Mass shootings and gun violence are happening way too often

[GrumpyGran]

18 minutes ago, AmericanRose said:

The comments were... concerning.

I had to quit reading, it was nauseating. A bunch of men hurling insults at each other while they boast about how many more guns they bought. Also who's better for gun sales. I think that little microcosm of society proves that it isn't really a fear of anyone taking their guns or the government coming for them, it is just a flaw in their character that leads them to need reassurance of their power and ability to exhibit said power. They have the government that they wanted and yet they still need more guns.

I think you mistake a truck for a deer when you are stinking drunk and decide to go out and shoot off your gun. How many times do you think law enforcement hears "I thought it was a deer"?

[onekidanddone]

Gunman killed in Reno after firing shots from high-rise condo

Quote

A gunman was killed by police after he fired shots from an elevated position at a luxury apartment complex in downtown Reno, Nev., shortly before 7 p.m. Tuesday, police said. Barricaded in a room on the eighth floor of the high-rise building, the shooter sent bullets raining onto the street below.

No other casualties have been reported, except for a woman who was injured in the hand, the Sparks Police Department said in a news release. She did not need medical treatment.

Few details about the incident were available Tuesday night. Neither the identity of the shooter nor the intended target was known.

Tuesday’s shooting at the Montage complex came less than two months after Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured nearly 500 others in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Paddock, 64, fired at thousands of unsuspecting concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino before killing himself.

Paddock once owned a unit at the Montage, the Associated Press reported, adding that records showed he sold the property in December 2016.

After police arrived at the Reno apartment complex, the gunman continued to fire shots from inside the room. A woman was also inside the apartment, Sparks police said in its news release. The woman, whom police initially described as a hostage, was not injured in the shooting, the Reno Gazette-Journal reported.

Authorities negotiated with the shooter, Reno Police Department officer Tim Broadway told reporters in a news conference. At one point, police tweeted that the “suspect” had been “detained.”

Police officers and a SWAT team then “converged on the suspect’s room and an officer involved shooting occurred,” according to the Sparks Police news release. The shooter received medical aid on the scene and was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

Keeping with protocol for officer-involved shootings, the Sparks Police Department is leading the investigation. It appears that the gunman acted alone, police said.

Before the shooter was in custody, authorities shut down much of the downtown Reno area, advising residents of the Montage to shelter in place and urging casino goers to remain in safe locations. Police restricted access to pedestrians on both the north and south sides of the apartment complex, Broadway said. The FBI and a police SWAT team were both on the scene.

The Montage is a high-rise complex of luxury condominiums, located near some of the downtown area’s most popular casinos. It was originally a casino and resort before it was converted into an apartment complex, according to its website.

Trooper Chris Kelley with the Nevada Highway Patrol told the Gazette-Journal the gunfire lasted for about 20 minutes.

Reno Police Department Deputy Chief Tom Robinson said the shooter was a young adult, the Gazette-Journal reported. Robinson identified the man’s gun as a shoulder-fired rifle with 20 to 50 rounds of ammunition. The shooter fired bursts of five to eight shots at a time, the Gazette-Journal reported.

Dusty Wunderlich told The Washington Post he was two floors below the shooter in the Montage. Shortly after arriving home, Wunderlich heard about 20 shots fired within 10 minutes. The gunfire was “sporadic” for the next hour, he said. The weapon “sounded like a hunting rifle,” Wunderlich said.

“It was intense,” he added. “Once I realized what was happening I turned off all my lights, got on the police scanner, and hunkered down. I was armed, which gave me some peace of mind.”

Sigh. It just never ends. No mass killings, so i suppose Trump-n-company will have to roll out the canned "Thoughts and Prayers" for another time.

[Bethella]

Well, Jadlowski, the hunter who shot and killed his neighbor has been charged with 2nd degree manslaughter and faces up to 15 years.

Quote

A person commits second-degree manslaughter when he or she (a) recklessly causes the death of another person...

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/hunter-says-mistook-woman-deer-charged-manslaughter-021205140--abc-news-topstories.html

[GrumpyGran]

4 hours ago, Bethella said:

Well, Jadlowski, the hunter who shot and killed his neighbor has been charged with 2nd degree manslaughter and faces up to 15 years.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/hunter-says-mistook-woman-deer-charged-manslaughter-021205140--abc-news-topstories.html

He better get the max. There is no defense for his stupid actions. And I still wonder how this actually happened. It just seems impossible that it happened the way he says it did. Now if he were standing on the interstate overpass...

