Washington State Triple Shooting - Woman Arrested

The Seattle Times reports on the latest random mass shooting.  They're coming so fast now we can hardly keep track of them.

A 20-year-old woman who allegedly opened fire in a grocery store on the Key Peninsula on Saturday afternoon, wounding three strangers, was charged today with two counts of first-degree attempted murder and one count of first-degree assault.

Laura Sorenson pleaded not guilty to the charges during her arraignment today in Pierce County Superior Court. She is being held in the Pierce County Jail in lieu of $1.5 million bail.

“There does not appear to be any understandable motive for this shooting,” Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist said in a news release. “The defendant said she didn’t even know the men she shot.”

According to Lindquist, Sorenson walked into the Peninsula Market on Saturday afternoon, pulled a revolver out of her purse and made a comment about killing people. She fired until she was out of bullets, hitting three men, he said.

The victims were a clerk, a developmentally disabled man, and a 78-year-old man who was crouched down and hiding. Two of the victims were hospitalized. One victim is in critical but stable condition, Lindquist said.

Thomas Alton Caffall Loved Those Video Games

CBS News adds some detail to the profile of the latest hero of gun rights.

Caffall's stepfather, Richard Weaver, told CBS station KHOU that the suspected gunman refused to work after apparently quitting his job less than a year ago. Weaver said Caffall regularly played video games inside his rental home near the campus. According to KHOU, Northcliff, the third man killed on Monday, was Caffall's landlord.

Weaver told KHOU that Caffall played video games so much that it seemed to be warping his sense of reality. He said Callfall's alleged violent reaction to an eviction notice was not something that surprised him. Weaver even told KHOU he had become concerned that Callfall might hurt, or even kill, one of his own family members in recent months.

This reminds me of the famous Anders.  He played video games too.

Accidental Shooting Death of Tennessee Turkey Hunter - Shooter Goes to Jail

The Daily Herald reports

A Lewis County man will serve more than a year in prison for the 2011 accidental shooting death of another man, county officials said.

William Wesley Allen was found guilty of the criminally negligent homicide of 38-year-old Patrick Bennett after a two-day jury trial June 13-14, the Lewis County Herald reported. He pled guilty to an additional charge of hunting during a closed season.

Judy Bennett, the victim’s mother, told The Daily Herald her son died of a gunshot wound to the neck while turkey hunting in a wooded area on March 27, 2011.

Allen was hunting with a child in the area when the incident occurred. He told a jury he didn’t see Patrick Bennett through the trees, Judy Bennett said.

Allen was sentenced Wednesday to serve 18 months in a state prison for the charge of criminally negligent homicide. He was also ordered to serve 30 days in the county jail for hunting in closed season. The two sentences will be served concurrently, a county court official said.

It's interesting how many negligent shooting stories we've seen among turkey hunters.

1. Tennessee
2. Alabama
3. Oregon
4. North Carolina

And that's just earlier this year. What is it with turkey hunting? Does it attract a lower caliber gun owner than, say, deer hunting?  Excuse the pun?

What do you think about the sentencing of William Wesley Allen?  Was that too severe?  It was an accident, after all.

Please leave a comment.

What the Gun Control Movement Can Learn from Gay Rights

The Atlantic Wire published a fascinating article about how the gun-control movement might improve its approach.  Basically, taking a cue from the marriage-equality movement, gun control folks need to mobilize some wealthy backers.

Which gets at what may be the most important difference between the push for gay marriage and the push for more effective regulation of guns: When gay-rights advocates achieved their marriage victory in New York, they benefited from a relatively weak and poorly organized opposition movement. That's a luxury that gun control advocates will never have.

But if Bloomberg and other wealthy supporters of gun control were to create a single-issue Super-PAC, seed it with $200 million, hire experienced operatives to scare on-the-fence legislators and protect rebels, the political fight with the N.R.A. would start looking a lot fairer, fast. 

Why do you think the gun-control folks haven't already done this? Wouldn't it be fairly easy to find a handful of super-rich supporters who could come up with a couple hundred million? I would imagine some of them would contribute big just to thwart the NRA.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Stop Lead Poisoning - The NRA's Against It

Summit County Citizens Voice

Even though there are plenty of modern, less toxic alternatives available, the National Rifle Association doesn’t want the EPA to address lead hunting ammunition with new regulations.

The gun rights group earlier this month filed legal motions to try and block the EPA from protecting wildlife and people from the effects of poisonous lead hunting ammunition left the wild.

Paranoid as always, the group sees any attempt to regulate anything to do with hunting as an attack on its misguided interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

By now, it’s clear that lead shot is not a good thing for the environment. Nearly 500 scientific papers have documented the dangers to wildlife from this kind of lead exposure.

A recent study by University of Santa Cruz California researchers showed that lead is the leading cause of mortality in endangered California condors. Many of the birds that have been released into the wild have been recaptured and treated for lead poisoning.

Wouldn't moving away from lead be the right thing to do? It seems to me the NRA and its supporters are not interested in that at all. They have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that in any way might limit their "freedom" to do what they want.

Aren't there some pro-gun folks who are also environmentally conscious?

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Canada vs. the US

Thanks to our new commenter Alex for this RCMP link.

• The rate of crime involving firearms is much lower in Canada than in the United States.
• There are more than 30 times more firearms in the United States than in Canada. There are an estimated 7.4 million firearms in Canada, about 1.2 million of which are restricted firearms (mostly handguns). In the U.S., there are approximately 222 million firearms; 76 million of the firearms in circulation are handguns.
• A much higherproportion of homicides in the United States involve firearms. For 1987-96, on average, 65% of homicides in the U.S. involved firearms, compared to 32% for Canada.
• Firearm homicide rates are 8.1 times higher in the United States than in Canada. For 1987-96, the average firearm homicide rate was 5.7 per 100,000 in the U.S., compared to 0.7 per 100,000 for Canada.
• Handgun homicide rates are 15.3 times higher in the United States than in Canada. For 1989-95, the average handgun homicide rate was 4.8 per 100,000 in the U.S., compared to 0.3 per 100,000 for Canada. Handguns were involved in more than half (52%) of the homicides in the U.S., compared to 14% in Canada.
• Rates fornon-firearm homicides are nearly 2 times higher in the United States than in Canada. For 1989-95, the average non-firearm homicide rate was 3.1 per 100,000 people in the U.S., compared to 1.6 per 100,000 for Canada.

Spike Lee: The NRA has the Vulcan Death Grip