New Orleans Mass Shooting, Complicated with Grenades

Just to point out, this wouldn't have even made the radar of national news if it hadn't been for the novelty of ALSO involving grenades in addition to being a mass shooting and the wounding of law enforcement.

We have a right to be free from fear of gun violence.  We have a right in order to reasonably bring that about, to have fewer guns with more restrictive ownership and transfer regulation.

We do not have life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness when we have to worry about people with guns shooting us.  This is true of domestic violence, this is true of crime, this is true of people who are otherwise law abiding but go off their nut committing crimes of passion, like the many - MANY - murder suicides we have seen, or just plain dumb-ass careless accidents, like the school children in Texas who were shot, or the woman walking her dogs, or the the couple of cases of hunters shot BY their dogs. 

In contrast to the bad result of people having firearms, we see relatively few constructive uses of firearms for the primary reason cited of self-defense, and many of those defensive uses could equally be accomplished with non-lethal means like pepper spray, or tasers and stun guns.

Our law enforcement officers should be safer in pursuit of their duty than they are. As I noted earlier, in all of 2011, there were NO fatal shootings of law enforcement officers in the entire UK, with a total population of 63 million people.  The entire country had a handful of murder suicides, and only one that I could find that involved firearms in all of 2011, compared to multiple occurrences every week here in the U.S., mostly involving firearms.  The number of suicides in the UK, in comparison is approximately half that of the suicide rate of the U.S,, where more than half of all suicides involve firearms.  Per the National Institute of Mental Health just having firearms in the home is a risk factor for suicides.  The use of firearms in crimes are relatively rare in comparison to the U.S., proving the argument that criminals will continue to have lots of guns is false.

Our gun culture is part of our violence problem.  Our gun culture is not making us safer or more free; it is making our country more dangerous, and in doing that it is making us less free, it is making us less civil and less civilized. 

Or, we could continue to have more of this, with or without grenades (From the New Orleans Times Picayune:

Gunmen shoot 5 inside home in eastern New Orleans; kill 3

Published: Thursday, January 12, 2012, 10:18 AM     Updated: Thursday, January 12, 2012, 8:30 PM

By Danny Monteverde, The Times-Picayune

Chaos broke out in eastern New Orleans today when gunmen killed three people and injured two others inside a red-brick ranch house in a quiet residential neighborhood. The violence continued when a gunfight broke out between police and the suspects after a car chase. Cops killed one of the suspects and shot two others.

Enlarge Michael DeMocker, The Times-Picayune Moments after being shot by police, a murder suspect is checked for signs of life by a paramedic with New Orleans EMS as a female suspect lies on the ground at Press Drive and Chef Menteur Highway on Thursday, January 12, 2012. The trio are suspects in the shooting on Devine Avenue that left five people shot, three fatally. 3 killed, 2 injured in eastern New Orleans gallery (16 photos)

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Police were called to 7427 Devine Ave. about 9:30 a.m., where they found a man and a woman dead inside the home, and two other women and a man with gunshot wounds, according to Officer Garry Flot, a department spokesman.
The three survivors were transported to a hospital, where one man later died, according to the Orleans Parish coroner's office.
A description of the gunmen, who allegedly escaped in a red Pontiac, was broadcast immediately, Flot said.
Police spotted the vehicle and a chase ensued. It ended when the car crashed into a sign in front of a Goodyear tire shop at the intersection of Chef Menteur Highway and Press Drive, according to Deputy Superintendent Kirk Bouyelas.
After the crash, a man got out of the vehicle and fired at the officers. The officers returned fire, killing him and injuring a man and woman who were also in the car.
The injured occupants of the car were taken to a hospital, Bouyelas said. They will be booked with the attempted murder of a policeman and the murders in the east, Bouyelas said. One policeman was also taken to a hospital suffering from what Bouyelas described as a "graze wound" to his leg.

5 shot, 3 fatally in eastern New Orleans; 1 suspect dies in police shootout Chaos broke out in eastern New Orleans today when gunmen killed three people and injured two others. A gunfight broke out between police and the suspects after a car chase. Cops killed one of the suspects and shot two others. Watch video

Bouyelas could not say how many shots were fired. However, nearly three dozen evidence cones were placed at the scene. One couple, who did not want to be identified, were in a Walgreens across the street from the tire shop when they heard "a bunch of pops outside." They came outside and saw the dead suspect and police.

OR, we could tighten up our regulation on guns, and have fewer of them, particularly in the hands of criminals, dangerously mentally ill people, and drug users.

Cartel Grenades

MSNBC reports on the newest concern to surface in the never-ending Mexican Drug Cartel violence on the border.

It was a scenario U.S. law enforcement had long feared: A fragmentation grenade from Mexico's bloody drug war tossed into a public place.

Only the grenade thrower's bumbling prevented bloodshed in a south Texas bar — he neglected to pull a second safety clasp. But the act was proof that one of the deadliest weapons in Mexico's drug battle is a real threat to the U.S., and investigators are stepping up efforts to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Besides the mistake made by the attacker, which prevented a disaster, there was an impressive act of heroism on the part of an off-duty police officer. After the grenade bounced off the floor and landed on a pool table, he "picked it up and threw it back out the door. No one was hurt, no arrests were made, and authorities are divided about whether the targets were rival gang members or off-duty police officers."

The hand grenade used in this failed attack was identified a having come from the same batch of weapons that were used in two other attacks, in October at the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, and at a television station in early January in the same city. The grenade thrown at the consulate failed to explode also, and no one was injured when the grenade hit the Televisa network's studio as it aired its nightly newscast.

But all three grenades were manufactured at the same time and place, and were at one point together in the same batch from South Korea. Their manufacture date was unavailable.

The immediate source of these weapons is the black market which flourished after Central America's civil wars. Some are brought in by weapons smugglers. Others are diverted from the region's militaries: In April, Guatemala seized 563 grenades after a shootout with Mexican drug cartel members, and officials later determined the grenades came from Guatemalan military bases.

The article mentions that the United States and South Korea are the biggest producers of grenades found in Mexico. I couldn't help but wonder why they're not claiming 90% of the grenades have been traced back to the U.S. I guess that's because South Korea has a big piece of the action.

ATF officials said the United States keeps tight controls over its own grenade inventories and that it knows of no grenades recovered in Mexico that were taken directly from American military supplies.

What do you think of that? Wouldn't that be similar to that lawsuit against Glock.

They claimed that the manufacturers deliberately made more guns than the legitimate market could support and sold them through channels that would reach a "secondary market" of private and under-the-table transactions.

Although the lawsuit was unsuccessful, it sounded quite plausible to me. In a similar way, American grenade manufacturers are producing far more than we need for our own military, and shipping their product out to unstable Central American Countries in spite of the clear probability that many will end up in the Mexican Drug War. And, just like the Glock people, the grenade producers shrug their shoulders and say it's not their problem, they certainly can't be held responsible for what happens to their product down the line.

What's your opinion? Is that how it goes? Are you all right with it?

Please leave a comment.