NSR: A gun on Every Corner: Discuss the NRA, Gun Ownership and All Those Non-Mass Shootings..

Entirely possible-- but:

Not sure the instinct to blame the cops-- which I share-- is reasonable, absent a good deal more of the story than we have at a distance and this early. From what little I know of the sequence of events, the police may have had or thought they had reason to take the UPS driver as part of the scheme rather than a hostage. In fact, if he was a new hire that tends toward the possibility he was part of it-- it is at least a possibility needing investigation. He seems to have been awfully conveniently located when they needed him, and we haven't heard how easily that part of the sequence fell together? Was he driving throughout the chase?

And if his willing participation was the police' working theory, the priority is protecting the traffic jam bystanders from all the parties in the truck.

200 shots seems excessive though-- how can you possibly feel sure of your downrange being empty for that many shots in that crowded a scene?

Incidentally, I think the court in the blown up house case made a reasonable decision; the po-po cannot be expected to protect lives and persons in such a case and worry about property as well-- we have to make their jobs possible. (This is why this weekly parade of video of folks being gunned down for little apparent reason is so upsetting-- shit happens but when it happens for careless and negligent and bigoted reasons it endangers not just the victim, but the shooter too-- by painting the presumptive reasons for tolerance with suspicion and paranoia.) The appropriate redress in blown up house cases is not a lawsuit, but special legislative relief from one or more levels of government; and it should be on the basis of relief, not "made whole." The perp is the only one who did anything wrong.

And before you fire up the keyboard to say "easy for me to say," it really isn't. My family suffered a very similar reverse, as almost everything we had was tied up in our first house in my childhood, and it was confiscated for a flood control project after the 1955 hurricane in New England. The legally required compensation for such condemnation was still at levels set before the depression-- pennies on the tens of dollars.

We lived a Monty Python existence for several years; "Spam, spam, spam, wonderful spam!" Breakfast, lunch and dinner... Fried spam, baked spam, hashed spam, scrambled spam, spam omelettes, spam and beans. War surplus spam was available by the case, for pennies on the tens of dollars too, and we bought a truckload and turned 2/3 of the food budget to rent and then mortgage on the new house... the hole was deep, and we are our way out. I actually ate my way through disgusted and back to grateful somewhere between age 2 1/2 and 6.

 

did you see the part of the video where the UPS driver is trying to get out the left side of the truck, several police are shooting at him, and he collapses down the truck stairs?

 

no it just show the police shooting at the guy and the guy going down

can see bullets striking the truck near him

Edit" Found the full video. There's actually two guys trying to get out the side of the truck and they're crawling/crouching and something falls out of the hand of the guy who falls down the stairs. So there are some points in the police's favor.

 

Sorry; I should have said "anyone" rather than "you." And I was being lazy not wanting to find the post that pulled in the house destruction case and do a whole second lengthy post, so sorry twice.

 

I couldn't tell if that was the putative hostage or one of the putative hijackers. There seem to be at least two bodies there at the end, and only one of them seems to have clearly been shot from outside-- though both might have been?

There does seem to be one discharge from within the truck, but even that might have been the flash of a shot from outside striking metal.

Or if I'm the official driver and I am a hostage and one of the perps gets shot down in front of me, I'm apt to take his gun and shoot the other, even though that is likely to be misinterpreted from outside. I'm going to figure that my life is already at more than extreme risk, and at least I can improve the chances of the bystanders by shutting the malign shooters down...

 

I read the same comments from a number of LEO's / Swats or retired ones. It is basically unanimous that this shooting was totally unwarranted. I understand as well the urge to defend the police but the images are there to see.

 

I don't have, and was trying to make clear that I don't have, any such indication? But it does seem obvious as a possibility the police have to consider, and that there are dozens of things that might have happened at the time the perps boarded the truck which might have given them that impression incorrectly, as well as the, you know, possibility that it was actually true? As the event unfolds, training or no training you are going to have to make some assumptions, and if the driver was helpful when they got on-- presumably not having a clue what was going on-- or at gunpoint that he could see and they couldn't--they/he-- because someone was presumably in command?-- might get pressured in that direction incorrectly.

We're at a distance, and it looks pretty bad-- but there may be a lot of detail we can't see that explains a lot of it... Its my old saw about "you have to trust the guy in the room"-- even if you can't and its wrong it may not all be as all wrong as it looks. Circumstances may alter the case.

