von Brunn did yesterday at the Holocaust museum. Now it's our responsibility to determine why he did it," said Joseph Persichini, assistant director of the Washington FBI field office.

The Homeland Security Department said the shooting does not appear to have a connection to terrorism, according to a joint Homeland Security and FBI assessment, though Persichini characterized it as "domestic terrorism."

He said authorities have contacted or visited any people or places named in documents found in von Brunn's car. Authorities searched the red 2002 Hyundai for explosives, but found none.

Von Brunn was sentenced in 1983 for attempted armed kidnapping and other charges in his 1981 bid to seize Fed board members. A guard captured him outside the room where the board was meeting. He had a revolver, sawed-off shotgun and knife in a bag with him. He served more than six years in prison.

"The subject resides in my memory like old road-kill," he wrote of the capture. "What could have been a slam-bang victory turned into ignoble failure."

Von Brunn is a native of St. Louis, a World War II veteran who served in the Navy, worked in advertising in New York City and moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore in the late 1960s, where he stayed in advertising and tried to make a mark as an artist.

Public records show that in 2004 and 2005 he lived briefly in Hayden, Idaho, for years home to the Aryan Nations, a racist group run by neo-Nazi Richard Butler.

Civil rights groups were familiar with his history.

"We've been tracking this guy for decades," said Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which tracks hate crimes. "He thinks the Jews control the Federal Reserve, the banking system, that basically all Jews are evil."

At the White House, just blocks away from the museum, President Barack Obama said: "This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms. No American institution is more important to this effort than the Holocaust Museum, and no act of violence will diminish our determination to honor those who were lost by building a more peaceful and tolerant world."

Von Brunn's Internet writings say the Holocaust was a hoax. "At Auschwitz the 'Holocaust' myth became Reality, and Germany, cultural gem of the West, became a pariah among world nations," he wrote.

Officer Johns' mother says it is difficult to believe his death is real. The museum reopened today. Congress has passed a resolution condemning the shooting.

The men and women in uniform who guard our national resources -- our parks, museums, preserves, and monuments -- don't get many thanks for the work they do on our behalf.

Let us remember Stephen Johns and his family and his coworkers.

According to the Washington Post, Johns' coworkers were newer on the job than Johns, and working extra shifts, when they intervened in the rampage that killed him.

The security guards who returned fire when a white supremacist allegedly gunned down their colleague at the Holocaust museum Wednesday were a recently retired D.C. police officer and a former Marine, both of whom had worked at the museum only a few weeks.
The former D.C. police officer is Harry Weeks, who retired from the force in February after 27 years. The second guard is Jason "Mac" McCuiston, 30, a former Marine who had worked as a police officer outside Atlanta before returning to the Washington area and taking the job at the museum. Both men live in Charles County, about an hour outside Washington. In interviews this morning with The Washington Post, they said they had become fast friends since starting their jobs. Weeks has worked at the museum since early April; McCuiston started later that month. Neither of the guards were supposed to be working on Wednesday, when James W. von Brunn allegedly entered the museum and immediately began shooting, fatally injuring security guard Stephen T. Johns, 39. Both said they had accepted overtime assignments to help with the crowds and VIPs expected to be at the museum that evening for the opening of a new play about racial tolerance, written by the wife of former defense secretary William Cohen.

A gentle giant, Johns opened the door to the museum for a visitor Tuesday. The US Navy veteran who came through that door with Johns' assistant then opened fire with a .22 rifle.

FBI agent Ronald Farnsworth said in a court affidavit that von Brunn, driving a red 2002 Hyundai, double parked outside the museum entrance on 14th Street SW near the Mall at 12:44 p.m., got out of the car and walked toward the building, carrying the rifle at his side. Johns, a guard at the museum for six years, "was kind enough to open the door" for a person whom he apparently thought was a harmless elderly visitor, D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said at a news briefing yesterday.

Authorities who viewed the video did not say whether von Brunn was holding the rifle at his side in a way that concealed it from Johns.