Fox News and right-wing media have been lying to their listeners -- reporting that the White House shooter, Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, was part of the Occupy DC protest.
In trying to determine why he recently traveled to the nation’s capital from the western part of the country, investigators searched the Occupy D.C. campground near the White House but have found no connection between him and the Occupy protesters, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the case.
They're utterly desperate to project their own eliminationist gun-toting tendencies onto a crowd that's made up of mostly left-wing pacifist types.
Fox Nation ran the headline: "Man Linked to 'Occupy' Protest Charged With Attempted Assassination of Obama." However, the only "link" they found was that Ortega-Hernandez blended into the crowd so he wouldn't be immediately noticed. That's not a link -- a link is defined as a bond, connection or tie. In other words, an ideological supporter, activist and participant in the Occupy protest. The shooter was none of those things.
Scanning right-wing talk radio, nearly every host has been scaring his or her audience by suggesting that Occupy Wall Street is becoming a violent uprising. Yesterday, host Rusty Humphries compared the Occupy movement to Nazi stormtroopers.
Meanwhile, it's not a stretch to note that right-wing gun check loopholes likely allowed Ortega-Hernandez to buy an AK-47 assault rifle in the first place. Reporting has indicated that the assassin has severe psychological disorders which may or may not have been diagnosed. If his mental health was ever recorded, it should have been posted to the gun check database and, during a background check, Ortega-Hernandez would never have been allowed to buy a gun. Unfortunately, states are failing to report mental health records to the gun check system. Ortega-Hernandez might have slipped through the loophole. Or he might have purchased the firearm at a gun show where dealers don't have to conduct background checks.
Also, Ortega-Hernandez's conspiracy theory about President Obama wanting to implant children with microchips signifying the "mark of the beast" is an extreme far-right Alex Jones style theory. Therefore, according to the shooter, President Obama is The Beast.
Yeah, that sounds like a liberal.
(This post is written as part of the Media Matters Gun Facts fellowship. The purpose of the fellowship is to further Media Matters’ mission to comprehensively monitor, analyze, and correct conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. Some of the worst misinformation occurs around the issue of guns, gun violence, and extremism, the fellowship program is designed to fight this misinformation with facts.)