Tag: Gun Issues

  • 5 Found Shot in French Alps

    NOTE:  This is a story from 09/05/2012 that was stuck in the “draft” folder.  Still as timely as ever.

    French authorities say five people, including a teenage girl, have been shot in a forest in the Alps. All five were initially reported to be dead. The teenage victim is now reported to be in critical condition in a hospital, according to a local prosecutor.

    An official with the regional administration for the Haute-Savoie region says three of the bodies were found in a BMW registered in Britain.

    The Sipa news agency says the girl was found alive with bullet wounds on a forest road.

    It happened in a forest near Chevaline, near Annecy lake, in Haute-Savoie.

    The initial reports said a cyclist discovered the girl, the three bodies in the car and a fourth body, of a cyclist lying nearby.

    The identity of the victims is unclear. The British Foreign Office says it is aware of reports of the incident and is looking into it.

    via Fox New York.

    Wait a minute… how is that possible?  I mean, guns are just about completely outlawed in Europe (the Swiss being the notable exception.)

    It appears that no matter how strict the gun laws become there will always be some nut who’s willing to break the “Gun Control” law.   i.e.  to rob or kill.

  • Obama Voters’ Gun Problem

    Obama voters are killing each other

    Chicago’s murder numbers have hit that magic 500. Baltimore’s murder toll has passed 200. In Philly, it’s up to 324, the highest since 2007. In Detroit, it’s approaching 400, another record. In New Orleans, it’s almost at 200. New York City is down to 414 from 508. In Los Angeles, it’s over 500. In St. Louis it’s 113 and 130 in Oakland. It’s 121 in Memphis and 76 in Birmingham.  …

    … It isn’t the bitter gun-and-bible clingers in McCain and Romney territory who are racking up a more horrifying annual kill rate than Al Qaeda; it’s Obama’s own voting base.Chicago, where Obama delivered his victory speech, has homicide numbers that match all of Japan and are higher than Spain, Poland and pre-war Syria. If Chicago gets any worse, it will find itself passing the number of murders for the entire country of Canada.

    Chicago’s murder rate of 15.65 per 100,000 people looks nothing like the American 4.2 rate, the Midwestern 4.5 or the Illinois’ 5.6 rates, but it does look like the murder rates in failed countries like Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe. To achieve Chicago’s murder rate, African countries usually have to experience a bloody genocidal civil war or decades of tyranny.

    But Chicago isn’t even all that unique. Or the worst case scenario. That would be New Orleans which at an incredible 72.8 murder rate is ten times higher than the national average. If New Orleans were a country, it would have the 2nd highest murder rate in the world, beating out El Salvador.

    Louisiana went red for Romney 58 to 40, but Orleans Parish went blue for Obama 80 to 17.

    St. Louis has a murder rate just a little lower than Belize. Baltimore has a worse murder rate than South Africa and Detroit has a worse murder rate than Colombia. Obama won both St. Louis and Baltimore by comfortable margins. He won Detroit’s Wayne County 73 to 26.

    Homicide rates like these show that something is broken, but it isn’t broken among the Romney voters rushing to stock up on assault rifles every time Obama begins threatening their right to buy them; it’s broken among Obama’s base.  …

    Voting for Obama does not make people innately homicidal. Just look at Seattle which is agonizing over its 26 murders. That’s about the same number of murders as East St. Louis which has only 27,000 people to Seattle’s 620,000.So what is happening in Chicago to drive it to the gates of hell ahead of Zimbabwe and Rwanda?

    A breakdown of the Chicago killing fields shows that 83% of those murdered in Chicago last year had criminal records. In Philly, it’s 75%. In Milwaukee it’s 77% percent. In New Orleans, it’s 64%. In Baltimore, it’s 91%. Many were felons who had served time. And as many as 80% of the homicides were gang related.

    Chicago’s problem isn’t guns; it’s gangs. Gun control efforts in Chicago or any other major city are doomed because gangs represent organized crime networks which stretch down to Mexico, and trying to cut off their gun supply will be as effective as trying to cut off their drug supply.

