Another triple murderer that won't face trial.

There one ever-recurring argument against gun legislation which I'd like to illustrate today:

"Gun laws affect only the law abiding"

There's the "duh" explanation to this, because anybody who'd break these laws would be a criminal. But what about after a crime has been committed? If somebody were to do a drive-by-shooting, he could face some serious charges right? Breaking several federal laws concerning guns, homicide, reckless endangerment
will put you in that position.

No, these people break those laws, because they are not planning on getting caught. They have no intention to stand trial and face punishment for their actions.

Take for example the most recent school shooting in Ohio; at the age of 14 he could not legally buy any type of firearm that accepts primed cartridges. I'm using this wording because I don't know whether he used a rimfire or centerfire weapons, I'm quite convinced he wasn't using blackpowder pistols.

So, he was in violation of several federal laws, but he will -for obvious reasons- not stand trial.
Another person who killed several people killed himself yesterday after an hours long standoff with law enforcement. (Texas Standoff Ends When Suspect Drives Into Lake)

If you're a religious person, you can choose to believe that these people may still face penalty in the afterlife, but there are still plenty of murderers at large who are alive and well
. There are many who are out on parole, probation, or who have made themselves comfortable within the prison system.

This is one of the reasons why I think we should improve our penal system. Prisons are overcrowded with people who do not belong there, and people who are not rehabilitated are cut loose to make place for others. We should keep looking for better investigative tools, it's a true pity that ballistic fingerprinting and microstamping show little promise, but our prison system is ready for a reform.

And our gun legislation? Should we keep legislation which has not been observed to work?

It also happens in the netherlands

Apparently, children are quite capable of killing each other with or without guns. Just today, a 14 year old allegedly stabbed a 16 year old schoolmate who he was quarreling with. The argument supposedly started after somebody threw a pen ...

(article by the Herald tribune)


How about some anger control?

Hey Helmke, are you behind three months on everything?

So, Recently a 14 year old kid took two handguns onto school property and shot four of his peers before committing suicide. Few days before, a law enforcement officer gunned down six youths with an automatic rifle.

What is todays entry on the Brady blog? A regurgitation of a months old shooting. Yes, regurgitation, if it had been an update, they would have at least mentioned that the suspected culprit has been arrested, a man who has been arrested for robbery, assault, firearms violations, receiving stolen property, and providing false identification to police.He has been convicted only of false identification and was placed in a program for first-time offenders after his arrest last November. according to (and copied from, the Philadelphia inquirer)

You go on to recite your "common sense" laws, and how a majority of the US population supports your ideas.
I'll be the first to admit that I myself recycle a lot of arguments, especially my criminal statistics
, but that was the entire point of my blog.
What's the point of the Brady blog? To remind everybody of their poor friends who have been struck by tragedy in september?

Why don't you remind us how all of your -common sense feel good- legislation would have prevented this man, who was already in violation of several gun laws, from paralyzing that poor kid?

Brittish police too busy to protect civillians

Police tied up with paperwork, report says
"Figures released as part of a review of the performance of the 43 forces in England and Wales show that the Home Office is as far away as ever from achieving its much-vaunted target of reducing time spent filling in forms and dealing with administration, and "effectively freeing up 12,000 officers for the front line".

It had an overall poor grade for "protecting vulnerable people" - a key area, according to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), which carried out the assessments - though within that category it was "fair" in dealing with child abuse, missing persons and "public protection""

Obviously, certain high ranking police officers were quick to say that two-thirds of the police forces working hours are plenty to uphold the law, in the country were drug dealers dress up as scooby doo, schools are becoming an increasingly violent environment for children, police officers are too wrapped up in red tape to do their job in the time they actually *can* go out and make a difference. And when they actually do get somebody thrown in the can, they'll be calling the civilian population to help find the crook that escapes. Because of all the violence associated with the drug culture (no, not gun culture) parents are going out buying drugs for their children to keep them from mingling with the dealers themselves too much for Christs sakes! (I'm rejoiced to see they're not throwing her in jail, but that's a different issue)

You know what? Maybe you should place even more cameras and microphones, keep persecuting people for possessing books. Eventually, all the measures that haven't paid off anywhere in the past will start working (/sarcasm)

ZOMG, correlation!

One of my colleages has found something to correlate gun violence to!




My god, turns out Economic factors can be correlated to homicide far better than gun ownership or gun legislation. Who would have tought that?

