According to a story at the Examiner, attempted mass shooter Floyd Lee Corkins told the FBI he picked his targets off the Souther Poverty Law Center website:
He told the FBI that he wanted to kill anti-gay targets and went to the law center’s website for ideas. At a court hearing where his comments to the
FBI were revealed, he said that he intended to “kill as many as possible
and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the
guard.”
In August 2012, Corkins targeted the Family Research Council offices in Washington DC. He shot the group’s security guard in the arm before the guard managed to disarm him. At the time, Corkins had the names and addresses of “four socially conservative organizations” on him.
It’s impossible not to notice that this is precisely what many on the left accused Sarah Palin of doing in January 2011 after Jared Loughner shot Rep. Giffords and several bystanders in a Tucson parking lot. At the time, the left claimed Palin’s district map featuring crosshairs might have given Loughner ideas. No connection between the map and the shooting was ever found. Indeed, it turned out Loughner had been obsessed with Giffords before Palin’s map even existed.
Now that anti-right, anti-hate SPLC is implicated in providing targets for a politically motivated mass shooter will the national media turn on the SPLC the way they did on Sarah Palin? Is it time for a national conversation about the dangers of left-wing extremism?