Apparently, all the students, faculty, and staff were warned to stay away from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus this morning. I didn’t hear about it until all the danger had passed. Some fool named Joseph Rongstad threatened to go on a rampage and start killing students.
The notice did not offer any specifics about the threat or how it was communicated, but Olson told the Star Tribune that the suspect went on an hours long threat-filled rant on his landscape company’s Facebook page. Some of the postings included a specific family as an intended target.
“Here we go AMERICA,” the last of his many postings read. “I am heading out … to the U of M Minneapolis mn to start killing kids. … if I can’t get the USA military to [come] talk to me face to face then I’m going for it to try defend your freedom America. … I may have been played … on this brain reading technology but today I find out for sure.”
The posting then warned, “IM COMING FOR YA KIDS AND ITS GOING TO GET BLOODY.”
A previous posting from the man also made a threat against Iranian students, saying, “If this government don’t have the total lock down of ALL university’s of Minnesota by this morning sun up watch out PARENTS … Kids will die for real amongst them u of m students.”
Other postings from the man made explicit threats to Sheriff Olson, and Chippewa County judges Thomas Van Hon and Keith Helgeson. In 2016, Van Hon ordered the man civilly committed for six months as mentally ill and chemically dependent.
What I find a bit irritating about this is that the was in Watson, MN which is about an hour away from Morris, while the Twin Cities campus is almost 3 hours away, and we didn’t get an email notification until after Rongstad was confined and we were all out of danger. He did specifically mention the Minneapolis branch, but also threatened “ALL university’s of Minnesota” and we were the closest potential target. We got notified well after the SWAT teams had shut down the town of Watson for this ranting kook.
I’m just saying it would be nice if we all got the warning, not just the big city campus.
That alert definitely should have gone to all campuses. It’s a pretty basic tactic to announce that you’re going to attack one target, then go attack somewhere else while the cops are distracted.
America is fucked. It’s free, but it’s also so incredibly fucked up.
@ ^ gijoel : Free? When you have daily gun massacres? Mass killings by people armed with weapons of war and have to take precautions even in schools against murderous people with intent to kill and nothing is being done to change this not even basic steps to put sensible gun control measures in place. That’s really freedom?
What does freedom even mean here?
Your right / freedom to
swing your fist around in the airown firearmsstops at my nosestops at the point where gun massacres are a daily event.Maybe the “brain reading technology” showed that Rongstad didn’t even realize the Morris campus existed.
It looks like Mr. Wannabe shooter lives in the middle of nowhere.
Watson only has 205 people.
Chippewa County isn’t much more populated.
I can’t imagine that they have much in the way of Special Weapons And Tactics squads.
This news article adds a few more details.
This guy has a long history of delusional violence and erratic behavior.
The alert should have been sent university system wide.
If it’s good enough of a warning system for the well armed DoD, it’s good enough for unarmed universities.
No other country gives you so much freedom to choose which style of gun violence will kill you.
raven @ 6, “In 2016, Van Hon ordered Rongstad civilly committed for six months as mentally ill and chemically dependent.”, meaning on two counts, he’s federally and usually at state level prohibited from possessing firearms.
Guess we need another law to ignore, if he’s still armed – illegally.
He was elected mayor?!
You guys need to overhaul your electoral process and find better community responses to mental health problems other than sticking people in jail.
Thank GOD he was an American, and not a terrorist….
Our university has one of those warning systems, and I opted out of it.
It just gets flooded with useless garbage “suburban student spotted unhoused individual, felt threatened” “trashcan outside dormitories caught on fire” “police activity on block X of Y street” and son on. Used to get at least half a dozen of them a day – when the incident was reported, when it was still happening, and when it was over.
Supposedly we also got them for active shooter events, gas leaks, an other legitimate dangers, but by the time those events happened, I had opted out, because I was tired of all the useless “boy who cried wolf” warnings.
:/
DanDar @ 10, agreed, however overhauling the electoral system requires those who have and are benefiting from that system to reform it. And basically, endangering their own careers, so that’s not going to happen.