15 year old armed with a laundry utensil shot and killed by Police officers

"PHILADELPHIA — Police responding to a domestic dispute shot and killed a 15-year-old who went after a police officer with a clothes iron.
Public affairs spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore described the teen as being armed with "an object in his hand that he was using as a weapon" when he went at police officers Monday afternoon outside his home. The item was an iron, according to news reports citing unidentified police sources.It was not clear whether police first tried to subdue Timbers with pepper spray or a stun gun."
(Article)

Whether or not the shooting was justified or excusable hasn't been decided jet, for all we know the officers involved could be charged under criminal law.
Not that I think they should, a clothes iron is perfectly fit for bashing someones head in according to the department of justice, which reports that an assault with a blunt object is more likely to result in a serious injury than an assault with a firearm.
The youth involved was reported to be a "difficult" child.

If I were to see an enraged person coming at me, I'd defend myself to the best of my abilities as well. I would hopefully not kill the assailant, but I would not hold back until I've effectively stopped him. I prey that he desists after seeing a weapon.

Let's never forget this:

I owe it to My colleague over at armed and safe to point this out in one of his most recent articles:
The Florida sun, maybe after the recent event of a police officer gunning down six defenseless youths in Wisconsin with an automatic rifle, has remove the article calling to reinstate a ban on assault weapons, proclaiming that only Police officers should be allowed to have them, if their name hath called them of "patrol rifles"

The article in question can still be viewed in Googles cached webpages, thank you 45superman for the link.
I've printed myself out a handy .pdf file of the entire page for safekeeping, and as a reminder that I should never lax my critisism for news-sources, the south Florida Sun-Sentinel should not assume that people will not call them on their statements.

This is the information age, not the age of memory holes.

All of us, or none of us!

This was on the 13 o clock news over here in Belgium for crying out loud:

Cop Kills six at party!

CRANDON, Wisconsin (CNN) -- A 20-year-old off-duty sheriff's deputy shot and killed six people at an early-morning party

Peterson was shot to death after opening fire early Sunday on a group of students and recent graduates who had gathered for pizza and movies on their high school's homecoming weekend. Peterson was off-duty from his full-time job as a Forest County deputy sheriff; he also was a part-time Crandon police officer.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071008/ap_on_re_us/wisconsin_shooting)


Still think only law enforcement officers should have access to guns? They are no less prone to violent behavior than anyone else, they can make mistakes like every other human being.
If they are no different, why treat them different? Why should they be excluded from gun legislation if they too occasionally abuse their right to harm other people?

Note that I do not think police officers are bad people, I have little besides respect for our finest who do their job and keep people safe, but some police officers, just like some civilians, are prone to criminal behavior. This doesn't mean that they all, police and civilians alike, should be stripped of their arms. As a matter of fact, I've never believed for one second that taking a gun away from somebody would render him/her harmless. But for the love of all which has a determinable pattern, stop claiming that law enforcement officers are in any way better than your average citizen.

Assault rifles at work.

A very interesting article was recently brought to my attention by Yuri Orlov.

"A security guard used an assault rifle to kill two robbery suspects at a Red Bird strip mall late Wednesday, police said.Police say the guard grabbed his weapon when one of the men pointed a handgun at him.Sergio Vann, the 19-year-old gun-wielding assailant, died at the scene late Wednesday."

Do you happen to know my stance on assault weapons? If not, here's a piece that I wrote which was censored out of Robyn Ringlers blog:

Robyn: "Allowing the ownership of guns that can shoot down airplanes or cause massive numbers of casualties in just seconds or minutes makes no sense."

Michael: Excuse me?
It may sound logical if you'd read it out loud, but does it really make sense?

It doesn't make any sense to you why people should be allowed to have guns which -as you've so eloquently put it- "cause massive numbers of casualties in just seconds"
Would you be referring to the select fire assault rifles and submachine guns on our streets today? The kind which has a 30 round magazine, capable of firing bullets fully automatically, every bullet posing a lethal threat?
Sound about right, doesn't it?

The only people who regularly carry these guns around town (usually in their car) are police officers, clearly the only purpose of these tools isn't to cause massive numbers of casualties in just seconds or minutes or even days, they are called defensive weapons because they excel in allowing a police officer to defend his own life, and the lives of others around him. Ordinary citizens can use these guns as well, to protect themselves and those around them.

