When a clothing store opened in Cedar Glen, Calif., in the summer of 2021, the owner hung a Pride flag at the entrance, her friends recalled. Whenever someone would tear down the flag, owner Laura Carleton would raise another one.
But after someone complained about the flag on Friday, the encounter turned deadly.
A man arrived at the store, Mag.pi, around 5 p.m. and criticized Carleton’s Pride flag before he shot her, according to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department. Carleton, 66, was pronounced dead at the scene.
The shooter, whom authorities have not publicly identified, died following “a lethal force encounter” with deputies after the shooting, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.
Community members have since rallied around Carleton’s store, placing Pride flags, flowers, candles and photos of Carleton in front of it. Matthew Clevenger of Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ said Carleton was a strong ally of the LGBTQ+ community.
“She was a fierce protector of everybody being who they wanted to be,” Clevenger told The Washington Post.
Carleton, who went by Lauri, began working in fashion as a teenager at her family’s business, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, according to Mag.pi’s website. After graduating from the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., Carleton worked at a retail store before joining Kenneth Cole in the 1980s. Carleton worked for the fashion company for more than 15 years as an executive.
In 2013, Carleton founded her clothing store, Mag.pi, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, Calif. She added a second store in Cedar Glen in 2021. While she built her career, Carleton married her husband and took pride in their blended family of nine children, her store’s website says.
Carleton was one of the largest donors to Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ+ and attended the organization’s Pride boat parade in June, Clevenger said. A section of Mag.pi was dedicated to rainbow-colored products, and she displayed rainbow candles by the cash register, he said.
Carleton helped create a culture in which the LGBTQ+ community felt accepted, Clevenger said. But some community members were still resistant, he added, and took down Mag.pi’s Pride flag multiple times.
After making “disparaging remarks” about the Pride flag on Friday, a man shot Carleton before fleeing, according to the sheriff’s department. He was holding a handgun when deputies found him on a nearby road, where he later died, officials said.
Contrary to what people believe, the US military has a fairly good cross sectional representation of the American populace. It is most certainly not right wing. I've known more than a few active duty military members and actually most were moderate to liberal on the political spectrum. And fairly intelligent.
Yeah, it’s a good cross section, but that still means there are a LOT of neo-Confederates in the military. A new civil war would be devastating.
So like, what happens when one side gets a hold of nukes?
That’s what I’m worried about and why I reject these calls from super-leftists for a new civil war. Do you want NYC, LA, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Portland nuked? Because that’s what happens when the hillbillies in Iowa and the Dakotas get their hands on the nukes that are stored there.
We’ve built the most powerful military the world has ever seen, along with the most powerful single weapon, and guys like the one I initially responded to just want to go ahead and shatter that with a civil war where the neo-Confederates WILL use that against Blue cities.
Why are you only rejecting the "super-leftists" and not the right wing who are carrying out evil acts and actually openly calling for civil war, and have been declaring we've been in a civil war for years?
Don't you dare use my words to try to serve some political agenda.
Man, reading comprehension is NOT your strong suit, is it?
I’m this thread, I was responding to another leftist calling for, as he put it, “R E V O L U T I O N”.
Of course I’m also against shitty neo-Confederates ALSO calling for a civil war, but you already knew that, didn’t you, you condescending little sealioning fuckhead? Instead, you need to turn this into yet more whatabiutism.
I don’t want a new civil war. It’s that easy. If one starts, I simply don’t see a way that it doesn’t turn devastating and nuclear. Calling for a revolution is dumb: our military will likely split, and then two sides of the same super powerful weaponry are fighting in my homeland. No thanks!
Judging from your post history, you're just lying. There's no evidence of you ever confronting the right with their behavior, only the left. Therefore the only conclusion is that you are biased. Judging from your responses in other threads, this is because you support the status quo and fear losing it. A status quo degenerating into fascism and genocide, of which you are enabling.