For the latter, we were, back in the 1970’s reforming our mental health care system. Alas, Saint Reagan came along and cut all funding for the promised community based mental health care and the state hospitals closed. This literally resulted in the mentally ill being ejected from closing facilities onto US city streets and treated as criminals and general undesirables, pushing them from place to place in the cities until having symptomatic mental health issues was simply criminalized and punished with prison.
Just another fine example of two fine American traits, excelling in mediocrity and doing the right thing only after exhausting every other possibility and we’re still hardly at work on the latter.
But you want to defund the police, with no plan on how to fight domestic or foregoing, nut jobs.
Blank statements without a plan tend to bit the far left and the far right in the armpits
@#14 –
that’s domestic or foreign
Forgive me for getting sidetracked, but I really want to know what that lake has to say on the matter.
wolja@14:
You could have spent all of 30 seconds to figure out what “Defund the Police” means instead of spraying your ignorance everywhere. Here, I’ll give you the opening paragraph from Ye Pffft! of All Knowledge for free, with some important bits in bold:
Seems like supporters of defunding have already thought of situations like this, and aren’t just calling for getting rid of the police and not replacing them with something else. Wild!
Apostrophe abuse of that severity should attract a custodial sentence in itself!
So, don’t tell me, let me guess: this was a white dude who was ranting about starting a mass shooting…?
Rushing to enter comments they think will own the so-called “far left” without fact or spell checking tends to “bit” the radical centrists in the armpits.
@2 Sorry I should have put the /s tag in it, but I was really tired when I wrote it. There’s nothing you have said that I disagree with. There’s a toxic cult of liberty in America that masks complete avarice with a concern for freedom.
I see this guy’s problem here.
He doesn’t know the difference between corpses and Zombies.
A corpse isn’t after anyone. They don’t do anything.
A corpse that is walking around is a…Zombie.
You have to watch out for Zombies.
Watson only has 205 people.
I’m surprised it even has a bar and a Lutheran church, both of which he has trashed at one time or another.
I’ll bet he’s made the place a really “interesting” place to live for the last 5 or 10 years.
@16 Lac qui Parle wants us to respect the rich woods around it.
It would also be nice if nutters couldn’t get such easy access to guns.
@lochaber
Our campus has one of those systems, but the campus PD maintains tight control over it, so we don’t get any of the ‘Nextdoor’ type nonsense. But the reason we have it is that in 2022 a disgruntled ex-grad student who was supposed to be banned from campus walked into his old department and shot the Department head, who was his old graduate adviser.
That lead to the chief of campus police resigning, the UA settling a multimillion dollar wrongful death suit brought by the professors family, and a host of new security measures across campus.
The whole incident was a shitshow on the part of Campus administration https://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/010924_meixner_settlement/family-slain-ua-prof-meixner-settles-lawsuit-vs-university/
This isn’t even the first shooting like this on campus…in 2002 a failing nursong student killed three professors, including one in the classroom where he an a bunch of other students were taking an exam https://news.arizona.edu/story/shooting-leaves-three-faculty-suspect-dead
To this day the nursing college bans non-transparent backpacks and bags…
But:
“In 2021, he was convicted of burglary for driving a tractor through the narthex of a Lutheran church in Watson, where he was elected mayor in 2012. ” so he wasn’t all bad.
@14-15. wolja : “But you want to defund the police, with no plan on how to fight domestic or foregoing, nut jobs. Blank statements without a plan tend to bit the far left and the far right in the armpits.”
Seconding what #17 Nes wrote above but also questuion for you – who exactly is “far Left” here and what actual power do they have?
Do you think the Black Lives Matter movement is “far left” for just wanting to have African-American lives respected and noty have them murdered by the cops?
Relatively speaking, post the McCarthy era political purge and genuine witch / commie hunt the USA barely has a left wing of politics at all let alone much of a far left one. In most of the world and under most reasonable classifications, Obama, HRC and Biden would be centre right wing and even Bernie Sanders and the squad would be at most centre left-ish not “far left.”
