Thai Mall Shooter’s Clothing Matches That Worn by Killer at Columbine High School Two Decades Ago

The first thing one notices in the video of the 14-year-old youth as he’s arrested at a mall at Bangkok after killing two people is the American flag on his baseball cap.The sight of the flag — along with his black shirt, tan trousers, and black boots — raises a question: Was this a copycat rampage inspired by the slayings at Columbine High School in April 1999? The young man’s outfit is almost a mirror image of the attire worn by Dylan Klebold in the Colorado shooting.The video shows the long-haired, bespectacled killer, who’d fashioned his weapon from a plastic gun that was supposed to fire only blanks, staring up from the floor with a vacant expression on his face as a cop is handcuffing him.Where did he get the gun, and how did he know how to turn it into a deadly weapon? Police arrested four persons on suspicion of selling, most likely online, weapons for firing blanks. Reuters reported that live-streaming equipment was discovered at the home of one of the four.The shooting wasn’t nearly as deadly as the one at Columbine, Colorado, in which a dozen students and one teacher died along with the two teenaged killers, who wound up turning their weapons on themselves. Still, as more video bears witness, panicked crowds fleeing the scene at Bangkok’s gleaming Siam Paragon Mall feared his rampage wasn’t over. The police — mindful of the country’s worst mass killing, the massacre by a police sergeant of 36 people in a day care center in northeast Thailand a year ago — took an hour before arresting him.Whatever inspired the shooter, the shooting had immediate international repercussions. One of the victims was a young Chinese woman with her family on a tourist visit, the other a woman from neighboring Myanmar who was working in Thailand.Global Times, a Chinese organ normally dedicated to anti-American propaganda, this time played it straight: “According to local media, the 34-year-old Chinese female surnamed Zhao was shot dead when walking through the Siam Paragon building,” the Global Times said. The paper quoted a Chinese eyewitness as having written “on China’s Twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo that the shooter began shooting at the female toilet on the second floor.”As after the Columbine massacre, the shooting at Bangkok was expected to renew debate about laws that are superficially intended to make it more difficult to buy and sell weapons. Despite regulations and licensing fees, guns are notoriously easy to buy on local black markets.The shooter, meanwhile, faces charges of murder, as well as the attempted murder of five who were wounded, plus illegal possession of his weapon. The police did not know what motivated the attack but planned to investigate a Royal Thai Army shooting range. Video showed the shooter practicing there under an instructor in military camouflage garb, according to the Bangkok Post. He is also said to have a history of mental illness.The prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, worried about the impact of random violence on tourism, which accounts for 18 percent of Thai GDP, visited the scene and assured reporters, “The situation is easing.”

Thai Mall Shooter’s Clothing Matches That Worn by Killer at Columbine High School Two Decades Ago

Thai Mall Shooter’s Clothing Matches That Worn by Killer at Columbine High School Two Decades Ago

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