Attempted Murder - Suicide was Work Related not Domestic

NJ.com reports

The two groundskeepers worked together on the same rolling fairways, buzzcut greens and sandy bunkers at the upscale country club in Bedminster.

But a work-related dispute between the two seasonal laborers turned bloody at Fiddler’s Elbow Country Club yesterday, said Somerset County Geoffrey D. Soriano.

As related by Soriano, the episode began when Francisco Jimenez, a 59-year-old Orange resident, was waiting at the club entrance when his fellow groundskeeper arrived for work about 5 a.m., riding in the passenger’s seat of a car.

Jimenez flagged down the vehicle, walked to the side where his coworker sat and fired a gun twice into the man’s upper body, Soriano said. The driver floored the accelerator to get away, as Jimenez fled in his own car.

Later they found the shooter, Jimenez, dead from a bullet to the head. His family were shocked, saying there were no indications that he was capable of anything like this.

This story illustrates a point I've made a few times. When something like this happens, something shocking and violent, I don't think anyone is concerned whether the shooter had been a concealed carry permit holder. This information often gets lost in the shuffle of bigger issues, dead bodies and such.

The pro-gun crowd love to parade all their statistics about how law-abiding the CCW guys are, but the numbers they provide are inaccurate, they fail to include many cases like this one.

What's your opinion? Did Mr. Jimenez own the gun legally? If it turns out he did, is someone responsible for ensuring the statistics properly reflect this fact? I don't think so.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

Warren Jeffs - "You Won't See Him No More"

Yahoo News reports

What do you think, flim-flam man or cracked religionist?

Please leave a comment.

The World According to Jim, and Why He Is Wrong

Jim appears to have a simple one-size-fits-all solution to difficult problems - shoot them.

Doesn't seem to really matter what the issues are or the circumstances; Jim and those who think like him believe that guns are a solution, all the time, any time, and where they don't appear to be working, the answer is MORE guns and more shooting.

As a person with a better grasp than average of strategy and tactics, and good analytical skills, I evaluate the spectrum of possible solutions to achieve the desired end goal. 

In the case of the London rioting, where I just heard on the national broadcast news that the police are considering using plastic (not rubber) bullets, it occurred to me that an explanation of that thinking, to think out loud essentially, might be useful.

The goal in London is to end the rioting, not to spark more rioting - not more locations, not more people, not rioting that continues over a longer period of time.  History has not reflected well on shootings of unarmed people by authorities, particularly if those people were acting out in protest of an inequality.  To their credit, the Brits tend to take the long view, and have been criticized by students of history internally and externally, when they resorted to simple brutality.

More than that, historically it has not worked.  I would point to the past year's events in places like Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere in northern Africa and Asia minor.  It is a failing strategy in Syria, it has not been successful in Yemen, it is not successful in Libya.

I would suggest that those stupid, simplistic fools who think the answer to the riots in London is simple brute force, and that anything less is simply being namby-pamby towards criminals should acquaint themselves with the very important work of an author by the name of Gene Sharp.  Probably the most useful of his writings for purposes of analyzing and problem solving the riots would be "From Dictatorship to Democracy", which can be read online for free - just click on the title.  This was one of my Penigma.blogspot.com posts in response to discussions over on MikeB's blog; if I recall this was before I formally joined as an admin and author.

To apply more subtle and complex analysis than the ' ya just gots to shoot 'em, shoot 'em all, then shoot some more' approach of Jim, look first at the catalyst for the riots.  A man was shot, by a police officer.  That man shot at the police officer, embedding a bullet in his cell phone.  The police officer shot back, a move which, if the police account is correct, seems fairly justified.  But right or wrong, THIS is what started the riots, this is what touched off simmering, unresolved tensions into full blown conflict.