    America’s murder rate isn’t the work of the suburban and rural homeowners who shop for guns at sporting goods stores and at gun shows, and whom news shows profile after every shooting, but by the gangs embedded in the urban areas controlled by the Democratic machine. The gangs who drive up America’s murder rate look nothing like the occasional mentally ill suburban white kid who goes off his medication and decides to shoot up a school. Lanza, like most serial killers, is a media aberration, not the norm.

    via Front Page Magazine.

    A fine read as to what’s really happening on the streets.

    The fact of the matter remains that Democrats cannot control their own.  They are crime ridden to the core; they do not believe in the rule of law.  Obama himself simply ignores laws he doesn’t like.

    Crazy.

     

     

  • Run, Hide, Fight — Have an Active Shooter Plan

    From the Alabama Dept. of Homeland Security.

    [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ESNae7OoyM]

  • Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control

    The U.K. and Australia:

    A media frenzy coupled with an emotional campaign by parents of Dunblane resulted in the Firearms Act of 1998, which instituted a nearly complete ban on handguns. Owners of pistols were required to turn them in. The penalty for illegal possession of a pistol is up to 10 years in prison.

    The results have not been what proponents of the act wanted. Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is. Armed street gangs have some British police carrying guns for the first time. Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself.

    Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens who have come into the possession of a firearm, even accidentally, have been harshly treated. In 2009 a former soldier, Paul Clarke, found a bag in his garden containing a shotgun. He brought it to the police station and was immediately handcuffed and charged with possession of the gun. At his trial the judge noted: “In law there is no dispute that Mr. Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.” Mr. Clarke was sentenced to five years in prison. A public outcry eventually won his release.

    In November of this year, Danny Nightingale, member of a British special forces unit in Iraq and Afghanistan, was sentenced to 18 months in military prison for possession of a pistol and ammunition. Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action. Mr. Nightingale pleaded guilty to avoid a five-year sentence and was in prison until an appeal and public outcry freed him on Nov. 29.

    -=-=-=-

    With new Prime Minister John Howard in the lead, Australia passed the National Firearms Agreement, banning all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns and imposing a more restrictive licensing system on other firearms. The government also launched a forced buyback scheme to remove thousands of firearms from private hands. Between Oct. 1, 1996, and Sept. 30, 1997, the government purchased and destroyed more than 631,000 of the banned guns at a cost of $500 million.

    To what end? While there has been much controversy over the result of the law and buyback, Peter Reuter and Jenny Mouzos, in a 2003 study published by the Brookings Institution, found homicides “continued a modest decline” since 1997. They concluded that the impact of the National Firearms Agreement was “relatively small,” with the daily rate of firearms homicides declining 3.2%.

    According to their study, the use of handguns rather than long guns (rifles and shotguns) went up sharply, but only one out of 117 gun homicides in the two years following the 1996 National Firearms Agreement used a registered gun. Suicides with firearms went down but suicides by other means went up. They reported “a modest reduction in the severity” of massacres (four or more indiscriminate homicides) in the five years since the government weapons buyback. These involved knives, gas and arson rather than firearms.

    In 2008, the Australian Institute of Criminology reported a decrease of 9% in homicides and a one-third decrease in armed robbery since the 1990s, but an increase of over 40% in assaults and 20% in sexual assaults.

    via WSJ.com.

    Gun “control” laws in the U.K. and Australia have not made those people safer.  It’s an illusion.  When emotion gets ahead of reason people sacrifice liberty  for the illusion of security — a la TSA — and get neither.

  • UK Doctors’ Called For Kitchen Knife Ban

    Yes, seriously.

    A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase – and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

    They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

    The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

    The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

    via BBC NEWS.

    Who’s crazy now?

    Anti-Gun laws in the UK have been an epic fail.

    Anti-Gun laws in Chicago have been an epic fail.

    Anti-Gun laws everywhere have been a failure.

    Yet the left continues to try to take away guns from honest law abiding citizens.  It’s never going to work.  It’s never worked.

