Mass Shooting

[DKTanker]

Hispanic man in full body armor went on a shooting spree in Allen, Texas (suburb north of Dallas) this afternoon.  Killed 8, he's dead.  Not clear yet whether LEO shot him or self-inflicted, but it was a head shot.  No further information.

LEO responding to an unrelated call apparently took out the shooter.

 

Edited May 7, 2023 by DKTanker

[Ivanhoe]

72 hour rule should be obeyed, but something caught my ear in breaking local TV news videos. A guy whose son works at H&M called his father, who drove to the mall and ended up trying to provide 1st aid to several victims out in the parking lot. According to him, he got there before police. 

 

[rmgill]

Dang. Just put it in drive and floor it over the dude. It's a rifle, so it's not going to care about the windshield, hunker down. But if he's facing the other way, he's not going to hear you over the ringing from the shots of his rifle up close. 

[Insert Admiral Greer Quote here]

[BansheeOne]

Not a "mass" again, but as an apparent workplace shooting, remarkable enough for Germany.

Quote

Germany: Two killed in Mercedes factory shooting

Richard Connor

21 minutes ago

Two people were killed in a shooting when a man opened fire at a Mercedes plant in southwestern Germany. A suspect has been taken into custody, police said.

A large-scale emergency operation was underway at the Mercedes plant in Sindelfingen on Thursday morning after emergency calls reported a shooting.

A special operations team sealed off the site with a full-scale deployment including two helicopters and several emergency doctors.

"One person was killed, one seriously injured," the Bild newspaper cited a police source as saying. "The motive is still unclear. The perpetrator has been arrested."

The DPA news agency later reported that a second person had died after sustaining severe injuries. 

Bild said the shots were believed to have been fired at a production line team leader, with the perpetrator being a 53-year-old external worker from a logistics firm. 

Multiple shots were reportedly fired at about 7:45 a.m. local time (0545 GMT/UTC). Police tweeted about an hour later that an operation involving police and rescue workers was ongoing on the factory complex, some 15 kilometers (just under 10 miles) southwest of Stuttgart. Authorities confirmed a suspect had been taken into custody.

Prosecutors said the arrested individual was believed to have acted alone. Emergency services were said to have carried out a search of the building looking for other injured people.

Employees reported that the scene was the automaker's Factory 56, where the firm's flagship S-Class vehicle is produced.

[...]

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-two-killed-in-mercedes-factory-shooting/a-65584686

[Sardaukar]

What do US residents think about:

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), which compel authorities to confiscate firearms.

We have bit similar things in Finland. 

[rmgill]

If they aren’t as permanent as an accusation and the confiscation includes compensation for value, sure.

But I have known of folks who had firearms taken due to legal entanglements and when it was all sorted out the police refused to return firearms or worse stole components off of firearms. 

[DB]

I'm sure that I've seen reports in here that items have been destroyed almost immediately after what was supposed to be a temporary confiscation. Probably in NY. Probably in some cop's gun locker if they were quality items.

[Ivanhoe]

17 hours ago, Sardaukar said:

What do US residents think about:

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), which compel authorities to confiscate firearms.

We have bit similar things in Finland. 

Considering that the FBI now overtly labels conservative Catholics as potential domestic terrorists, not to mention parents who show up at school board meetings, probably not going to end well. 

 

[rmgill]

4 hours ago, DB said:

I'm sure that I've seen reports in here that items have been destroyed almost immediately after what was supposed to be a temporary confiscation. Probably in NY. Probably in some cop's gun locker if they were quality items.

One was a case where a friend was threatened by a homeless man outside of a store with a knife. He drew his gun and warded off the homeless man. The homeless man later went and called the cops and my friend was later found that night by police who arrested him and confiscated his two handguns. Later, the court case fell apart because homeless complainant was unable to be found to actually go to court (lack of evidence). A year went by and the city adamantly refused to return the firearms that they had confiscated, even when told to do so by a court order. Since no one person is responsible for the action, it was hard to get a court to actually enforce the order. He eventually just abandoned the property. 

Or we can just look at New Orleans PD's confiscation of firearms during Katrina. They dumped them all in a container then couldn't figure out if anyone REALLY owned what they took. We have a word for that, it's called theft. 

And yes. Have a nice $2000 rifle taken by police with a $1000 scope on it? It'll end up with no scope on return (if returned) OR banged up, taken to the range, shot, rust and otherwise denuded of value. 

[Skywalkre]

On 5/12/2023 at 1:46 PM, Sardaukar said:

What do US residents think about:

Extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs), which compel authorities to confiscate firearms.

We have bit similar things in Finland. 

As mentioned in previous weeks, yeah, I'm ok with the idea.  In fact it seems pretty straightforward that something like this should exist.

Technically we have these already in parts of the country but through a combination of lack off resources allocated or lack of enforcement from appropriate bodies they don't appear to do much.  I was just reading about a case of a mass shooting in CO where the family of the shooter attempted to have his guns taken away (the article highlighted how in this county every single request made was by family... not one from government officials), the request was approved by the courts, but the local sheriff refused to carry it out.  The guy then went on to carry out his attack.

