We sometimes tend to forget these things happen along the northern border as well as the southern one, but here we are, with a reminder. Early Sunday morning, an as-yet unnamed gunman opened fire on a Customs & Border Patrol officer operating along the northern border in New Hampshire. The agent was reportedly uninjured. The shooter is in the hospital.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection says one of its agents returned fire at a person near the U.S.-Canada border in Pittsburg, New Hampshire, early Sunday morning.
CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott confirmed that the agent struck the individual, who has not been identified. The person was taken to a nearby hospital, and their prognosis is unclear.
"The FBI Boston Field Office will be investigating the incident. CBP is cooperating fully with investigators. For more information, we refer you to the FBI," Scott told WMUR.
The FBI says the shooting took place at roughly 1 a.m. on Sunday and that their preliminary investigation indicates the person opened fire on the agent first.
That's hardly surprising, given the rhetoric tossed so freely about by the left, painting CBP and ICE agents as everything evil under the sun. While we have no notion of who this shooter was (yet) or any idea what may have motivated him, it's not at all unlikely that this rhetoric may have set him off.
The FBI is now on the scene and investigating.
The FBI's Evidence Response Team arrived at the scene of the shooting shortly after the incident.
The shooting came the same morning that a man was shot and killed after allegedly breaching the secure perimeter of President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
It's enough to make one wonder how bad this could get.
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Ever since President Trump resumed office and started his crackdown on illegal immigration and border enforcement - and by "crackdown" I mean "enforcing the laws on the books, passed by Congress" - the left's hysterical pronouncements have become more and more hateful, more and more charged, and more and more intellectually challenged. While these people enjoy the same 1st Amendment rights as anyone else, many of them carefully trod the line between speech and incitement. Some step boldly over that line. And this kind of thing may well be the result of that.
In this instance, though, the motivations of the shooters have yet to be determined. We just don't know; he could have been just some random, unhinged whack-job. But if I had to bet on whether he was, at least in part, inspired by left-wing rantings about Nazis and the Gestapo, I know which way I'd bet. The real irony is that the left, on this and a host of other issues, are handing Republicans some of the best campaign talking points they have ever had.
The late, great Rush Limbaugh once said something to the effect of, if you want to harm liberals, the best way to do that is to let them talk. That would seem to apply this year.
This is a developing story. Stay tuned.
Editor’s Note: Democrats are fanning the flames and raising the rhetoric by comparing ICE to the Gestapo, fascists, and secret police.
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