[Bethella]

Just now, GrumpyGran said:

He better get the max. There is no defense for his stupid actions. And I still wonder how this actually happened. It just seems impossible that it happened the way he says it did. Now if he were standing on the interstate overpass...

Based on the reported distances he could have been in a neighboring field, not his yard and the discrepancies are due to shoddy reporting.

[onekidanddone]

19 minutes ago, Bethella said:

Based on the reported distances he could have been in a neighboring field, not his yard and the discrepancies are due to shoddy reporting.

My husband grew up target shooting and hunting. First rule: Always know what is behind your target. 

[AmazonGrace]

I gather he would have been fine with shooting a car thief. 911 doesn't exist

[AmazonGrace]

And here's a pastor's son who apparently would have been happy to shoot a burglar but ended up shooting his cousin:

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/12/27/teen-shot-and-killed-at-wilmington-church/

[GrumpyGran]

7 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

And here's a pastor's son who apparently would have been happy to shoot a burglar but ended up shooting his cousin:

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2017/12/27/teen-shot-and-killed-at-wilmington-church/

Accident, my ass. This was irresponsible behavior and this kid should have to pay in some way for his stupidity. If we keep letting these people brush this kind of thing aside it will keep happening. What the hell is wrong with these idiots, call 911 and let the police handle it. You're seriously going to shoot someone because they broke into a church?

[bashfulpixie]

Calling 911 doesn't fulfill their fantasy of being some John Wayne/John McClane type hero.  Or in the case of some of them, a darker "I want to experience shooting/killing someone"

[candygirl200413]

Anytime I think about the whole "having a gun to be a hero" it reminds me of this old 20/20 episode:

Spoiler

 

 

[Ozlsn]

3 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Accident, my ass. This was irresponsible behavior and this kid should have to pay in some way for his stupidity. If we keep letting these people brush this kind of thing aside it will keep happening. What the hell is wrong with these idiots, call 911 and let the police handle it. You're seriously going to shoot someone because they broke into a church?

This guy and the father above should be facing manslaughter charges at the very least (or local equivalent). If they had grabbed the victim and stabbed them I can't see that it would be being ruled an 'accident' so why does using a gun get a free pass? If anything it should be held to a higher standard - you want the weapon, you have the responsibility to use it appropriately. Or, as @onekidanddone said, at least identify the target correctly first. 

 

2 hours ago, bashfulpixie said:

Calling 911 doesn't fulfill their fantasy of being some John Wayne/John McClane type hero.  Or in the case of some of them, a darker "I want to experience shooting/killing someone"

They could always join the army... of course it's a bit different when they shoot back at you. 

[AmazonGrace]

I file this sort of thing under, "Only in America" 

People are awful. 

[bashfulpixie]

That is horrifying!! That poor man. 

[GrumpyGran]

13 hours ago, bashfulpixie said:

That is horrifying!! That poor man. 

They found the guy responsible. I'm going to guess that it's not going to go well for him. The cops are pissed, not a great optic for them either so they are happy to vilify this guy to the max.

[Kailash]

Holy crap- this prank call happened way too close to home for me. I'm devastated for Andrew Finch's family, especially his 2 daughters. So unnecessary. I hope the guy who called is held responsible for his shitty, selfish, life changing actions.

 

[faraway]

Sure the guy is to blame but it seems like these cops are not trained well at all. You don't even know what's going on or who's in front of you so you just shoot?

[GreyhoundFan]

8 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

They found the guy responsible. I'm going to guess that it's not going to go well for him. The cops are pissed, not a great optic for them either so they are happy to vilify this guy to the max.

And he has a history of illegal behavior.

Spoiler

A professional “swatter” — someone who pranks armed police into raiding the homes of innocent people — has claimed responsibility for placing a fake 911 call that led an officer to kill a man in Wichita.

Police were lured to the home of Andrew Finch, 28, on Thursday evening by a caller who falsely claimed to be inside with hostages and a gun.