And then I'm not even talking about fully automatic assault rifles anymore. I'm talking about a semi-automatic rifle chambered for an intermediary cartridge, fed by a standard capacity magazine (not high, 30 rounds is standard). A rifle whose stock can be folded so you can safely use it inside your house, or take it with you in a car to the range easier, and a pistol grip for ergonomics and user safety (better grip equals less slip ups, literally)

Why but by ignorance could you claim that it makes no sense to allow law abiding citizens to own such weapons? Because as opposed to the police, we'd never need them? I'll let you in on a little secret, the police hardly ever uses them either, they just hang there in the (locked and deliberately hard to access) rack, waiting -months, years, always- for that one emergency that validates their purchase. Said emergency isn't likely to ever produce itself, not for police officers, and not for civilians, but would you deny the formers the ability to prepare themselves, would you only then seek to judge the latter: us.

Now, reading that article that I found on the real gun guys, turns out I was wrong. It's not only police officers who carry and use defensive rifles, but private security guards do so as well! The guard was able to fight off two assailants who had the drop on him, because he had an effective weapon as well as the ability to use it, to the contrary of the thug with a gun.

Come on, where are you?

The gun control Blogs which I've "subscribed to" all seem to not have been updated recently.

Too dizzy?

The police will protect you! Stake your life on that thin blue line.

Relying on law enforcement to protect you is one way of life. I myself lost all faith in their ability to do so when an angry ex-husband was not apprehended for roughly 25 minutes after he'd bashed in the door of his former abode.
I live around the corner of the local precinct.

Law enforcement operates by tracking down the perpetrator of a crime after it has been committed. I believe that's a very valid way, more so because I'm radically opposed to preemptive crime fighting (racial profiling, confiscation of "risky" possessions, seizure of assets prior to trial, ...). Still, if it takes them that long to travel such a short distance, I will assume they will not be around to protect me in case of an emergency.

Now, if you think that 25minutes is bad, try seven months!

"Mr Woodhams's family claim the Metropolitan Police failed to investigate the first incident properly, during which the 22-year-old father of one was slashed across the neck and face after confronting youths who threw a stone at his car.
No one was ever arrested over the knife attack in January 2006, which was followed by a seven-month campaign of violence and bullying, and Mr Woodhams's family believe he would still be alive if police had investigated the first incident properly."

Excuse me if I insist on owning defensive weapons.

Innocent bystanders still die in a "gun free countries"

Gun free countries aren't free of guns or free.
After the freedom has been removed from the law abiding, criminals are still armed, and still willing to kill people. When they try to do so, innocent people may still get caught in the crossfire, and die.

Gun victim shot 'phoning sister'
"Magda Pniewska, 26, was caught in the cross-fire between two gunmen in New Cross, south London, on Tuesday"

In response, the mayor wants to make it illegal to purchase replica handguns, because they could be converted to functional firearms. Flawless plan, people won't buy replica guns because they are illegal, so they can no longer convert them into functional firearms, which is already illegal ... golden.

This is of course, assuming that people really are converting replica's to functional firearms. I didn't think that the materials used for replica's were able to stand up to the pressures that real guns are exposed to. Ill trust BBC to be accurate enough here. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if they (the criminals) were actually manufacturing their own guns, and using a handful of parts stripped from the replicas, such as the trigger group and grips, as I honestly can't comprehend why somebody would include a proper barrel in a replica.

Are you aware of just how easy it is to make a functional firearm? Anybody with some basic machine shop tools and the knowledge on how to use them can theoretically set up a gun factory in his garage. As a chemist, I can tell you that it's even easier to make propellant powder (single base, double base, with or without regulators, you name it), and marginally harder to make reliable percussive caps.

Banning guns hasn't worked so far, so instead of following through and banning toys too, could you -petty please- try looking for something that actually has a chance of working?
I don't blame them for trying to ban guns in the first place, I blame them for not repealing the ban after it had been observed to not work.
Now maybe, just maybe, could you try better criminal rehabilitation programs? An actively enforced way of fighting unemployment? A more deterring penal system, better education, legislation based on hope instead of hatred? Common sense rather than scaremongering?

-"Hey look, this key doesn't seem to open the lock, why don't we try another one?"
-"Are you crazy? Let's just twist it more violently!"


It's called tunnel vision, and it hasn't saved any lives so far.

Arson, so easy a 10 year old could kill somebody.

I've covered the futility of banning guns on several occasions, explaining the potential harm that can be done by people abusing knifes, bludgeons and explosives. Recently, I came a cross a case where a ten year old child was accused of killing several people by setting fire to the house they were in.

