Man Allegedly Opens Fire Because Mother and Son Weren't Social Distancing, Police Say
By Christine Favocci
Published July 31, 2020 at 11:58am
The virtue signaling, intolerance for other viewpoints and general insanity in our culture mostly driven by the left has somehow centered around the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s coronavirus safety recommendations, making violence against those who refuse to comply almost a commonplace occurrence.
Douglas Marks, emboldened by government edict and perhaps touched by a bit of mental illness (increasingly difficult to assess in today’s culture) allegedly opened fire on a mother and son because they were not socially distancing at a Miami Beach hotel Monday, according to USA Today.
The woman, identified by the Miami Herald as Veronica Pena, and her family had checked into Crystal Beach Suites Hotel earlier that day. Pena took her son down to the lobby to wait for her boyfriend.
As the pair stood near an elevator, Marks allegedly confronted them for not practicing social distancing, although reports don’t specify whether Pena and her son were wearing masks.
“You all need to leave,” Marks said, according to a police report. “You all aren’t social distancing.”
Pena and her son instead moved to a lobby couch, but recounted she overheard the suspect say, “Let me take care of them, I have two people not following directions.”
It was then that Marks grabbed a gun, and, claiming that someone was following him, told the front desk to call 911 and fired four “warning shots” in the lobby, according to his statements to police, WPLG-TV reported.
Police reported that Marks “continued to scream commands to social distance while holding the firearm and subsequently fired several shots.”
“The guy came and started shooting,” a witness told WSVN-TV. “The son and the mom were, like, crying, and they were scared.”
“‘Bam! Bam!’ Real loud, loud. I just grabbed everybody and put them on the floor,” Elio Rodriguez, another witness who was staying at the hotel with his family, told the outlet.
No one was injured, and Marks, who confessed to the crime, was taken into police custody on several weapons and aggravated assault charges.
Video footage obtained by WPLG showed part of the arrest with Marks wearing a surgical mask and lying on the floor of the lobby in police handcuffs.
The lobby’s marble floor, dotted with bullet holes, revealed the gravity of the threat that the man and his weapon posed.
Although following the CDC recommendations for stopping the spread of COVID-19 is typically a wise thing to do, failing to do so should not be punishable by a bullet.
But Marks is not alone in allegedly treating those who don’t wish to follow the guidelines with contempt and violence.
A mother and her children were recently bullied for not wearing masks, while others have been maced or publicly humiliated for not complying, even as experts have previously disagreed on whether healthy people need to wear them.
As it is, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has upped the ante by recommending wearing face shields or goggles as well, meaning that all of the face mask-monitoring “Karens” of the world will soon be shaming people who dare leave the house with naked eyeballs.
These requirements and some people’s enthusiasm for enforcing them are dividing America like never before, and creating the unintended consequences of the burdensome recommendations being politicized and weaponized by people with another agenda.
Even so, the more serious issue is the mentality that drives these entitled, finger-wagging — and sometimes weapon-toting — individuals. They are often a frightening parody of the worst kind of religious crusading that, ironically, the atheistic left so often breathlessly warn about whenever religious people stand up for their freedoms.
When folks think they have the moral high ground and that anyone not espousing their viewpoint is evil and therefore must be vanquished, they can easily justify anti-social and violent behavior towards other humans.
This is what happens to a society when religious belief is edged out, creating a vacuum that inevitably gets filled by whatever ideology becomes sacrosanct.
While religious ideas and practices are often tempered by a fundamental respect for others that their faith provides, the atheistic alternative dangerously follows the leftists’ views of the collective over the individual, meaning that lashing out violently is an acceptable remedy since just about anything or anyone can be sacrificed for the common good while stopping the spread of COVID- 19.
Although the atheistic left often cast religion as the culprit for violence and tyranny, it is instead the combination of fundamentalist morality divorced from the love of neighbor that brings out the worst in humanity, whether it is knocking down buildings or shooting at people for not maintaining the proper social distance.
Who will these folks — unmoored from religion, living in the tinderbox of coronavirus-induced poverty, anxiety and insanity — target next?