Knowing nothing of the report, Finch went to the door as officers surrounded his home and was fatally shot on his porch.

In tweets and interviews, a man known online as “Swautistic” said he had placed the 911 call — which in his view was a routine hoax gone badly wrong.

“Bomb threats are more fun and cooler than swats in my opinion and I should have just stuck to that,” Swautistic told reporter Brian Krebs on Friday. “But I began making $ doing some swat requests.”

Several hours later, Los Angeles police arrested a 25-year-old named Tyler Barriss in connection with Finch’s death. According to KABC, he had been arrested two years earlier for making hoax bomb threats to their TV station.

Police have not said whether Barriss and Swautistic are the same person, or said who called them to the house, or why. But local reports suggest that Finch — a father of two — may have been randomly caught up in a feud between two videogamers who obtained his address.

The two unnamed gamers got into an argument over a match of Call of Duty on Thursday, according to the Wichita Eagle. Screenshots of the spat show that one of them dared the other to swat him — and for some reason gave out Finch’s address.

Swatting usually makes the news when police are tricked into raiding the home of a celebrity — like Justin Bieber in 2012 or Lil Wayne in 2015. But it’s lately become a way for people to escalate online disputes into the real world — punishing a rival with a surprise visit from a SWAT team.

Swautistic, as his screen name suggests, billed himself as something of a specialist.

“According to him, he’s put his shingle out there as someone who can be hired to make these false reports,” said Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter who now investigates digital security issues. “It seems like he got some kind of pleasure from doing it.”

This may be how the aggrieved Call of Duty player came to enlist Swautistic’s services.

“I was minding my own business at the library,” a man claiming to be Swautistic told the YouTube channel DramaAlert. “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey dude, this f—ing r—-d just gave me his address and he thinks nothing is going to happen. You want to prove him wrong?’ I said, ‘Sure, I love swatting kids who think that nothing’s going to happen.’ ”

On Thursday evening, a man phoned Wichita City Hall and ended up speaking with a 911 dispatcher. He said he had accidentally shot his father in the head during an argument and was now pointing a handgun at his mother and brother.

He threatened to set the house on fire, and then asked the operator: “Do you have my address correct?”

Police said the man continued to call 911 — even after they’d arrived at the address.

About an hour after sunset, officers surrounded the two-story house on McCormick Street where Finch was at home with his mother and at least two other people — none of them hostages.

“I had seen the red and blue light flashing in my window,” Lisa Finch told the Eagle. “I heard my son scream, I got up and then I heard a shot … They didn’t call the ambulance until he was dead.”

Finch was one of nearly 1,000 people shot and killed by U.S. police in 2017, according to The Post’s running tally. Historically, few officers are charged and even fewer convicted.

Without naming him, police later said that a man emerged from the house and was repeatedly ordered to put his hands up. An officer thought he saw the man reach for a weapon, and opened fire.

But the man had no weapon, and police soon realized there were no victims in the house.

At a news conference, a deputy police chief said the officer who fired his gun had been placed on paid leave, and he blamed Finch’s death on “the actions of a prankster.”

Lisa Finch questioned how police could have been so easily duped. Her son didn’t even play video games, she told the Eagle. “He has better things to do with his time.”

As reporters crowded around Finch’s blood-spattered porch on Thursday, @SWAuTistic wrote to 18,000 Twitter followers:

“That kids house that I swatted is on the news.”

He wrote another message defending himself, according to the Eagle:

“I DIDNT GET ANYONE KILLED BECAUSE I DIDNT DISCHARGE A WEAPON AND BEING A SWAT MEMBER ISNT MY PROFESSION.”

Swautistic’s main account subsequently disappeared from Twitter — suspended — but by then, Krebs and others were digging through archives and screenshots of his posts.

“Those tweets indicate that Swautistic is a serial swatter,” Krebs wrote on his website. He had claimed responsibility not just for Wichita — but for false bomb hoaxes at the Federal Communications Commission, a convention center in Dallas and a high school in Panama City, Fla.

A man Krebs believes to be Swautistic contacted him on Twitter on Friday morning through an alternate Twitter account. “I didn’t believe him at first,” Krebs told The Post. “But he was able to prove he was the swatter.”

Krebs asked Swautistic if he felt bad about Finch’s death.

