Anchorage Woman Charged in Boyfriend's Fatal Shooting

Bonnie Degenstein, 27, was arraigned Saturday in Anchorage, Alaska for second-degree murder. She called police Friday night and reported she had been drinking and playing with guns with her boyfriend when she shot him in the head.

Alaska Dispatch

Twenty-seven-year-old Bonnie Degenstein made her first court appearance Saturday afternoon at the Anchorage jail, less than a day after police arrested the woman on a second-degree murder charge following a 911 call to report she had accidentally shot her boyfriend.

Police say Degenstein called Anchorage Police Department dispatch at 10:16 p.m. Friday. She said she and Ryan Tamborrino, 24, had been drinking and "playing with a guns" at a residence near midtown and that she’d accidentally shot him.

Police responded and found Degenstein sitting on a couch just inside the front door of an upstairs apartment. Tamborrino was sitting on an adjacent couch. The wounded man was slumped over, bleeding profusely from his head but still breathing, the charges say. Tamborrino was transported to a local hospital; he died later of an apparent gunshot wound to his forehead.

A downstairs neighbor who told police the victim was his friend said he went to bed early and did not hear any gunshots. He also said he wasn’t aware of Tamborrino owning firearms. The witness's roommate told police he'd seen the couple fighting two days earlier. Tamborrino was allegedly yelling at Degenstein, who was standing outside the apartment, telling her she needed to leave.

The roommate offered Degenstein a ride home, and during the drive she said she'd been arguing with her boyfriend because she found out he was dating other girls.

Degenstein's next court appearance is scheduled for Dec. 10.

Degenstein has one prior conviction, for drunk driving, received in 2012. 

Fairbanks Borough Rejects Armed Employees

Local news reports

Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly members have decided they don't want employees carrying guns on the job.

The assembly Thursday night voted 6-2 to reject an ordinance that would have allowed borough employees to carry guns if they completed a concealed carry handgun course.

Assemblyman Karl Kassel, the borough's former Parks and Recreation director, said he had supervised an employee who carried a gun before a 1996 rule prohibited them. Working with an armed co-worker made other employees uncomfortable, he said.

An accidental shooting was a bigger worry, Kassel said. Trained professionals have been affected by accidental shootings, he said.

"Over 600 are killed every year accidentally by firearms, way more than are killed from massacre situations," Kassel said. "That's a bigger risk and liability than some nut coming through the front door. I really don't think it's a good idea to add guns to the workplace."

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/07/12/2972392/fairbanks-borough-rejects-armed.html#storylink=cpy

Alaska Woman Shot by Accident - No Charges

Local news reports

Alaska State Troopers say Shawn Strauss on Sunday afternoon was flown from Danger Bay logging camp to Providence Kodiak Island Medical Center.

Troopers tell the Kodiak Daily Mirror that Strauss and fellow Evergreen Timber employee Ricky Aschenbrenner took a logging road about 30 miles from the camp for a beachcombing trip.

They were carrying a shotgun for protection from bears.

As Aschenbrenner tried to remove gun from the driver's side of the vehicle, the gun became stuck.

Aschenbrenner tried to free the gun and it fired, striking Strauss.

People who break the safety rules resulting in a negligent discharge, even if they try to blame the gun or the vehicle, should lose their gun rights.  These people have proven to be unfit. In almost all cases these incidents that make headlines are not the very first infraction.

Noisemakers work better than shotguns for bear protection, anyway.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Lawful Alaska Gun Owner, Enjoying Constitutional Carry, Shoots Walmart Store Manager

 Local news reports

A man driving a motorized shopping cart shot an Anchorage Walmart assistant manager during a dispute over the man's unrestrained dog on a busy Saturday afternoon inside the Midtown store, police said.

Police arrested the suspect minutes later. Medics rushed the victim, a man shot once in his midsection, to a hospital in stable condition, police said. The store was not shut down, a police sergeant said, and business continued as usual minutes later, with many shoppers unaware a shooting had taken place.

Police later identified the shooter as Daniel Pirtle, 45. The victim, Jason Mahi, 33, was in surgery Saturday afternoon, a police spokeswoman said.

Pirtle, a double amputee with metal, prosthetic legs, came into Walmart with his service dog not on a leash, police Sgt. Cameron Hokenson said.

Mahi is an assistant manager at the store, according to Walmart. He asked the man to leave, police said.

How dare that store manager ask the man to leave.  He wasn't doing anything wrong. No wonder he ended up getting shot, he asked for it.