"The boy escaped the September 16 fire that killed his mother, Chanan Palmer; his half-sister Kaysha, 8, and three children of Christy Winans: Kayla Winans, 6; Je'Shawn Davis, 5; and Jasmine Davis, 3.
Darke County Prosecutor Richard Howell told the Dayton Daily News last week that the boy didn't give investigators a clear motive. But when asked whether he was certain the boy was behind the fire, Howell told the newspaper, "Yes, I am."
"He was just made a scapegoat for the whole thing," said Burke L. Goines, the boy's uncle. "It's traumatizing to put a 10-year-old boy in a situation like this, to make other people look better in their investigation," Goines said."
(http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/law/10/01/arson.child/index.html)

I'm not arguing guilt here, I have no idea whether or not this kid really is responsible for those deaths. I'm saying that he could have done it, accidentally or intentionally. Setting fire to something is no harder than pulling the trigger of a gun. Much easier than cleaning a firearm and learning to align the sights in order to hit something that's ten yards away.
You don't need to be an expert marksman to be able to kill somebody with a gun, nor do you need to know how to have a fire degrade the structural components of a construction in order to cause the roof to collapse to kill a handful of people.

You do -however- need to be either very sick, or hateful, bent on hurting other people.
Accidental shootings happen, accidental fires happen, all by people. People who make mistakes, people who are victims to bad luck. Murders are committed by people who have made the choice of killing somebody else. It's that choice that separates the law abiding from criminals, not the means he uses to carry out his dismal intentions.

Prohibition to prevent accidents?

Why would we ban guns?
According to the department of justice, criminals are less likely to hurt you when they are armed with a firearms (as opposed to a knife or bludgeon, or even unarmed), so that's not a reason.(1)
The fact that DC criminals still have access to firearms rules out banning guns to keep them out of all criminal hands.

Banning guns doesn't eliminate targeted killings either, BUT! (drummroll) Removing legal guns from civilians will prevent their children from shooting each other!

... if only.

"A 17-year-old boy has admitted accidentally shooting his 12-year-old sister dead at their family home with a powerful handgun kept illegally by their mother."

Illegally because this is the UK, I suppose they're calling the .38 snub a powerful handgun to make it seem more dramatic, those handguns are considered underpowered for self defense by many people. Not that it matters if the victim, a twelve year old girl, is hit in the forehead.

"Kasha was playing with the gun when it went off, killing his sister Kamilah, Manchester Crown Court heard. The teenager did not intend any ill will towards his sister, the court was told. He did not intend to fire the powerful handgun and it was simply "a terrible tragedy and terrible accident", Mr Justice Holland said."

See, this is the problem right there; guns are not toys! This accident could have happened as well if handguns had still be legal in the UK, but it probably wouldn't have happened if the youth involved had been taught to respect firearms.
Modern popular culture often glorifies crime and violence, guns are a part of that. This is the UK, some kids carry air guns around as a fashion accessory(2).

Banning handguns won't resolve the issue of accidental shootings, maybe we should give educating our youth on firearms a try.

1)http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/wuvc01.pdf
2)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/01/09/ngun09.xml

Are guns offensive?

Scenario: You're strolling about a mall, minding your own business. In front of you, ten yards away, a person in the crowd produces a handgun from his pocket, and places it in a holster in his waistband. Said person walk away, no incident ensues.
How would you feel about that?

It's probably a citizens who is (legally or otherwise) carrying a concealed weapon, and places it in a more comfortable spot. It shouldn't have been in the wrong place, and he definitely shouldn't have taken it out in public, but he didn't do any harm, or did he?

He doesn't harm me, I don't really like to be confronted with guns outside of a range or cleaning table, as that usually results from criminal or irresponsible behavior, but guns don't scare me or make me uncomfortable. But I do understand that other people might be scared. I wouldn't say "take offense", but brandishing a gun can be considered an offensive gesture.

Same situation, different person:
-The person is accompanied by a uniformed police officer, and is obviously a plain clothes officer.
-The person is wearing a business suit, and places the firearm in his briefcase
-The person is wearing a hoody and sunglasses, he's shifting his head, surveying his surroundings. You're outside a pharmacy.

In the last case, you'd find me behind the nearest pillar with a cellphone ready to call 911, whereas I'd walk right by the first two. Don't tell me I'm thinking black and white, I know how I function in a stressful situation, can you honestly say that the image of a stereotypical criminal with a gun wouldn't startle you more than a police officer handling a handgun?

It's not the gun, it's the person holding it. Does he have good intention or bad ones, can he be considered a threat? Are you in danger? Guns scare few people, but a threat to their lives does.
I think that it's important to never lose sight of that, it scares people that they're vulnerable, this is only natural, but guns shouldn't scare you, people willing to abuse guns should scare you.