So........what do you think would be the response if the police (or military supporting the police) were to start shooting civilians, a mix of old and young, male and female, who were unarmed except for the most primitive use of the occasional bottle or rock?  There is a finite number of police in London; there is a finite number of police in the countryside surrounding London.  There is no abundant surplus of resources here, and there is a growing, not declining, number of people with whom they have to contend in opposition.  IF someone were stupid enough to incite further violence by more shooting - the likely outcome given the catalyst events - then those forces would be overwhelmed.  Further, there are limited resources available to the police; budgets have been cut to the bone........so how would people like Jim propose to fund the massive escalation of people and material required to respond to a massive escalation on the side of the rioters?  How much of London and the surrounding area, metro and beyond, would be left vulnerable to other crime or violence?

How many people on either side, police/ authorities or rioters would be dead or injured? How much MORE property would be damaged in an increase in rioting.  And the ultimate question - would that move the conflict closer or further away from any kind of resolution.

If the authorities did take the resolution that Jim seems to favor, I guarantee you that the Cameron government would topple, and be replaced - and NOT by another conservative either.  Any number of upper level authorities in the police and in civil government would be tossed out on their collective asses, because of the likely unpopularity of that kind of largely avoidable escalation in violence and increased instability.  It would further raise the risk of a marked increase in sympathy and support for the rioters, against the police and/or military.  Whenever either is required to fire on people, people with whom they identify, you further run the risk of a breakdown in the discipline of authority forces due to identification with the people who are the targets, especially if they include women and children - as these riots do.

There is sometimes a great deal of truth in the axiom that violence begets violence.  Sometimes a solution of force cannot be avoided; but when it is the solution that is necessary, it must always be minimal, and surgical in precision.  The solution Jim appears to advocate is neither of those.

Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them; Jim appears to be one of those who is history illiterate, as are those who think like him.  Whereas the less violent solution is cost effective, and it is far more likely to produced the desired ending of the riots, sooner, and with the least risk to all parties involved.

You can work rough, or you can work smart.  The Brits work smart, and more power to them; this is a rough and dangerous situation for them to get under control.

Another ND for our anonymous friend

This comes from the blog Ohh Shoot. In case you missed it, Ohh Shoot highlights unintentional shootings. Some might refer to these as accidental shootings, but accident is too often interpreted as unavoidable. The shootings on this blog did not have to happen. Safe storage, better gun design, gun safety training are just some of the measures that could have prevented these tragedies.

So much ND's not being frequent in the USA!


Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Man unintentionally shoots himself in the penis

27-year-old Joshua Seto of Chandler, Arizona was shopping with his girlfriend in a local grocery store. He was trying to put her pink handgun into the front waistband of his pants when he unintentionally discharged the gun. The bullet went through his penis and then continued through his left thigh. According to dispatch records heavy bleeding started immediately. During the 911 call the operator told his girlfriend, Cara Christopher, to apply direct pressure to the wound but to avoid looking at it. "I did look at it," she replied. "It's pretty bad."

Seto was taken to the hospital where his condition has not been released. It is not known if he will suffer any permanent damage. Police are warning people who carry loaded, hidden guns in public to use holsters, not waistbands. Police are also investigating possible charges against Seto.

A local television station interviewed several men, asking how they felt about the story.

Guess he is going to need a penis substitute from now on.

A couple of interesting quotes for you...

From Atlantic Monthly, September 2011

The Secret History of Guns

By Adam Winkler

OK, all you Second Amendment supporters, when was the last time you went to a Muster Day?

Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.

For those men who were allowed to own guns, the Founders had their own version of the “individual mandate” that has proved so controversial in President Obama’s health-care-reform law: they required the purchase of guns. A 1792 federal law mandated every eligible man to purchase a military-style gun and ammunition for his service in the citizen militia. Such men had to report for frequent musters—where their guns would be inspected and, yes, registered on public rolls.

This gets even better:

Today, the NRA is the unquestioned leader in the fight against gun control. Yet the organization didn’t always oppose gun regulation. Founded in 1871 by George Wingate and William Church—the latter a former reporter for a newspaper now known for hostility to gun rights, The New York Times—the group first set out to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship. Wingate and Church had fought for the North in the Civil War and been shocked by the poor shooting skills of city-bred Union soldiers.