There's also the issue of suicide as I've been trying to bring up repeatedly, lately.  More folks die to suicide by gun then these violent mass shootings/gang-related deaths.  For people like this family may be the only ones that are aware the person is slipping away... so to have a temporary recourse to buy time for the person just seems like a no-brainer.

But... this is America... and it's easier to talk about abortion then guns here.

[rmgill]

4 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

But... this is America... and it's easier to talk about abortion then guns here.

It's EASY to talk about guns. It's practically a knee jerk reaction to use passive voice and blame the crimes on the gun or the SUV used to commit a mass murder. It's hard to talk about the suspension of rights and commitment of people against their will for significant mental illness or repeated violent acts. That's why so many recidivist criminals are out on the streets and more are released each day. In fact, the left is doing all it can to de-stigmatize mental illness and treat it all as if it's normal. 

Re-centering the edge cases is what the left is about. 

Skywalkre, explain how the latest shooting in Texas, where the illegal immigrant obtained a firearm, illegally would ahve been stopped by a law saying he couldn't own said gun. 

[rmgill]

5 hours ago, Skywalkre said:

There's also the issue of suicide as I've been trying to bring up repeatedly, lately.  More folks die to suicide by gun then these violent mass shootings/gang-related deaths.  For people like this family may be the only ones that are aware the person is slipping away... so to have a temporary recourse to buy time for the person just seems like a no-brainer.

If you compare suicide  rates by northern hemisphere nations, you find the similar rates of suicide. The mechanism just shifts to other mechanisms. Ban guns (good fucking luck) and you just have more people using cars, trains, buildings, poison, etc to commit suicide. 

Why does the US, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden have similar rates of suicide? Is it guns or something else?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate#/media/File:Map_of_countries_by_suicide_rate,_WHO_(2019).svg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate

(see it's really EASY for the left to blame guns, it's single variable thinking, simplistic, pedantic and facile. It's harder to think about it as a multivariable problem and address the complexities, also harder to peg a party platform on it where you promise change)

Edited May 16, 2023 by rmgill

[Burncycle360]

Impulsive suicide (and homicide) are a real thing, and tragic, but none of that has anything to do with my right to self defense.

 

Will the banning of firearms reduce the overall number of impulsive harm? Almost certainly. However, it can never get it to zero, only closer to the baseline, and the cost to achieve what little gains are achievable is well beyond the point of diminishing returns. In 2013, the CDC figured defensive uses of firearms ranged from 500,000-3,000,000 annually, well in excess of the suicides and criminal use of firearms even on the most conservative end, and I cannot in good conscious advocate for adding regulation that requires driving defensive uses down to zero in an effort to save someone who ends up just driving their car into oncoming traffic instead. No.

 

Red flag laws were discussed earlier, they're terrible. 

Edited May 16, 2023 by Burncycle360

[rmgill]

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/11/weaponizing-death/
 

Victor Davis Hanson on the politicization of shootings and the disparate standards when it comes to the narrative. 

[Burncycle360]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CsIUSs6MMPN/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

 

 

[Skywalkre]

On 5/15/2023 at 5:11 PM, rmgill said:

Skywalkre, explain how the latest shooting in Texas, where the illegal immigrant obtained a firearm, illegally would ahve been stopped by a law saying he couldn't own said gun. 

Not what I've been talking about...

[Skywalkre]

On 5/16/2023 at 3:40 AM, Burncycle360 said:

Red flag laws were discussed earlier, they're terrible. 

They appear not to be properly funded or enforced.  That Colorado case I read about showed a lot of the concerns you had just aren't true currently. 

[Burncycle360]

Quote

They appear not to be properly funded or enforced. 

Real communism hasn't been tried, basically?

It doesn't matter that you can find an anecdote which you believe disproves concerns because that individual case didn't appear to be one that was abused. It's specious reasoning, just like I don't see any tigers around so the tiger deterrent app on my phone must be working. You can't draw any meaningful conclusions in that direction for any given anecdote because there's no way to determine how many incidents didn't occur due to the intervention, and it's disingenuous to assume any intervention counts as an incident that didn't occur since most mentally disturbed people will never go on to harm themselves or others.

What matters is the principles it violates, the precedents it sets, and the potential for abuse... not if "done correctly" but if a bad actor was at the helm with the intent of wielding the power of the state against an individual that has the wrong ideology. The UK, Canada and Australia is a glimpse of what lies down that road; a turn key totalitarian state. It's irrelevant that such an eventuality isn't manifest in the moment, the stage is set.  You don't design a government or laws assuming the state has your best interests at heart, you just don't. You design it to mitigate the damage bad actors within the state can cause, whether they think their intentions are noble or not.

The tradeoff of guarding against this possible outcome is that sometimes mentally ill people or violent criminals have one additional tool available to hurt themselves or others. I'm fine with that, because a non trivial number of them would even without access to this particular tool, and there are many ways to ameliorate the dangers of it without opening an avenue for the state to oppress its ideological opponents 

Edited May 19, 2023 by Burncycle360

[Sardaukar]

There are some studies about why people turn their inner rage into mass shootings.