The left is not calling for civil war. They call for revolution which is fundamentally different. You're purposefully trying to lie to weasel out of admitting you are wrong. And you are very, very much in the wrong.
And you have the nerve to use my words to serve your agenda, which you still haven't apologized for by the way.
What are the steps to a revolution without a civil war?
And wow, you looked at all, what, 25 Lemmy posts I have? Wow. Genius fucking detective here.
I don’t support fascism, you stupid fuck, but because I ALSO don’t support just murdering all the Republicans in the country, somehow that means I’m for the status quo.
I have zero to apologize for. You’re a dumb fucking teenager who thinks that we should have a revolution that somehow doesn’t devolve into a civil war, as if you can just say some magic words and red states, which have been a problem for this country since its foundation with all of the shitty compromises that had to be made to even FORM the United States, are somehow going to say “Oh, shit, this kid on the internet is right! Let’s accept what the left wants now!”
We agree that American conservatives are shitty humans who SHOULDN’T have power, but one of us doesn’t want millions of people to die to take power from them.
If I could wave a magic wand and take all military assets out of Confederate states while also getting every non-fascist out and to the better part of the US, then expel those shithole states, I would. But there’s no magic. There’s no way forward without war until at least until the geriatrics in charge die of old age. Unfortunately, the right has also weaponized new media, so GenX and a lot of my fellow elder Millennials have fallen for their shit, but fortunately it’s far fucking fewer than the Boomers and the self-glossed Greatest Generation.
I’m not willing to start killing Republicans, but it sure as fuck sounds like you are. About as far as I’d recommend is to slap anyone at your middle school who listens to Andrew Tate or Joe Rohan.
I'm kinda new here, so I don't have much of a posting history, but let me set this up immediately.
Calls for a war of any kind in a nuclear-armed country is hella-damn dangerous. I don't care what kind of war it is. Civil War, Revolution, whatever, the bottom line is that even if we don't get mushroom clouds out of it, there are plenty of dirty bombs worth of nuclear material that could be employed by ideologically and hate-blinded assholes with an agenda and the unbending but quite wrong notion that they are not only RIGHT but are backed by their concept of goodness itself, the Almighty. And while I agree with the other poster that the entire US military isn't a seething pool of Neoconfederate fucksticks, that doesn't mean there aren't enough to appropriate and attempt to launch nuclear weapons against 'dins of sin' as they might call large, liberal cities.
I'm not going to go dig through some poster's posting history. You wanted DadWagonDriver to say he's against righties calling for war? You got it in the post you're replying to. Bam. There, he's on record now for saying the Neoconfederates should fuck off already. That should be good enough for you, and that should be enough to set you straight. Enough with the calls for naked warfare. The way to fix our country is in the ballot booth, not on the battlefield. War always has been and always will be the weapon of last resort. Be ready to protect yourself, but don't be looking for a fight. Why? Because wars rarely lead to the outcomes you want. Look at Iran when they overthrew the Shah. The Left then quibbled amongst themselves while the religious fanatics that were the Left's ally during the war stole the reins of power and then outlawed being a leftist, among many, many other things.
Oh yeah, and in closing? The battlefield of today is a thermonuclear battlefield, and the thing about Thermonuclear War is that it is a most strange game to play. The only winning move is not to play!
That is just a lie he told to disarm anybody reading and it clearly worked on you. He doesn't feel that way, otherwise he would have been doing it in the first place. You need to learn to read context and really think about other people's actions, approaches in debates, and what they're really saying.
Just because you agree with him doesn't make him or you right, and it doesn't change the fact he's manipulating you, is acting with ulterior motives and you're falling for it.
Heh. One of my favourite pasttimes is TTRPGing, and one of the settings I made to explore my disdain for the hard-right was a setting that featured the destruction of San Francisco by nuclear weapons by Conservatives. I could totally see a 'Christian States of America' nuking a liberal city...
Don't get me hard, the annihilattion of America AND a few degrees off off global warming? I like this.