     

  • 446 School Age Children Shot in Chicago

    MSM Silent:

    In Chicago, there have been 446 school age children shot in leftist utopia run by Rahm Emanuel and that produced Obama, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, etc. 62 school aged children have actually been killed by crazed nuts in Chicago so far this year with almost two weeks to go. So why isn’t this news worthy? Is it because it would embarrass those anti second amendment nuts who brag about Chicago’s tough gun laws? Is it because most of the kids who were shot and killed were minorities? Or is it because the corrupt media doesn’t want to show Chicago in a bad light? Amazingly, no Obama crocodile tears either.

    For those of you too dense to get the point of this post, it’s to make the point about gun laws. No matter how tough the gun laws are, the crazed, nut jobs will find a way to get them and if they so chose, use them. No draconian law can stop this, no matter how well intentioned the law is, or if it’s just about leftists grabbing power from citizens and taking away their constitutional rights.

    via Fire Andrea Mitchell!.

    I raised this very issue right after the Newton tragedy.  This guy poked around and found the numbers at Crime in Chicago (an excellent source of what’s really going on in the Second City.)  I found the story at Second City Cop (which you should be reading everyday.)

     

  • Getting Serious About School Security

    Treat like a fire.

    “Come with me to the library at Columbine High School,” Grossman said. “The teacher in the library at Columbine High School spent her professional lifetime preparing for a fire, and we can all agree if there had been a fire in that library, that teacher would have instinctively, reflexively known what to do.

    “But the thing most likely to kill her kids — the thing hundreds of times more likely to kill her kids, the teacher didn’t have a clue what to do. She should have put those kids in the librarian’s office but she didn’t know that. So she did the worst thing possible — she tried to secure her kids in an un-securable location. She told the kids to hide in the library — a library that has plate glass windows for walls. It’s an aquarium, it’s a fish bowl. She told the kids to hide in a fishbowl. What did those killers see? They saw targets. They saw fish in a fish bowl.”

    Grossman said that if the school administrators at Columbine had spent a fraction of the money they’d spent preparing for fire doing lockdown drills and talking with local law enforcers about the violent dangers they face, the outcome that day may have been different.

    via Police One.

    This is taken from the middle of an excellent article.  It starts with the historical problem and walks you through a simple solution.

    Common sense for everyone, and every school.

  • Gun Background Checks Jump in Illinois

    Illinois State Police information provided to The Associated Press shows that 12,557 checks were conducted through the state’s Firearms Transfer Inquiry Program between Friday and Tuesday. There were 6,870 checks during she same period a year earlier.

    via Chicago Tribune.

    Jump?  Nearly double!

  • Pearl High School Shooting: Oct. 1, 1997

    I am not insane, I am angry.  I am a cross dresser.  I killed because people like me are mistreated every day.  I did this to show society, push us and we will push back. … All throughout my life, I was ridiculed, always beaten, always hated.  Can you, society, truly blame me for what I do?  Yes, you will. … It was not a cry for attention, it was not a cry for help.  It was a scream in sheer agony saying that if you can’t pry your eyes open, if I can’t do it through pacifism, if I can’t show you through the displaying of intelligence, then I will do it with a bullet.
    — Luke Woodham, Shooter

    via Wikipedia

    The parallels to Newton are spooky:  Smart kid starts the day by killing his mother and then going to a school to kill as many as he can.

    At Pearl High School however Luke Woodham was stopped by the school’s principal who ran out to his truck a retrieved his .45 handgun.

    The Wiki article is short.  Worth reading.  Newton could have been very very different if someone in or very near that school was armed.

  • Newton CT – Day 3

    I wrote something short on the Facebook page of an old friend who called for more “gun control.”  He wrote back.  I wrote this response.

     

    I actually live on the “West Side” near [omitted.]  My first comment on the Newton matter was to wonder why the events in Newton & Aurora get big news while we can’t get any real media attention about Chicago killing 450 black (and brown) children ever year in this city. We may not live near Fenger but we’re touched by violence. My wife was out walking our baby (now six) in a buggy when a block away a kid was shot by Crane H.S. The wife and kid were nearly trampled in the ensuing stampede of children away from the scene. She was also out walking with the baby the day that they beat a kid to death with a baseball bat or golf club or something literally on the steps of the H.S.

    And that my old friend is the telling part – if the gang wants you dead they don’t need a gun to make that happen. The same day as the tragedy in Newton some wacko killed 20 kids with a sword at a school in China. Banning guns will not prevent crazy & will not stop mass killings.