I will agree that particular slogan wasn’t worded ideally or overly helpful. Reduce excessive police spending would be more accurate and I don’t think many actually expected all funding to police to go. Just, y’know not giving them surplus military grade toys and funding way out of proportion to other funding that could better address crime rates by tackling the root causes of crime. (Again see #17 Nes) Unreasonable? Really?
Yep, if the “left” in the US became any less left you would have to rewrite political axis polls to entirely remove both boxes from the “left” and re-shade half of the “right” side of the diagram to invent a new left. Its quite mad. I have no idea what percentage of the politicians would edge into the existing authoritarian/libertarian left boxes, but its probably 10% of the number of the general population that does, and the general population probably has… 20%, being generous, that do, with almost 0% even coming close to hitting the corners.
As an example, I just did a quick test before posting this and got “Progressive Left”, which the freaking poll says is only 6% of the US population. 6%, and I do not consider myself to be necessarily “far left” compared to other people I know. The idea that 6% of the population, who, unlike a similarly small percentage of right wing religious ideologs, has no money, no real power, doesn’t own most corporations, and has almost no one in political office is simultaneously “powerful enough to change US policy and undermine sensible legislation, or what ever the F you imagine is going on Wolja is just… hilarious. I could only wish this held the slightest scrap of truth to it.
!4-15&27
…
[blockquote]Seems like supporters of defunding have already thought of situations like this, and aren’t just calling for getting rid of the police and not replacing them with something else. Wild![/blockquote]
My point in this that the slogan is a good way to engage your small section of the populace while refusing to acknowledge other viewpoints may have some validity. The rabid barking of the MAGA crowd is mirrored in the far left crowd demanding defunding in extremist.
Black lives matter, for eg, is an incredibly important movement but the message that comes across to those not quite as left of centre is that all police actions are driven by racism. I live in a country where gun violence isn’t as big of a thing but the infection from the far right in the US has fed fundamentalist xtian violence as the “Christians” successfully sell the idea they are being forced from power by the others. That’s just plain dumb.
Every facet of society has it’s far right and far left. The how far left and right depends on the spectrum your but of society is in. As an example from Australia from this year. We finally have a semi progressive Govt after a decade of far right attacks on the “woke”. In 2022 when the current Govt was elected in an election that effectively reduced the “conservatives” to the lunatic fringe I felt hope. I voted for the Green party in the senate to hopefully get a house of review where negotiation was mandated.
This year the Greens have started pandering to the far left of their already quite left party and are demanding all gas and coal mining stops NOW. Instead of forcing compromise by negotiating they resemble the far right in parrotting things that just can’t work immediately.
They also stopped any new low income housing happening by demanding a rent freeze in a climate of rising interest rates therefore costs. Their posturing allowed the sellers of stupid to successfully bleat the “Greens are after your money” meaning the reality of politics is the Govt couldn’t negotiate as hard.
Don’t get me started on the “Voice” referendum where the forces of stoopid won through FUD.
Selling stoopid is much easier than selling fact.
@Kagehi #28 I know 1984 is a most misunderstood book but the fact is the “all pigs are equal” trope positing that at the extremes the difference between Stalin and the equivalent demagogue on the extreme right is non existent. They both parrot tripe aimed at making their supporters happy while refusing to negotiate. So for eg the warring in the democrat party where the right and the left yell at each other rather than talking allows the Orange headed nut job and his ilk to pander to the fearful and win back congress in one term is disturbing ,
Australian Labour, the Govt, is a centre right party with ard left and hard right flanks. The PM has to fight his own party, the “conservatives” and the Greens to get anything done, Not surprisingly not much happens.
Look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs Minchin etc in the democrats. They take diametrically opposing positions and nothing of substance happens.
I have a theory of why the far right has the power but can’t prove it. Basically the flower power movement in the 60’s set the world up for the next reactionary swing to the right. Someone or a group, dunno who, decided the best way to fight flower power was to take over talk radio and move the less educated workers to the right by using fear campaigns, reds under the bed etc. This then resulted in the *Labour” movements traditional base, those very same lower socio economic woking class” to support the group saying if you vote for them your job will go to Asia, The group pushing those claims were in the process of moving the jobs to Asia in pursuit of profit.