Duke shot himself after firing at school board members during a meeting Tuesday. No one else was hurt. Before opening fire, he painted a red V on a wall and talked about his wife being fired.

Officials say she worked for the schools, but it wasn’t clear whether she resigned or had been fired or what her job was. She was apparently living with her mother in a nearby town. Van Etten says the shooting was not “spur of the moment.” Police also found anti-government paraphanelia in Duke’s home.

The entire school board shooting was captured on camera, as Melissa Bell explained:

In the chilling video captured by a WMBB News 13 camera, the board members try to reason with Duke and try to save one another from the gunman.

Ginger Littleton, one school board member, stayed in the room even after Duke ordered her to leave. In the video, she swings her purse at him, in an attempt to knock the gun out of Duke’s hand. She falls to the ground, and Duke stands over her but does not kill her. Another school board member comes back into the room at that time and asks the gunman to let Littleton leave, which Duke does.

At another point, Superintendent Bill Husfelt asks Duke to let everyone else go, saying Husfelt was likely the one responsible for firing Duke’s wife. Duke turns his gun on Husfelt and fires, but the bullets miss Husfelt.

Expect to see much more of this in the coming days, weeks, years.

IN ASCENCION, MEXICO — In this dusty farm town, an hour south of the U.S. border, more than 40 people were abducted – one a week – in the first nine months of the year. Then, on Sept. 21, the kidnappings stopped.

That was the day a gang of kidnappers with AK-47s burst into Lolo’s seafood restaurant and tried to abduct the 17-year-old cashier. A mob of enraged residents chased down two of the teenage attackers and lynched them in a cotton field on the edge of town. “We’re not proud of what happened,” said Georgina “Coca” Gonzalez, who helped form an armed citizens’ group after the incident to fight crime and prevent kidnappings. “But we’re united now – the whole town. And we all want justice.”

Across the country, and especially in northern Mexico, the breakdown of the legal system is giving way to a wave of vigilante violence. As Mexicans grow frustrated with the depredations of drug mafias and the corruption and incompetence of authorities, some are meting out punishment the old-fashioned way, taking an eye for eye, or in some cases, an eye for a tooth. Some of these retributive acts have happened spontaneously, such as the Ascencion “uprising,” as many here have celebrated it. But other killings in the past year appear to have been carried out by shadowy forces who have left bodies along highways or hanging from bridges with handwritten notes that advertise the dead as “extortionists” or “kidnappers. Late last year, authorities discovered four bodies, including an alleged Monterrey gangster, Hector Saldana, and his two brothers, in a car in Mexico City. The deaths were announced by Mauricio Fernandez, the new mayor of the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia, even before police identified the bodies.

Fernandez said he had nothing to do with the killings, although he boasted of his plans to create “cleansing teams” to rid his city of criminals.

“Sometimes coincidences happen in life. It’s better to see it that way,” Fernandez told a Monterrey newspaper.

People fighting back, can I get an AMEN.