Virginia Man Gets Prison Sentence in Accidental Shooting

Local news

A Galesburg man who admitted to committing an accident shooting in November of 2013 will spend some time in prison for the crime.

Knox County Circuit Court records indicate 22-year-old Jared Yard was sentenced yesterday to three years in the Illinois Department of Corrections after pleading guilty in November to a count of Reckless Discharge of a Firearm, and three-and-a-half years in prison to a charge of Possession of a Firearm by a Felon. Judge Scott Shipplett ordered the the sentences to be served concurrently.

Yard was arrested not long after the incident in the one-hundred block of Silver Street.  Police say Yard and a 21-year-old friend were sitting in a pickup truck when he started displaying a sawed-off shotgun. Yard claims he accidentally shot the friend in the leg.The victim was later taken to a Peoria Hospital and had surgery.

A charge of Aggravated Battery with a Firearm was dropped in exchange for Yard’s plea, which could have resulted in significantly more prison time.

Actually, his prison sentence was for being a felon in possession, not for the accidental shooting. As everyone knows, very few accidental shootings result in jail time.

The New Arms Race

Huffington Post

As for "carrying," it's now legal in every state in America and allowed in ever more situations as well. In the last year, for instance, Idaho, where that mother died, became the seventh state to green-light the carrying of concealed guns on college campuses. To put all this in perspective, less than two decades ago, fewer than a million concealed weapons were being legally carried in the U.S.; now, more than one million people are permitted to carry such weapons in Florida alone. In 21st-century America, the "right to bear arms" has been extended in every direction, while there has also been a "sharp rise" in mass killings.

Meanwhile -- since what's an arms race without a second party? -- the police,mainlining into the Pentagon, have been up-armoring at a staggering pace. It's no longer an oddity for American police officers to be armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers as if in a foreign war zone or to arrive on the scene with a mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle previously used in our distant wars. And by the way, while much anger has been displayed, by the police in particular, over the recent murders of two patrolmen in Brooklyn by a disturbed man carrying a Taurus semiautomatic handgun, that anger seems not to extend to his ability to arm himself or to the pawnshop filled with weaponry that originally sold the gun (but not to him).

Another Non-Gun-Free Zone Mass Shooting - Myrtle Beach SC - 3 Dead 1 Wounded

ABC

Three people were killed and a fourth person was wounded in a shooting at an oceanfront motel in Myrtle Beach, one of South Carolina's most popular tourist destinations.