Newsbusters' Noel Shepard is upset about the DHS report on right-wing extremism and can't figure out “why the Pittsburgh cop killings were used as an example of a potential rise in violence associated with rightwing extremism when it was a domestic dispute between a mother and son which flared out of control.”

I'm guessing it was because the killer, Richard Poplawski, was a right-wing nut who thought the government was going to take away his guns and got his news from a conspiracy website run by Alex Jones. And because he was stockpiling food and weapons prior to the shootings. And because he was worried about “the elite Jewish powers that be” engineering the country's economic collapse in order to “make for a power and asset grab” and worried about a “Zionist occupation.” Maybe all of that has something to do with it.

Meanwhile, Shepard's portrayal of the killings as “a domestic dispute between a mother and son which flared out of control” is pretty misleading; it suggests that the police officers walked in on the “dispute” and Poplawski shot them in the heat of the moment. That isn't what happened. Poplawski knew the police were coming, took the time to put on a bulletproof vest and to arm himself with an assault rifle, a pistol, and “a significant amount of ammunition.” Then he waited to ambush the police officers who responded to Poplowski's mother's call for help.

That's what Noel Shepard describes as a “domestic dispute” that “flared out of control.”