Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Another Mass Shooting

We have too many people shooting other people.  It doesn't matter WHY one person shoots another person; it is wrong for one person to be shooting other people in a civilized society, other than law enforcement when it is absolutely unavoidable.

The difference between a civilized society, a civil society, and a lawless uncivilized society is that we use a legal system and the rule of law to decide who is guilty, who is responsible for wrongs, with accountability and consequences.

It is the antithesis of people taking the law into their own hands, in executing people in taking revenge on people for wrongs real or imagined.  That is why we have courts, it is why we have other people, at a remove from emotional involvement rendering a legal decision.

Commenters here have described this as 'outsourcing' our personal violence.  That is the definition of civilization, it removes as much of the emotional components which escalate violence as possible.  It allows for reparative, restorative justice rather than unfair, imbalanced, vengeful eye-for-an-eye retributive justice that occurs when people take justice into their own hands.

That includes many of the acts that people with guns try to bring under the umbrella of defensive violence, where the action is questionable or avoidable.  We have too many people armed and not only willing, but eager to engage in violence, especially gun violence. 

That violence DAILY spills over to make victims of other people.  It makes us an immoral, violent, unjust, uncivilized society.  We can being changing that by reducing the number of people with guns and the number of guns overall.

From NBC Chicago by way of MSNBC.com

2 Dead, 5 Injured in Restaurant Shooting 

 By


NBCChicago.com
updated 2 hours 44 minutes ago
Two people were killed and five wounded Tuesday in a shooting inside a Church's Fried Chicken restaurant on Chicago's south side.
Police said the shooting, at South Halsted and West 66th streets, stemmed from an argument that started outside. Shortly before 7 p.m., the shooter chased his intended victim into the restaurant with a handgun and opened fire, striking seven people, police said.
First responders found two teens dead on the counter and five others injured outside the restaurant.
A 16-year-old boy and a 51-year-old man were both shot in the leg and taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County. A 17-year-old boy suffered a gunshot wound to the leg, and a 58-year-old man suffered multiple gunshots wounds and were both taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
The age and condition of the fifth victim wasn't immediately known, nor was it clear if the gunman's intended victim was among the dead and injured, police said.
As of Wednesday morning, one person was in critical condition, three in serious condition and one is in the good condition.
At least three people came to the crime scene Tuesday, wailing in tears, barely able to stand.
Latoia Brown said her 16-year-old daughter, Diamond, dated one of the teens who was killed. She describes the boy as a "good kid."
"This must have been an accident. They must have got the wrong person. He did nothing to nobody. It hurts. It hurts bad," she said.
No one was in custody Wednesday morning as police continue looking for the shooter.

23 comments:

  1. "We can being changing that by reducing the number of people with guns and the number of guns overall."

    That's what gun control is all about - across the board supply reduction.

    The tactics of you people are similar to the anti-choice movement: you know you can't ban it, so put up as many practical obstacles, and make it as expensive as possible to exercise a constitutionally protected human right.

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  2. dog gone,

    Let's review the tenant of civilized society that several very smart and courageous people penned so succinctly and eloquently in the United State's Declaration of Independence:
    "We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

    Our government and legal system are a means to secure the inalienable rights of members of our civilized society. They are not the only means to secure inalienable rights; and they are not designed nor intended to secure the safety of citizens during criminal attacks on citizens. The legal system simply spells out rules of conduct and is a means of accountability after an attack. The whole "due process" notion is not so much for the benefit of criminals, it is for the benefit of citizens, in the event that they are wrongly accused or government wishes to abuse its power.

    If someone attacks me, they are wrong and guilty ... and I am going to immediately and assertively defend myself the best way possible given the circumstances of the situation. I don't need anyone's permission to do that. I don't relish the idea of ever having to use force, regardless of the method of delivering that force. What I relish even less is entrusting the well being of my family and myself to a violent criminal ... because that would endanger my family, and that is criminal.

    Until we have Star Trek phaser guns with a "stun" setting, our options are limited, and we are forced to choose the "least of the evils". Letting violent criminals have their way is not an option: ask the Jews how that worked out in Nazi Germany.