But that sure makes a bad first impression, and I'm certainly not saying it shouldn't; just that we need detail, and fairly solid detail at that, before we say "cops suck" each time. Shit happens, and in a nation of 330 million its happening somewhere each and every day, and one needs to avoid giving each case a significance it does not merit just as one needs to not get so inured to it that one stops paying attention.

 

Pensacola NAS instructor called shooter "Porn Stash" in class which pissed him off:

The Saudi Air Force trainee who killed three sailors at a U.S. Navy training center in Florida last week had previously filed a complaint against one of his instructors for ridiculing him with the nickname “Porn Stash,” The New York Times reports. The gunman has been identified as Second Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, who was a visiting Saudi student at the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Earlier this year, he reportedly filed an official complaint against one of his instructors, who left him angered in class by giving him the derogatory nickname. “I was infuriated as to why he would say that in front of the class,” the Saudi trainee reportedly wrote. Investigators are still searching for a motive for the Friday morning attack, and there has been no suggestion that the April incident led to the shooting. The instructor reportedly asked Lt. Alshamrani if he had any questions, repeatedly addressing him as “Porn Stash,” but the trainee didn’t respond.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pensa...omplaint-over-porn-stash-ridicule-says-report

 

OTOH, if you are assigned to train guys from a different culture, who won't see you as the same sort of authority figure as the boys from Iowa and Harlem will, you might want to go more generic in your approach. A pox on both...

 

That's not an argument against making a start, though-- it is just an acknowledgement that one shouldn't expect to perfectly and immediately fix a problem 300 years in the making. There are many reasonable approaches to lowering the ceiling and the floor on the number of these events, approaches which do not really conflict with the intent of the Second, which would start to make a difference in a few years, if we just stop fretting about slippery slopes and start facing the rising tides.

Guns biodegrade; not as rapidly as sawdust, but they do. If we stop injecting huge numbers of them into the market, there will be fewer and fewer in attics as time passes; and the illicit ones will, over time, find their way into lakes and evidence lockers. One has to start somewhere. And while it will remain true that someone who really wants one can get one for awhile, people are presently getting killed by people who only sorta want one, or just happen to have one, or toddlers who find one in reach. If you cut down the numbers, you will cut down the deaths-- that you won't absolutely eliminate them is a poor argument to present to widows and orphans and slaughtered school children...

 

Not with payments.

This is some of the crazy things about police shootings, the cops face very little accountability, while cities end up paying up the ass on civilian lawsuits.

 

My husband plays poker a couple of nights a week at one of the local casinos, and over the weekend, one of the guys he knows from the poker room went hunting with a buddy. Buddy accidentally shot him in the head. He's lost an eye for sure, and been in the hospital in a medically induced coma since then. Yay guns!

 

To quote Larry Niven, "think of it as evolution in action." It ain't the guns, its the owners. We get guns and cars as toys at Christmas, and so we grow up to think guns and cars are toys, not lethal instruments.

I was trained about guns at a very early age, as were most of my childhood companions, and about the third most important thing in the training was "never go shooting with a companion you cannot trust to take it as seriously as you do." So I went rabbit hunting with Lance or target shooting with Danny; but when Paul wanted to go out, I always found something more important to do.

Like give the goldfish a bath...

(#1 is "never pick up a gun without checking to see if it is loaded-- even if you just checked 2 minutes ago. If it is, unload it unless you are about to use it. Unload it including the chamber. #2 is always know what is down past your target before you touch the trigger; and know it all the way to the limit of your gun's range...that cluster of houses may be a long ways away, but is it two miles away?)

But to be clear, that is not to say "Guns don't shoot people, people shoot people." Only people with guns shoot people-- one should approach too many people getting shot by addressing both variables. That we are failing badly on one of them doesn't really suggest that we should redouble our efforts on that one and pretend the other is just jim-dandy...

 

For my pals andI I it was Spilly Billy.

After an early hunt in NY I emptied my '03 30.06 dropping [or so I thought] a cartridge in the leaves. I searched but couldn't find it. I put the rifle on the back seat and returned home. My wife took the car with the twins shopping. I later retrieved the rifle and when I opened the bolt found the cartridge. I've often thought about "what if"!

My brother was a Navy M.D. attached to the "Marines". He was a part of a large Task Force doing a practice invasion of Okinawa in the late 50's. There was no live ammo for this exercise but he did treat 5 gunshot wounds!

 

At close enough range there doesn't even have to be much of a plug in a blank-- air pressure alone will make a puncture wound. But I gather you are talking shooters who didn't clear the chamber, just pulled the magazine?

 

I did mention that these were Marines.

 

Were the Buddy's initials D.C. by chance?