Florida Man Commits Triple Murder - "He Just Snapped"

George Mason III

Local news reports

His half-brother Gabriel "Bo" Taylor lived there with their mother Tracy Taylor and their 81-year-old grandmother, Jannie V. Taylor. So did Tracey's other son, Ralph Peyton.

"He was here every day," Donna Stanley, who lives across the street, said about Mason as she stood in the middle of the road Saturday morning. "He'd be here right now."

Instead, the 42-year-old Lutz man with a lengthy criminal record was in the hospital under police guard, accused of one of the most horrific shooting rampages in the city's history.

Police say Mason fatally shot Peyton, Jannie Taylor and Tarasha Yata Townsend, his 37-year-old girlfriend and mother of two of his daughters. Gabriel Taylor, 33, was critically wounded.

According to investigators, Mason chased Gabriel Taylor to the nearby corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Main Street and shot him multiple times with a 9 mm handgun. Almost in the same moment, Mason was struck by a Dodge pickup truck heading east on MLK.

Mason and Taylor were taken to Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point, where Taylor underwent surgery, Brooksville Police Chief George Turner said. Taylor was in guarded condition Saturday night. Mason has a broken back, broken leg and a broken arm, Turner said. No condition was available.

Georgia Says Ex-Cop Convicted of Sexually Assaulting a Woman With His Gun Gets to Own a Gun

Slate

What does someone have to do in order to lose gun rights in Georgia? Apparently, sexually assaulting a woman at gunpoint—even threatening to anally penetrate her with the gun—is not enough. Ian Millhiser at ThinkProgress reports on the shocking case of Dennis Krauss, a now former police officer who was convicted of sexually assaulting a woman in 1999 who had called 911 to complain that her husband was beating her. According to the appeals court decision that upheld Krauss' conviction, instead of helping the woman, Krauss threatened to take her to jail if she didn't have sex with him. 

Krauss checked them into a motel room while the woman sat terrified, thinking she was under arrest, in the car. "I had to, I was afraid to leave, he, you know, he is a police officer;  you don't just leave," the victim explained. Once he had her in the motel room, according to the 2003 appeals court decision, "Krauss took his gun from his gun belt and told the victim he wanted to have anal sex with her with the gun." Then he pushed her, pulled off her pants, and raped her. 

Despite Krauss' sexual assault conviction, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles restored his right to carry a firearm in July 2013. This is coming to light now because the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has published an exposé of the Georgia courts' tendency to restore gun privileges to convicted felons. The Journal-Constitution counted 358 violent felons who were able to regain gun rights in a six-year period, 32 who killed someone and 44 who were convicted of sex crimes.

The Correlation between Lax Gun Laws and Crime Gun Exports to Other States

My recent post on the statistics for deaths of law enforcement, in which I was focusing on the deaths by firearms in the context of the Virginia Tech shooting of a police officer, raised some interesting questions.

One of those questions had to do with the problems of guns used in crimes coming across borders from other states and gun regulation, as it pertains to firearm deaths (and injuries) generally, and those of law enforcement specifically.

Because most of the pro-gun crowd seem to have a difficult time acknowledging the connection and correlation between the number of firearms in this country, and the number of firearms deaths and injuries in this country, as a basis for firearm regulation, I found the following site to be of interest.  It shows very clearly how lax firearm laws in some states create greater problems for the adjoining states.  I think this is a good foundation for why we need uniform federal regulation of firearms, rather than the lax and inconsistent, and sometimes very ill enforced, patchwork of state laws.

The web site Trace the Guns has an excellent interactive map of crime gun exports, that shows clearly which states have the highest exports, and that documents a comment made by our own democommie on a related post:

democommie said...

FatWhiteMan: This: <i>"but the availability of firearms from outside of Virginia coming over their borders remain a problem."</i> Is, to you, an irresponsible statement? I think there are some giant leaps on your side.

One of the states which shows the HIGHEST rate of firearms export to other states is in fact West Virginia, which borders Virginia. I believe has relatively lax firearms laws, per this article in Wikipedia which conveniently provides a summary of gun laws for comparison by state.

Where I believe our readers who check out the Wikipedia article "Gun Laws in the United States (by state)" will find the difference between the two states is in the kind of check that is mandated in Virginia that were enacted after the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting; those measures are addressed in a recent post here.

Clearly the information on the weapon, the identity of the apparent shooter who subsequently committed suicide, the motive and other details are still emerging, but I believe the contrast between the export of firearms from West Virginia, in comparison to Virginia and other states, and in comparison to the data on law enforcement deaths is significant to the ongoing debate here.