The early news reports
made Jeffrey Johnson out to be a deranged monster: After pumping
five bullets into the supervisor who’d fired him from his job at
the Empire State Building, Johnson supposedly went on a wild
shooting rampage out on 5th Avenue, firing randomly at
innocent bystanders, wounding nine before cops took him down using
their anti-terrorism training.
In this early,
cinematic version of events, the NYPD’s aggressive anti-terrorism
training paid off—who knows how many more people Jeffrey Johnson
would have shot and killed?
But as the day wore on,
the early heroic version of events started to give way to something
more complicated and disturbing—as so often happens with these
workplace shootings. The gunman, it turned out, didn’t go on a wild
shooting spree; all of his bullets were fired into one target, his
former boss who downsized him; it was the NYPD who hit the
bystanders while trying to get the gunman, who happened to be
standing right next to their faces, in what appears to have been a
conscious decision to commit suicide-by-cop.
Despite all the Jack
Bauer anti-terror training the two cops supposedly received, they
couldn’t hit the side of a skyscraper if their lives depended on
it—let alone the front of a human being practically pressing his
face into the barrels of their guns. In fact the “graphic” CCTV
video looks like some desperate middle-aged schlub trying to get
himself killed by Mr. Magoo and Magoo’s twin, who empty their
handgun clips on every living creature except for the suicidal
schlub with the .45 in his hand, doing a tapioca dance right in
front of their faces…
http://exiledonline.com/going-postal-at-the-empire-state-building-jokers-joshua-foust-revenge-of-the-nerds/