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  3. The rule of law is a great idea, and civilized people follow it. What this proves is that there are uncivilized people in this world. It's already illegal for the citizens of Illinois to carry a loaded handgun, especially in Chicago.

    In addition, unless a police officer were on the scene, calling the police would not have changed the body count. A person with a license to carry and a handgun might have.

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  4. Cap'n Crunch:

    This:

    "Letting violent criminals have their way is not an option: ask the Jews how that worked out in Nazi Germany."

    Is one of the dearly cherished myths of the gunzloonz. The jews of Germany were but a fraction of those sent to the death camps. If they had gunz and resisted the Nazis it would have likely resulted in them dying earlier than they did. What the nazis did to european jewry, soviet p.o.w.'s, poles, gypsies and others was horriffically criminal--but the jews having access to pistols and rifles wouldn't have saved them. International indifference to their plight is what sealed the fate of those who died in the holocaust.

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  5. democommie,

    You point out some interesting details. I have always been one to remind people that the Nazis executed something like 250,000 German citizens much less the millions of others (in addition to the Jews) like you pointed out. And international indifference was certainly an enabler.

    There are lots of interesting hypothetical possibilities about how things might or might not have gone differently had the "undesirable" groups been armed. There is no doubt that many "undesirables" would have died even if they resisted. The one thing we know for certain is that all of them would have died if the Allies had not intervened. The point is that entrusting violent criminals with your well being is a very bad idea.

    It is a very unpalatable fact of life that violent criminals exist and predate on citizens. The more options we have in any given situation, the better our odds of coming through those situations unharmed.

    At the same time, I would not consider an event to have a "good outcome" if the victim survives but kills/injures bystanders. Thus I want a reasonable estimation of how many bystanders are injured/killed in such events annually.

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  6. So from your comments about the incident I get that you are talking about how people should not be carrying a gun to defend themselves and that CCW is just a form of "people taking the law into their own hands". But of course this happened in the one state where there is no CCW and no lawful carrying of firearms.

    Another story of gun violence in a city that has the most stringent gun control. Just more gun control FAIL.

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  7. FWM writes:So from your comments about the incident I get that you are talking about how people should not be carrying a gun to defend themselves and that CCW is just a form of "people taking the law into their own hands". But of course this happened in the one state where there is no CCW and no lawful carrying of firearms.

    But it is adjoining other sources of firearms, like Indiana.

    Indiana has no penalties for straw purchase;
    doesn't require a background check for guns sold at gun shows;
    doesn't require a purchase permit for all handgun sales;
    doesn't prohibit misdemeanor violent criminals from owning handguns,
    doesn't require reporting lost or stolen firearms to authorities,
    doesn't allow local communities to enact gun laws, and
    doesn't allow inspection of gun dealers -- all laws identified as helping restrict the export of crime guns.

    Another story of gun violence in a city that has the most stringent gun control. Just more gun control FAIL.

    It would also seem to be a clear case of a legal gun that some legal owner didn't secure, so that it got into the hands of a criminal.

    Which is why it takes fewer guns in the possession of you gun nuts to really top gun violence like this. You can't hang onto your weapons very well apparently - not well enough- as a group.

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  8. There you go, Dog Gone, picking on those poor straw purchasers. I have to wonder where that term came from. It's something like a straw man, no? Seriously, we're waiting for proof that these guns all came from nefarious legal gun owners who sell trunkloads of Saturday night specials out of their cars in a dark parking lot. It just never could be possible that criminals pass guns back and forth to each other, now could it?

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  9. dog gone said "It would also seem to be a clear case of a legal gun that some legal owner didn't secure, so that it got into the hands of a criminal."

    There is nothing in that story that indicates that firearm wasn't first purchased by a yet to be convicted drug addict.

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  10. The daily mass shootings are just a small price to pay for all that freedom.

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  11. mikeb302000 said...
    "The daily mass shootings are just a small price to pay for all that freedom."

    In this case, that's the price we pay for gun control. Gun control tied the hands of the victims so that they couldn't defend themselves.

