Sure I use labels. When they're accurate.

First of all, the profilers were wrong.

Dr. Michael Welner, a forensic psychiatrist at New York University Medical Center, described the shooter as "white, male, single, 20s-30s . . . (with a) longtime fascination with hunting and shooting."



Chris Whitcomb, former FBI hostage rescue team member, told NBC's Katie Couric that "statistically, it's going to be a white male, and it's going to be a young person, young 20s emotionally, but also because that's the age most likely statistically somebody's going to commit a crime like this."

Brian Levin, the director of something called the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism in San Bernardino, Calif., stated confidently that the killer "is kind of a wallpaper white male, a disenfranchised, disrespected man who's getting back at society. That's one of the reasons he's kept his distance from inner D.C., where he might lose his cover."



Republicans, one and all, I'm sure. Especially the guy from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

You tell me which end of the political spectrum paints anyone with a gun as a crazed right-wing white lunatic, much less anyone who starts plugging people at random.

So prevalent was this stereotype, that it may actually have aided the culprits in avoiding capture.

...The blue Caprice discovered today was believed to have been approached in Baltimore by police who found Muhammad sleeping on Oct. 8, the day after a 13-year-old boy in Bowie was wounded as the eighth victim of the sniper, the sources said.



The car was spotted in a parking lot off 28th Street, near the exit ramp to Interstate 83. Muhammad was allowed to go, although his name was put into an information data bank in Baltimore, the sources said.

"Everyone was looking for a white car with white people," said one high-ranking police source. Muhammad and Malvo are black males.



If true, the dead on the altar of the stereotyped white killer are:

October 10: Dean Harold Myers, 53, killed filling gas tank near Manassas, Va.

October 11: Kenneth H. Bridges, 53, killed filling gas tank near Fredericksburg, Va.

October 14: Linda Franklin, 47, killed outside a store in Falls Church, Va.

October 22: Conrad Johnson, a 35-year-old bus driver, killed in Silver Spring, Md.

And this is just the one confirmed screwup. I'd bet hard money these two guys drove right through a number of earlier roadblocks.

And what really bugs me is the stereotype doesn't even hold up statistically:

...Statistics from past cases apparently threw many profilers off. According to a database compiled by James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and one of the most widely quoted profilers, 55 percent of sniper killers are white. The average age is 26, and 91 percent are under 40.

Threw them off? Did they even LOOK at that number?

55 percent white. That means 45 percent non-white, almost double the portion of nonwhites than is represented in the general population as a whole (25 percent non-white.) Or to put it more bluntly, going solely by statistics, the odds were 50-50 the killer was not white.

The whole idea of the right wing militia nut as the most overwhelmingly likely suspect has, and never had, a basis in reality, but reflects the wishful thinking of a certain number of people. And if you can somehow entertain the idea that it's wishful thinking on the part of conservatives, more power to you.