    There are many many things that went wrong in Newton. Mom should have been a better gun owner and kept her guns in a safe (I keep my guns in a safe.) It appears that access to the school was through a broken window. Perhaps the physical infrastructure needed to be improved. Having talked to people “on the job” I know that CPD policy in Chicago is that 1st on the scene does NOT go into the building b/c they don’t know what they’re dealing with. I think this is a bad policy. You cannot have cops literally 30-40 feet away standing around while kids are getting shot. My guess is that L.E. took a long time to “secure” the building which delayed EMS from getting to the victims. And my guess is that EMS in Newton is simply not equipped to deal with gunshot wounds the way that we deal with them here (I believe the Army still trains field surgeons at County.)

    It’s just easy to blame the firearm. There are about 250 million vehicles in the country. There are about 310 non-military firearms (via CNN Aug. 9, 2012.) According to the CDC in 2010 children ages 5-9 were 6 times more likely to die in a traffic accident than by a firearm. Children are over twice as likely to drown and 1.5 times as likely to die in a fire over being killed by a gun. These are facts at the second link in my previous post. So if you’re serious about saving kids lives look at making cars and pools safer.

    As for who as access and training, perhaps you raise a point. However I have been trained. I’ve completed a 4 hour class on gun safety. A 10 hour NRA class on safety and marksmanship. 40 hours on the laws in Illinois (despite already being an attorney.) I train regularly at a local range which costs $70-80 per visit (fees + ammo.) I’m fully prepared to stop anyone who should attack me or my family yet I pray everyday that I never need to. But I’m lucky; I have the means to make this happen. It is very expensive.

    Self defense is everyone’s right. Recently there was this story: http://abcnews.go.com/US/kendra-st-clair-oklahoma-girl-12-shoots-intruder/story?id=17524438#.UM9OU3fzEyg This girl had no training and my guess is that her family did/does not have the means to send her and the rest of her family to training at $200 a head. This type of situation plays out everyday (the old man in the FL internet cafe also recently made news b/c there was security video.) Guns are used defensively far more often than offensively. There’s a good chance that Kendra St. Clair would be dead if she didn’t have her mother’s gun.

    And that is where the NRA and the so called “Gun Lobby” is coming from. Yes, the events in Newton and VA Tech and everywhere else are tragic. But for every Newton there are 50 or 60 or 100 Kendra St. Clair’s. Battered wives and girlfriends who are able to protect themselves from abusive men. Store owners who use their guns to prevent a crime from happening simply by not being an easy target. What about these people?

    When seconds count the police are just minutes away. A few years ago some kids were popping off a few shots out of a revolver in the alley beside my house. I called 911 and reported “shots fired.” It took over 15 mins for CPD to arrive. That’s the response time in an urban area to shots fired. If these kids kicked-in the door to my house we’d all be dead by the time CPD arrived… if I didn’t have the ability to shoot back (well that and our 145 pounds worth of dogs.) You can imagine what the response time would be out in the sticks. I sleep better knowing that if someone’s in the house odds are nearly perfect that I won’t need to actually shoot them. I can put two rounds into the bathroom shower and the intruder will not stick around to see where the next ones go.

    Your experience at OTSC is common. I know of parents who made their kids sleep in the bathtub for fear of a stray round coming through the wall or window. But no law is going to take those guns out of the hands of gang-bangers. A good start would be to get the Democratic machine that runs this town to turn over all felons w/ guns to the feds. 5 year min law is on the books but Ms. Anita Alveraz refused to send them over to the feds. Why?

    Ya see… there are a LOT of gun laws on the books that are simply not enforced. I truly believe this is b/c Rahm, Obama, Holder, and the rest of the Democrat cabal actively choose not to enforce them so they can demand new laws. It’s a sham.

    So to recap:
    – Guns are not the single cause of the tragedy;
    – Guns are not as deadly to kids as cars, pools, or fires;
    – Guns are mostly used defensively and save thousands of lives each year;
    – Most gun violence is caused by illegally held guns; and
    – We should start by enforcing the laws already on the books and insisting that violent offenders do real time.