In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control. The organization’s president at the time was Karl T. Frederick, a Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer known as “the best shot in America”—a title he earned by winning three gold medals in pistol-shooting at the 1920 Summer Olympic Games. As a special consultant to the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, Frederick helped draft the Uniform Firearms Act, a model of state-level gun-control legislation. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. The new measure imposed more order—and, in most cases, far more restrictions.)

Frederick’s model law had three basic elements. The first required that no one carry a concealed handgun in public without a permit from the local police. A permit would be granted only to a “suitable” person with a “proper reason for carrying” a firearm. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.

The NRA today condemns every one of these provisions as a burdensome and ineffective infringement on the right to bear arms. Frederick, however, said in 1934 that he did “not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA’s executive vice president at the time, Milton A. Reckord, told a congressional committee that his organization was “absolutely favorable to reasonable legislation.” According to Frederick, the NRA “sponsored” the Uniform Firearms Act and promoted it nationwide. Highlighting the political strength of the NRA even back then, a 1932 Virginia Law Review article reported that laws requiring a license to carry a concealed weapon were already “in effect in practically every jurisdiction.”

When Congress was considering the first significant federal gun law of the 20th century—the National Firearms Act of 1934, which imposed a steep tax and registration requirements on “gangster guns” like machine guns and sawed-off shotguns—the NRA endorsed the law. Karl Frederick and the NRA did not blindly support gun control; indeed, they successfully pushed to have similar prohibitive taxes on handguns stripped from the final bill, arguing that people needed such weapons to protect their homes. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”

One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. When asked during his testimony on the National Firearms Act whether the proposed law violated “any constitutional provision,” he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” In other words, the president of the NRA hadn’t even considered whether the most far-reaching federal gun-control legislation in history conflicted with the Second Amendment. Preserving the ability of law-abiding people to have guns, Frederick would write elsewhere, “lies in an enlightened public sentiment and in intelligent legislative action. It is not to be found in the Constitution.”

How about that! All those "burdensome" concealed carry laws were written by the NRA! I remember reading that in a law review a while back, but did not have the ability to "bookmark" it. Winkler goes into depth on that one.

I wish I had the footnotes for that one.

You gun goofs need to realise you have been taken for chumps.

BIGTIME!

Essay Question--How Does the Second Amendment negate Article III, Section iii?

Actually, this question goes further in depth than just relating to Article III, Section iii of the United States constitution which defines treason.

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

The militia’s purpose is to suppress insurrections, not foment them according to Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15:

“To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;”

Insurrection being defined by Webster (a good American Dictionary, not that evil OED) as:

an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government

Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951) mentions the insurrectionist theory as being off the table:

The obvious purpose of the statute is to protect existing Government, not from change by peaceable, lawful and constitutional means, but from change by violence, revolution and terrorism. That it is within the power of the Congress to protect the Government of the United States from armed rebellion is a proposition which requires little discussion. Whatever theoretical merit there may be to the argument that there is a “right” to rebellion against dictatorial governments is without force where the existing structure of the government provides for peaceful and orderly change. We reject any principle of governmental helplessness in the face of preparation for revolution, which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, must lead to anarchy. No one could conceive that it is not within the power of Congress to prohibit acts intended to overthrow the Government by force and violence. The question with which we are concerned here is not whether Congress has such power, but whether the means which it has employed conflict with the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.

Explain how a document that says that the Militia is to suppress insurrections and only lists one crime, treason, which is pretty much the same thing as insurrection, allows for people to commit treason using the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

.

Could This Happen Here Next? What Difference Would MORE Guns Make, On Either Side?

Well before these riots began, in part arising out of discussions here about extended capacity magazines, and arguments about hand guns for self-defense, and in part arising our of our new admin Laci's own experience with urban violence in Northern Ireland's during the 'troubles', Laci and I have privately over the past months had some interesting discussions about what happens during urban unrest.

As bad as this is, and it is certainly bad, what is absent are reports of widespread shooting, from either side. 

