THERE'LL BE MORE SEAN HANNITYS AFTER THIS SHOOTING, AND SOME WILL BE FROM THE "LIBERAL MEDIA"

(UPDATE: The suspect in custody is a man with a longstanding grudge against the paper -- more here. National politics is said not to be the motive.)


A gunman killed five people and injured others at the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, today. It's not clear what the motive was, and the suspect has made an effort to avoid being identified.

One law enforcement source says the suspect is a white male in his 20s and didn't have identification on him. The suspect is refusing to identify himself. The suspect damaged his fingertips in an effort to avoid identification, a law enforcement source tells CBS News.

Was this political terrorism? We don't know. Mass shootings happen in this country for other reasons -- personal grudges, or sexual harassment taken to a deadly extreme.

On the other hand, this was reported just a couple of days ago:

Milo Yiannopoulos has started issuing reporters threatening messages when asked to comment for stories.

“I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight,” the right-wing nationalist told Observer over text message, in response to a longer feature in development about an Upper East Side restaurant he is said to frequent.

When asked to elaborate on who specifically had upset him, Yiannopoulos explained that the statement was his “standard response to a request for comment.”

Yiannopoulos also sent the message to The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer....

There's no evidence that the shooter was left-wing, and the shooting is being celebrated in some right-wing online forums, but Sean Hannity has already blamed Maxine Waters:

Within seconds of learning Thursday about a shooting inside the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, Fox News host Sean Hannity laid blame at the feet of Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters.

“It's so sad that there are so many sick, demented, and evil people in this world,” Hannity told his radio listeners, in a clip first reported by Media Matters. “It really is sad. You know imagine you go to work and this is what you're dealing with today, some crazy person comes in... and I’m not turning this into a gun debate, I know that’s where the media will be in 30 seconds from now. That’s not it.”

“You know, as I’ve always said, I mean honestly—I’ve been saying now for days that something horrible was going to happen because of the rhetoric. Really, Maxine?” he asked, referring to Waters.

“You want people to create—‘call your friends, get in their faces,’ and Obama said that too. ‘Get in their faces, call them out, call your friends, get protesters, follow them into restaurants and shopping malls,’ and wherever else she said.”

We expect this from Hannity -- ideologue trolls gotta troll, right? But even if the culprit is a committed right-winger, I predict that some mainstream media commentators -- even some alleged liberals -- will join Hannity in laying some of the blame on Waters, because balance and bothsidesism must be maintained. Waters never urged violence, although it was widely reported that she did. She said,

Let's make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere.

She said nothing like what Yiannopoulos said. But to some media voices in the middle, she'll share the blame, even if the shooter despised her. The massacre will be the fault of everyone who's said an uncivil word about politics recently. Just watch.