Holocaust Museum Shooter Aiming at Weekly Standard?

The man who killed a security officer at the Holocaust Musuem yesterday may have had a different/additional target in mind, Ben Smith reports:

FBI agents visited the offices of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine yesterday after a shooting at the Holocaust Memorial Museum and told employees they’d found the magazine’s address.   A senior Standard staffer confirmed the visit but declined to discuss it in detail. An FBI spokeswoman, Katherine Schweit , also declined to comment on the investigation.

Two other sources said two FBI agents arrived shortly after 5:00 p.m. Thursday at the 17th Street offices of the magazine. They told staffers that they had found the address of the magazine on a piece of paper associated with the shooter, James von Brunn, and asked whether the Standard had received any threats.

The magazine is about a mile north of the Holocaust Museum, and there’s no other indication that von Brunn had targeted it. Von Brunn’s published rants included attacks on “neocons,” and the Standard has been at the heart of the neoconservative movement.

This would, as Smith notes, change the spin on the story a mite.  It certainly makes it weirder.

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Eric Florack says:

    Hmm.
    It is online, though, James, with several references I’ve seen to “neocon’ being code for Jew” in his vernacular.

    Still doesn’t make much sense, but at least it’s consistant.

  2. Furhead says:

    As someone noted in the other thread, von Brunn was anti-government (anti-everything, really), and many anti-goverment types were against the wars. The neocons tended to be on the other side of that argument.

    But honestly, this guy was crazy, and trying to work out all of his reasoning might be futile and pointless.

  3. PD Shaw says:

    One must always struggle with maintaining a respectable level of paranoia.

  4. Eric Florack says:

    A valid point, Furhead.
    Perhaps the trick here isn’t so much to understand it all as much as it is to identify the pattern.

  5. just me says:

    I think he was a nut. And the kind of nut that might do something, but without a 24/7 watch on the nut it is hard to say when or where, because they are a nut in multiple areas.

    I don’t think you can blame any one party or political movement on this kind of nuttery either.

  6. An Interested Party says:

    A very sensible response to some conservatives who are acting a little defense over all of this…

  7. pylon says:

    I suspect he had the address because he figured he’d be asked for an interview by Fred Barnes.