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  12. Someguy writes:
    In this case, that's the price we pay for gun control. Gun control tied the hands of the victims so that they couldn't defend themselves


    The hell it is.

    The opening sentences of this crime description :Two people were killed and five wounded Tuesday in a shooting inside a Church's Fried Chicken restaurant on Chicago's south side.
    Police said the shooting, at South Halsted and West 66th streets, stemmed from an argument that started outside.


    I don't care what kind of ammunition you have in your firearm, THIS was never, at ANY time, a good place to draw a firearm and start shooting at anyone involved.

    For starters, this also strongly suggests that it would be stupid to start firing in this situation - it SOUNDS great, makes for a lot of macho swagger, but it would be STUPID to do so. Shortly before 7 p.m., the shooter chased his intended victim into the restaurant with a handgun and opened fire, striking seven people, police said.

    How do YOU plan to be clear that this is not, just for openers, an undercover cop who is doing the firing? You just somehow magically KNOW who the good guy and the bad guys are?

    In this case it wasn't - but you wouldn't know that, as a pedestrian outside, or a customer inside this restaurant. You wouldn't know if any of the other people being chased were armed either.

    You could easily find yourself with ALL of the people involved turning guns on YOU, with no where for you to hide.

    What this does show is that you - like other commenters here - dangerously fail to have adequate information to make proper assessments about when and how to intervene. It shows that you are so damned dangerously in a rush to shoot someone with your fetish object that you want to do that where it poses a greater danger to the rest of us than it offers any form of safety for anyone.

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  13. GC writes:In addition, unless a police officer were on the scene, calling the police would not have changed the body count. A person with a license to carry and a handgun might have.

    And you could tell the necessary information about this shooting...how? I ask you the same question that I put to someguy - how would you know if this were a case of an off duty or undercover cop lawfully pursuing someone, possibly a group of people, who had been committing a crime, where he had previously identified himself?

    You would find this a situation that meets the rules of firearm safety...how?

    All this shows us is that we would be worse off with people like you in a real crisis than we are with you not carrying.

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  14. What we do know is that there are fewer crimes with guns where there are fewer guns.

    ALWAYS. Because in every case, fewer guns end up in the hands of criminals.

    More guns do not reduce crime, nor does more carrying of guns by idiots like those who make unsupportable claims here.

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  15. What we do know is that there are fewer crimes with guns where there are fewer guns.

    ALWAYS. Because in every case, fewer guns end up in the hands of criminals.

    More guns do not reduce crime, nor does more carrying of guns by idiots like those who make unsupportable claims here.

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  16. Dog Gone,

    I said a license holder might have been able to stop the killing. Might. That suggests a possibility, not a certainty. I doubt that an undercover cop would walk into a restaurant and open fire for exactly the reasons that you go on about--safety. We can argue out the details of each particular event all day, but my claim here was simply that a licensee might have done something.

    Mikeb302000,

    Daily mass shootings? Where's that?

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  17. There is nothing in that story that indicates that firearm wasn't first purchased by a yet to be convicted drug addict.

    So the choices are 1. firearm was purchased by be drug addict who was not yet convicted -- gee that suggests we could avoid this sort of thing by making a drug test a condition of legal purchase doesn't it?
    or
    2. my previous statement, legal guns are getting into the hands of criminals too easily, including legal gun owners not sufficiently securing their firearms to prevent that happening.

    and/or
    3. we could avoid this almost entirely by having fewer people with far fewer guns, which equates consistently to fewer crimes with guns, fewer deaths (suicides, homicides, accidental deaths) and fewer injuries with firearms.

    So the choice is this - or stricter gun limitations.

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  18. dog gone said...
    ".....at South Halsted and West 66th streets, stemmed from an argument that started outside."

    Where the itended victim fled, as suggest people do.

    "How do YOU plan to be clear that this is not, just for openers, an undercover cop who is doing the firing? You just somehow magically KNOW who the good guy and the bad guys are? "

    Are you serious? Is the training of law enforcement that limited where a LEO would chase a suspect into a restaurant and shoot 6 other people?

