Milo Protester Shoots Suspected Conservative, No Charges After He Points To ‘Racism’

From the Daily Caller:

A man who shot someone outside a speech at the University of Washington (UW) by conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos said his victim was a “white supremacist,” and police let the shooter go, even as the victim is hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. 

In what appears to be a case of mistaken identity by the “anti-racism” vigilante, the shooting victim later turned out to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders. 

The shooter turned himself in Friday night after police put out a lookout, but he was released without charges “after telling investigators he fired in self-defense during a campus protest,” the Seattle Times reported. 

The lookout described the suspect as an Asian man in his fifties. 

“One of the law-enforcement officials said the man who fired the gun claimed he had been assaulted before shooting the other man, whom he believed to be some type of white supremacist,” the report said. 

The shooter was then “released pending investigation,” it said. Police did not name the shooter. They said the 32-year-old victim had a “life-threatening gunshot wound to the abdomen.” 

The department said it “seized wooden dowels, homemade shields, flares, hammers, and other items from masked individuals” from protesters who were irate that a conservative was speaking on campus. Progressives have tried to physically prevent people from hearing his ideas on numerous campuses. 

“I have been very proud of our students who, to the best of my knowledge, acted with restraint,” the college president later said, even though video, news accounts and police demonstrate the prevalence of the violence at the event. 

After the shooting, police escorted Milo’s audience to safety by having them remove Donald Trump hats and other apparel that made them targets for violence on the college campus. Ironically, even if conservatives who wanted to hear Yiannapoulos talk were “white supremacists,” the shooter may have confused a fellow protester for a member of the alt-right. 

In a story headlined “Man shot at UW no racist, friends insist, despite shooter’s claim,” the Times reported that two friends of the victim said he “supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary, and … sports an anti-hate tattoo that consists of a black swastika surrounded by a red circle with a slash through it.”