Some have genuine (even justified) hate towards people being bullied at school and cannot handle it. 

Some have imaginary issues.

Why people flip (some are actually born that way) can be a mystery.

For some it's political.

But common denominator is that they are somehow "flawed" people (read that "fucked up in the head").

 

[BansheeOne]

There are clearly more issues than just guns cooking here, so further observations might be rather for the Protests or Balkans thread.

Quote

Protests rock Serbia after mass shootings

Jelena Djukic-Pejic | Nemanja Rujevic

5 hours ago

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Serbia following two mass shootings. The protests are directed against the government. Now President Aleksandar Vucic has responded with an event of his own.

"We march ten to twelve hours a day and only take short breaks to recover," says Sladjan. Together with a dozen young Serbs from southern Kosovo, he's been walking toward Serbia's capital Belgrade for over a week.

The approximately 400-kilometer-long march is ending in a large demonstration being held by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Friday, May 26, 2023. As party leader, Vucic hopes to demonstrate the strength of his governing Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). "We feel obligated to support the President — after all, he's been helping Serbs in Kosovo for years," says Sladjan.

This time, however, the issue isn't the ongoing tension between Serbia and Kosovo. Right now Vucic has other concerns. Since the beginning of May 2023, 18 people have been killed in mass shootings and the country is in uproar. Most shocking were the murders at a school in Belgrade where the shooter was only 13 years old. 

A dangerous protest for the government

The fractured middle-class and left-leaning green opposition has apportioned most of the blame for the shootings to Vucic and his party. Tens of thousands of demonstrators have already gathered three times in Belgrade and blocked a bridge on the freeway to protest the "climate of violence" that has been cultivated by both the nation's ruling politicians and the media, which remains staunchly loyal to Vucic.

The opposition is demanding the resignation of certain government figures, as well as a ban on reality shows with violent content and a removal of the licenses for pro-Vucic television channels Happy and Pink. The next protest is scheduled for Saturday, May 27, 2023. The plan is to demonstrate in front of the headquarters of Serbia's public broadcaster RTS.

"The protests have become dangerous for those in power," Belgrade political scientist Vujo Ilic tells DW. "People wanted to express their grief after those two tragic shootings, but now everything has become politicized. The situation has also not been helped by the government calling the protesters 'political scavengers.'"

Discontent is growing

Most of the media remain loyal to Vucic, with opposition figures alternatively labeled "hyenas" or "foreign agents" seeking to exploit the shootings to seize power. But independent observers in the country are certain that discontent with Vucic is growing.

For the past eleven years, Vucic has ruled the Balkan country with an iron fist, cleverly maneuvering Serbia's relations with the EU and Russia. Domestically, he presents himself as the "nation's father," while handing out jobs to SNS party members and loyal followers. Since being in office, elections have been suspected of being rigged.

Confronted with the wave of protests, which are the largest since he took office, Vucic is now counting on a rally of his own to put critics in their place. "He wants to use a 'counter-demo' to show his supremacy on the streets as well," Ilic said. "The message to his constituents is that we still outnumber them."

[...]

https://www.dw.com/en/serbia-rocked-by-protests-and-counterprotests-after-mass-shootings/a-65737898

[bojan]

Yeah, those have basically nothing to do with guns or really even this particular instance of mass shootings, those events only served as catalyst for a long accumulated anger because or regular abuses of power and corruption by government. In that sense protests are real grassroots level, with little organization*. And were quite big, one on the last Friday (May 19th) was probably largest ones since October 5th 2000. They are also extremely diverse, from looney left, various semi-left "European type social democrat", (aka "There is no alternative to Serbia in EU"), over centrists, right** and up the, through not including extreme far right.

*Which also means that if anyone of the standard "opposition" steps forward to claim protests for own goals number of people attending are going to drop significantly.

**For USians - There is no real "right wing" party in Serbia, those called so are mostly populist idiots with very little fiscal conservatives, even less then some "social democrats" and "centrists".

All that said unless Vucic does something really monumentally stupid (and todays gathering is quite stupid, but there is a lot of ways left to escalate stupidity) I think those will burn out if left on their own, just like last time.

Edited May 26, 2023 by bojan

[Tim the Tank Nut]

Burncycle's "principles" paragraph should be required reading in every civics class from now til the end of time

[rmgill]

 

[Ivanhoe]

What the heck is wrong with the WCSO? 190 employees total, surely they could have sent backup a little sooner. Current sheriff has been in office since 2003, so he sure as heck didn't get fired. 

 

 

[rmgill]

Looks like a pretty big county for 190 people on the SO. 

Figure what, 1/2 are beat cops, the rest are support staff or jail staff? 
So 90 officers, assuming 12 hour shifts, 4 on, 3 days off, what 22 officers possible on a given shift. Probably less due to sick, vacation, the what not. For that large a county....probably figure 8-10 officers max for a given shift. 


https://www.google.com/maps/place/Whatcom+County,+WA/@48.6848551,-122.2551129,201598m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x5485170bb49ea28b:0x3f1f5b2d6cd7b1ab!8m2!3d48.8787167!4d-121.9718658!16zL20vMG1sdzE?entry=ttu