By the way, if the justification for Constitutional Carry is that gun owners are law abiding, shouldn't the ones who do stuff like this count as concealed carry fuck-ups?  The problem is no one is counting and the gun-rights fanatics keep touting those ridiculously low percentages.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/03/16/2828283/one-shot-at-anchorage-walmart.html#storylink=cpy

Alaska Man Dead Because he Left the Kids Access to a Gun

The Anchorage Daily News reports

A man shot dead at a remote cabin south of Skwentna in October was hit by a bullet fired inadvertently by his child, according to Alaska State Troopers.

Charles Lamb, 61, died in the Oct. 15 shooting and it remained unclear for about a month who fired the gun and whether the gunfire had been accidental or the result of foul play. On Friday, troopers spokeswoman Beth Ipsen said one of Lamb's children accidentally shot Lamb with a .38-caliber handgun while Lamb split and stacked firewood.

 "One of the children was handling a small handgun without Mr. Lamb's knowledge when it unintentionally discharged, striking Mr. Lamb in the torso, causing a fatal wound. Mr. Lamb was nearby and out of view of the young child at the time of the shooting."

[troopers spokeswoman Beth] Ipsen declined to release the child's age because it would identify the child, who is not charged with any crime.

Nice of them to not charge the kid with a crime. I wonder if they realize the only one guilty of a crime is dead. In Alaska they love to shift the blame when it comes to gun mismanagement.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Alaska Soldier Commits Negligent Discharge and Suicide

Local news reports

THEY SAY A 20–YEAR OLD ARMY SOLDIER, IDENTIFIED AS CHRIS CARTER, HAD BEEN PLAYING WITH A FIREARM WHEN IT DISCHARGED, THE ROUND STRIKING 21–YEAR OLD AIR GUARDSMAN PHILLIP VILLA.

 THE SOURCE SAYS BOTH MEN MAY HAVE BEEN CONSUMING ALCOHOL WHEN THE INCIDENT OCCURRED.

HE SAYS CARTER, APPARENTLY DISTRAUGHT OVER THE SHOOTING, THEN TURNED THE GUN ON HIMSELF. CARTER DIED JUST  BEFORE 2–30 THIS MORNING.

These were trained gun owners, not stupid criminals that the pro-gun crowd like to denigrate. These were trained and lawful gun owners who were drunk and doing stupid things with a gun.

It's a tragedy that the gun-rights folks keep denying how commonplace the mis-use of guns is among legitimate gun owners.  It's hard to effect a remedy when they deny the existence of the problem.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Lawful Gun Owner in Alaska Leaves 4-Year-old Alone with Hunting Rifle

Local news reports

[A] 30-06 round flew through the building’s upper level.

According to Wrangell Police Department Lieutenant Merlin Ehlers, officers responded to the store at approximately 1:30 p.m. after a single round was discharged from a vehicle parked in front of the business. Ehlers said a child who had been left unattended fired the round from what he called a “large caliber hunting rifle.”

According to WPD chief Doug McCloskey, the child involved is 4 years old.

The bullet traveled through at least four inches of wood flooring, entered a box containing more than 30 feet of plastic bilge tubing and came to rest between three layers of cardboard.

Police have not released the name of the driver of the vehicle, though McCloskey added that the department has referred the case to prosecutors for possible charges.

POSSIBLE charges? What in the world is wrong with these people? They need to investigate? And then what, give the guy a warning to be more careful? Or, maybe to plead guilty to lesser charges than the felony recklessness it was?

This is in gun-friendly Alaska, where the reluctance to hold lawful gun owners responsible for their actions is a way of life.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Alaska Pipeline Damaged by Gunfire

via Now I Know

On October 4, 2001, Mr. Lewis proved, while his parents may have been connoisseurs of baby names (or, at least, pairing first names with the family surname), that wisdom skipped a generation. His rap sheet already included charges of theft, burglary, drunk driving, and weapons violations. But that day, he'd accidentally add criminal mischief and oil pollution to that list. At roughly 2:30 in the afternoon, Daniel Carson Lewis defiled his good name (or, what was left of it) and took five shots at the pipeline with his rifle. One of his bullets hit a weld -- a joint where two pipe sections had been welded together. While the pipeline is covered by a layer of galvanized steel which is typically resistant to gunshots, the joint was a weak point. It burst open and oil came rushing out, at the rate of 140 gallons per minute according to the Associated Press. 