    "but you wouldn't know that, as a pedestrian outside, or a customer inside this restaurant"

    As a pedestrian or a customer, I would know for certain that a LEO wouldn't run into a restaurant and start shooting people.

    "What this does show is that you - like other commenters here - dangerously fail to have adequate information to make proper assessments about when and how to intervene. It shows that you are so damned dangerously in a rush to shoot someone with your fetish object that you want to do that where it poses a greater danger to the rest of us than it offers any form of safety for anyone."

    what this does show is that those two adult customers were bound from protecting themselves. I didn't suggest that had someone else besides your "police officer" have a firearm, that they could have stopped the shooting, I suggested that it wasn't a possibility because of the tight gun control.

    I wonder why you never hear about mass shootings at police stations. Certainly police stations have more guns than restaurants.

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  19. It's the lack of proper gun control that "might" have allowed this bad guy to have a gun in the first place.

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  20. I want to make two very important points.

    (1) Concealed carry should be almost exclusively for the protection of the person carrying. It is very difficult to know for certain who are criminals when an altercation is between other people. Unless the other parties were very close to you AND you saw and heard everything AND know beyond a shadow of a doubt who the ciminal/s is/are, you should not intervene.
    (2) In this case, after the person shot multiple bystanders, it became clear that person was a criminal. Even then, returning fire in a small crowded restaurant was wrought with peril and could have easily been a very bad idea.

    I can think of only two possible reasons and methods to return fire safely:
    (1) You could try to shoot into something that you know for an absolute certainty will stop your bullet. The point is not to shoot the criminal. The point is to make the criminal stop their attack and run away because they think someone is returning fire at them. (They don't know that you purposefully shot into a stack of magazines.)
    (2) If everyone within 10 feet or so of a line drawn between you and the criminal are on the floor AND the criminal is standing up AND there is a decent "backstop" beyond the criminal AND you are confident in your ability to hit a target at that distance, then and only then should you consider returning fire. And if you decide to do that, you should be returning fire from behind cover/concealment.

    There is no getting around it: bad guys often have an advantage because they don't care about "collateral damage". As much as we "good guys" want to save lives, we undermine that objective if we add to the body count in the process of trying to take out the criminal.

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  21. I want to point out something else.

    It is easy for people to sit at their computers and spew comments one way or another. And I am convinced that the anonymity and distance between blog participants and the topics somehow embolden (for lack of a better term) people to be quite a bit more "rash" (again for lack of a better term) than they would be in person.

    The idea of armed citizens injuring or killing bystanders while defending themselves weighs heavily on many gun control advocates, especially dog gone. While the responses of gun rights advocates seem to validate those fears, I want to make sure people like dog gone understand that regardless of what armed citizens think they might do, we have to look at what they are actually doing.

    I mentioned this to dog gone before and I never saw a response from her. She mentions potential dangerous responses to situations and equates those with risk. And here is the problem with that. There are literally billions of rocks flying around our solar system and it would be extremely dangerous if any of them hit us in the head. It sounds like a huge risk: billions of flying rocks capable of causing severe injuries and death. But it isn't a huge risk. When is the last time a space rock hit someone in the head? Thus we don't walk around wearing helmets all the time.

    So what is the risk of armed citizens shooting bystanders while defending themselves? We don't have to guess. If it were happening, the lamestream media would be all over it. It happens so infrequently that there are no databases and no one can produce even 20 documented cases happening annually. Something that isn't happening isn't a significant risk and shouldn't be the basis for major policy decisions.

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  22. dog gone wrote:
    "3. we could avoid this almost entirely by having fewer people with far fewer guns, which equates consistently to fewer crimes with guns, fewer deaths (suicides, homicides, accidental deaths) and fewer injuries with firearms."

    Is your objective fewer injuries and deaths with firearms? Or is your objective fewer total injuries and deaths regardless of weapons? Or is your objective fewer total injuries and deaths of citizens who are not criminals regardless of weapons?

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  23. "Indiana has no penalties for straw purchase; "

    Straw purchasing is illegal in Indiana because federal law prohibits it.

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