While my colleague Laci might disagree with me, at least tongue in cheek, I don't think that people in the UK are fundamentally different, not better or worse, than people in the U.S.  So, if there were comparable riots in the U.S - which some already are predicting could occur in response to our grotesque inequalities and hardships for large demographic segments of our population - we need to consider that this violence which does NOT include firearms would very likely include shooting if this occurred in the U.S., due to the greater prevalence of guns.

View. Read. Discuss!

From MSNBC:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

16,000 cops on London's streets as rioting worsens; violence spreads to other cities

'Ordinary people have had their lives turned upside down by this mindless thuggery'; PM promises 'even more robust police action'

Dylan Martinez  /  Reuters

Riot police charge past burning buildings in Croydon, south London, on Monday.

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

updated 2 hours 49 minutes ago 2011-08-09T10:27:50

LONDON — A wave of violence and looting raged across London and spread to three other major British cities on Tuesday, as authorities struggled to contain the country's worst unrest since race riots set the capital ablaze in the 1980s.

In London, groups of young people rampaged for a third straight night, setting buildings, vehicles and garbage dumps alight, looting stores and pelting police officers with bottles and fireworks. The spreading disorder was an unwelcome warning of the possibility of violence for leaders organizing the 2012 Summer Olympics in less than a year.
Neighborhoods across the capital faced a massive clean-up of smashed glass, bricks, bottles and gutted buildings as police reinforcements reclaimed the streets from the youths.
On Monday, police made a rare decision to deploy armored vehicles in some of the worst-hit districts — but still struggled to keep pace with the chaos unfolding at flashpoints across London, in the central city of Birmingham, the western city of Bristol and the northwestern city of Liverpool.
Citing "sickening scenes," British prime minister David Cameron announced that 16,000 police officers would be deployed on London's streets on Tuesday — up from 6,000 on Monday night.
Cameron, who cut short his summer vacation in Italy and recalled Parliament from its summer recess to deal with the crisis, also promised "even more robust police action."
"This is criminality pure and simple and it needs to be confronted," he added. "Justice will be done and these people will see the consequences of their actions. If you are old enough to commit these crimes, you are old enough to face the punishment."

Authorities acknowledged that major new bouts of violence had badly stretched their resources.
"The violence we have seen is simply inexcusable," police Commander Christine Jones said. "Ordinary people have had their lives turned upside down by this mindless thuggery."
'Come join the fun' The riots appeared to have little unifying cause — though some involved claimed to oppose sharp government spending cuts, which will slash welfare payments and cut tens of thousands of public sector jobs through 2015.
Others appeared attracted simply by the opportunity for violence. "Come join the fun," shouted one youth, racing along a street in the east London suburb of Hackney, where shops were attacked and cars torched.
Rioters were left virtually unchallenged in several neighborhoods and able to plunder from stores at will or attempt to invade homes. Restaurants and stores fearful of looting closed early across London.
Witnesses were told of numerous cases of car theft by groups of looters.
Jails overflowing Disorder flared throughout the night, from gritty suburbs along the capital's fringes to central London's famously ritzy Notting Hill neighborhood. London's Ambulance Service said it had treated 16 patients, of whom 15 were hospitalized.
Police said 334 people had been arrested and 69 people charged with offenses. Sky News reported that all of London's jail cells were full so suspects were being taken to police stations outside of the capital.
At one point, the London fire brigade said it was running out of vehicles to tackle fires started by the rioters.
Three people were arrested on suspicion of the attempted murder of a police officer left hospitalized after he was struck by a car in north London early Tuesday.

After dawn, police said, the unrest appeared to calm, either quelled by police or after rioters drifted away.
Violence first broke out late Saturday in the low-income, multiethnic district of Tottenham in north London, where outraged protesters demonstrated against the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old father of four who was gunned down in disputed circumstances Thursday.
A brief inquest hearing into Duggan's death will take Tuesday, though it will likely be several months before a full hearing is convened.

Dylan Martinez  /  Reuters

Looters run from a clothing store in Peckham, south London, on Monday.

Duggan's death stirred old animosities and racial tensions similar to those that prompted massive riots in the 1980s, despite efforts by London police to build better relations with the city's ethnic communities after high-profile cases of racism in recent decades.