In total, over six thousand barrels leaked out of the pipeline due to Lewis's crime; roughly 4,000 of them were recovered. The damage to the pipeline required it to be shut down for two and a half days, delaying nearly three million barrels of oil. Two acres of tundra were damaged by Lewis's drunken riflery. Lewis was sentenced to sixteen years in prison and ordered to pay for the cleanup costs, totaling $17 million, which, of course, he will almost certainly never be able to afford.

Kodiak Island Double Murder - Mystery Shooter

Fox News reports

Fear that a killer was on the loose spread among residents of an island off Alaska's mainland Friday, with no suspect identified more than 24 hours after someone shot to death two people at a Coast Guard communications station.

"We don't have stuff like that happen here," said Wendy Cavender, a bartender at the B&B bar in Kodiak, a city about eight miles from the Coast Guard base on Kodiak Island. "All anybody knows is that there is a shooter and that person might still be at large."

What do you think? I guess we need more info, huh? Please leave a comment.

Alaska Gun Shop Responsibility Case Goes to the State Supreme Court

SFGate reports

A Bush-era federal law that protects gun dealers from being liable for homicides committed with guns from their shops is under fire in an Alaska court case that has led the Justice Department and gun-control activists to intervene.

At issue is whether a Juneau gun dealer is liable for letting a disheveled homeless felon leave his store with a rifle he used to kill a total stranger. The family of the slaying victim, Anchorage contractor Simone Kim, has filed a wrongful death lawsuit that has made it to the Alaska Supreme Court.

Jason Coday, a drifter with a police record in Utah and Nevada, fatally shot Kim in a random act of violence two days after arriving in Juneau and acquiring a gun from shop owner, Ray Coxe. Coxe said Coday walked out with the gun while his back was turned.

Guilty as charged is what I say. Gun shops have a responsibility to ensure that something like this cannot happen.

What do you think?  Please leave a comment.

Alaska FFL Guy and Hidden Criminal Goes to The Supreme Court

Juneau Empire reports

Jonathan Lowy with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., who is co-counsel with Mark Choate on behalf of the family of the murdered Simone Young Kim, argued that Coxe sells guns off the books then later claims that they are missing. Lowy said a previous audit of Rayco Sales found 200 guns missing from the inventory.

“To put that in context, 90 percent of gun dealers have zero guns missing from inventory,” Lowy said. “ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), they looked at the worst of the worst as far as gun dealers in this country. Out of 800,000 gun dealers, they found 16 in the entire nation who had that sort of total.”

First of all, we have to point out the transparent and blatant spin job in the above paragraph.  If 90% of gun dealers have zero guns missing, then 10% have some guns missing. That makes 80,000 total gun dealers who have guns missing.

The 16 who "had that sort of total," must mean only 16 FFL guys had 200 or more guns missing. That figure stretches credibility, but to say "out of 800,000 gun dealers, they found 16"  is a double spin.  The 16 figure has to be increased to include all those with guns missing even if they were fewer than 200, and the 800,000 figure should be replaced by the total number of inspections.

This would probably bring us back to the 10% figure which is TOO MUCH.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Alaska Attempted Murder Suicide by Shooting

Here is another one.


When you start paying attention, there are an awful lot of these.  They don't always make the national news.  But they are there, week after week day after day, usually more than one of these every week.

If you look.  Crimes of gun violence, crimes of impulse where the ease of instrumentality using a firearm is an integral part of the event.

From the AP, from KTUU tv and MSNBC.com:

Juneau: Police Identify Man in Failed Murder-Suicide

By the Associated Press

KTUU-TV

updated 1/4/2012 3:15:51 PM ETJuneau police have released the name of a man they say was involved in a failed murder-suicide.

Police say the man was 42-year-old Bradley James Mauch of Juneau.
Police say they got a call from a woman on Dec. 30 who said she had been shot.
When police arrived at the home, they found the woman had been shot in the abdomen. They also found Mauch was dead after shooting himself in the head.
The woman was taken to Bartlett Regional Hospital with injuries that were non life-threatening.

DGU's?  Legitimate ones? I've seen one so far this year, in Oklahoma. ONE.

Anchorage Alaska Murder

The Washington Post reports

A disgruntled former employee opened fire in an Anchorage hotel and killed a manager, setting off a four-hour search that ended with the gunman’s arrest, authorities said early Sunday.

What do you think, was he another lawful gun owner gone bad? Or was he a disqualified person who had no trouble getting a gun for himself?

Either way, gun availability to unfit people is a big part of the problem, don't you think?

Please leave a comment.

Anchorage Alaska the Last True Gun Owner's Paradise

The Anchorage Daily News reports

A shootout that left two men dead and two people injured at an East Anchorage bar Monday started with heated words inside the bar, then spilled into the bar's parking lot, where the fight quickly became a gunbattle, according to new court documents.

The story describes a very common scene of men shooting pool in a bar, getting mouthy with each other, and ending up in the parking lot to settle it. The only difference is in Alaska they all have guns.

What's your opinion? Is that what you call paradise? If you wanted to go to a restaurant or bar with your family, would you feel safe?

Please leave a comment.

Connecticut Gun Control Group Working Against Gun Violence

The Waterford Patch reports on a gun control group,  Connecticut Against Gun Violence, with some good ideas.

Pinciaro cited a recent New England Journal of Medicine study that said guns in the home are 47 times more likely to be used against a member of the household. He also said U.S. gun-related deaths average 30,000 a year, compared with 15 in Japan, which has half of our population. Connecticut, he said, has the fourth-lowest rate of gun deaths in the country at 4.7 per 100,000 population, while Alaska ranks first with 24.9 per 100,000.

Now, that's a helluva comparison, 30,000 to 15. Even taking cultural differences into account, those incredible numbers sure seem to support the gun-availability argument.

And, what do you think about that gun-death rate in Alaska. Is that part of the "freedom" they associate with living in the 49th State?

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

Alaska Gun Shop Case

NECN.con reports on the way gun-friendly states conspire to make it easy for criminals and mentally ill folks to get guns.

The case involves a gun used to kill Simone Young Kim in 2006 outside a store in Juneau for no apparent reason. The gun was obtained at the Rayco Sales gun shop.

Ray Coxe, owner of the store, has said the shooter — Jason Coday — chose the rifle, put $200 on the counter and left without completing the required paperwork.

Coday, 33, is serving a 101-year sentence after being convicted of first-degree murder.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.

The Jim Jones of Gun Rights

Chris Brown of Media Matters sent us the link to this wonderful article by his colleague David Hothouse, which contains a fantastic video of Schaeffer Cox.

A video posted online in June 2009 shows Alaska Congressman Don Young signing a revolutionary "Letter of Declaration" written by Alaska militia leader Schaeffer Cox, who was arrested yesterday along with four compatriots for allegedly plotting to kidnap and murder Alaska State Troopers and a Fairbanks judge.

At the 5:00 point, Schaeffer explains economics in a nutshell, simple enough for every gun owner to understand. At 7 minutes he explains how juries work. From there he goes right into what "sovereignity" really means.



Is this guy a smooth talker or what?  Aren't your grass roots gun owners usually suspicious of slick salesmen like this guy?  Is his con job so slick that it fools them? Or is his following not as widespread as he'd like us to think?

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Joe Miller of Alaska

via The Immoral Minority from the Alaska Dispatch.

Former US Senate Candidate Joe Miller is disputing the media's characterization of him as a “close friend and associate” of arrested Alaska Militia leader Schaeffer Cox.

Says the man who hired his own personal militia members to rough up the local media, whose buddies at Drop Zone provided supplies to local militia, and who illegally used North Star Borough computers, and then lied about it, to try and hijack an online poll.

Alaska is that state where they brag about how much freedom they have, isn't it?

Please leave a comment.

Small Town Alaska

This terrible shooting between two friends leaves one dead and the other in jail.  No one can understand it. They're all so shocked. Nothing like this has ever happened in their peaceful town and especially in the "family-friendly" lounge in which the shooting took place.

I wondered if the only difference between this town and Baltimore, let's say, is the number of inhabitants.  Now that Talkeetna has an incident to work with, it should be a simple matter of dividing their population into that of Baltimore's in order to get the factor.  Then, you'll need to add some economic and social problems like they have in the lower 48, and it'll all make sense.

Guns are bad news in bars and everywhere else for that matter.  If this small town was so peaceful, what need was there for carrying a handgun anyway? If Dirk Fast had received an uncalled-for and surprising punch on the nose, the Latitude 62 would still be known as a family-friendly place. But those days are over.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Alaska - 2 Cops Dead, Shooter Barracaded

Alaska, that libertarian paradise where guns abound, is the scene of a terrible shooting.

A standoff was under way Sunday in a tiny southeast Alaska village after a man fatally shot two of the village's four full-time police officers the night before, then barricaded himself in his home, local officials said.

We'll hopefully read more about this later.