“Of course I do,” he replied. But he blamed the shooting on police and the Call of Duty player who had given him Finch’s address — “taunting me to swat.”

“People will eventually . . . tell me to turn myself in or something,” he wrote. “I can’t do that; though I know its morally right. I’m too scared admittedly.”

“All so stupid,” he wrote by way of reflection. “This whole thing.”

A few hours after Krebs interviewed Swautistic on Friday, Los Angeles police arrested Tyler R. Barriss. Wichita police confirmed that he is a suspect in the case, though spokesman Paul Cruz said he didn’t know how or if Barriss is connected to Swautistic or other online personas.

He has been arrested at least twice before, according to county records — once earlier this year for unknown reasons, and once in 2015, when he called a phony bomb threat in to the ABC affiliate in Glendale, the station reported.

Reporters had to broadcast the evening news while bomb-sniffing dogs traipsed through their building that day, KABC reported, and Barriss received a two-year sentence.

The FBI is now involved in the Wichita case, according to police.

What a psychopath.

[Kailash]

16 hours ago, faraway said:

Sure the guy is to blame but it seems like these cops are not trained well at all. You don't even know what's going on or who's in front of you so you just shoot?

From the local news stories it sounds like the police were telling  Andrew to put his hands in the air but he reached toward his waist instead. The officer thought he was drawing a weapon and shot him. We know now he was unarmed but going in the police thought they were dealing with a hostage situation. It's a tragic outcome. I don't know if the officer was wrong to shoot, given the information they had. 

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, Kailash said:

From the local news stories it sounds like the police were telling  Andrew to put his hands in the air but he reached toward his waist instead. The officer thought he was drawing a weapon and shot him. We know now he was unarmed but going in the police thought they were dealing with a hostage situation. It's a tragic outcome. I don't know if the officer was wrong to shoot, given the information they had. 

It just seems to me that there was plenty of opportunity for dialog here but no attempt was made to establish dialog or determine if the person, who by the police account was still on the phone, was the same person who appeared on the porch. Ask the caller's name, find out who's house it is, try to confirm that this is actually happening.

Honestly, if I saw police lights outside my house, I would go to the door and open and walk out on to the porch. If some suddenly yelled "Put your hands up!" I wouldn't necessarily assume they were talking to me. Especially since I haven't done anything wrong or called 911.

It would appear that touching your waistband is now a crime punishable by instant death.

[Kailash]

@GrumpyGran I don't believe the police thought there was plenty of time for dialog. The prankster said he had already shot someone. 

You can bet that after all the stories I've heard and read about, if an officer yells to put your hands up my hands will go up. 

I'm not saying the officer was right to shoot. I wasn't there. I can understand why he did if events unfolded as portrayed. 

[SilverBeach]

Would the victim here have just strolled outside after shooting someone? Don't the perpetrators of most of these kinds of incidents stay holed up for a while, or start shooting from the inside? Couldn't the team have looked in windows to get an idea of what was going on? What if the man was hearing impaired?

The blame for this poor man losing his life is squarely on the reprehensible "prankster". His actions resulted in the senseless loss of a person's life, and irreparable harm to his family. However, police can sometimes do a better job of ascertaining if deadly force is appropriate.

And why was the family hauled down to the police station like they were?

I hope the genius who made this call is made an example of. 

Full disclosure: I'm black, and live in a major metropolitan area where excessive police force, deadly and otherwise, is a major issue.

[fraurosena]

What I don't get is this. If there is an incident where a police officer believes the situation to be extremely dangerous, and they believe a perceived perpetrator may be reaching for a gun, I understand that they would want to prevent that person from doing (more) violence. But why is it always a 'kill shot'? Why can't they incapacitate the perceived perpetrator by shooting them in the leg, or arm or wherever, without it having to be deadly? Because in a hell of a lot of cases, it turns out that their perception was wrong, and the person shot was innocent. 

I think if they (meaning law enforcement) stop immediately shooting to kill, and start with a shoot to incapacitate, a lot of unnecessary deaths will be prevented. It won't mean that innocent people won't be shot, it won't even mean that they won't be killed (aiming your gun in a stressful situation is not that easy), but it will save many, many peoples' lives that are now lost because deadly force is the only go to action law enforcement uses.

[Melbelle]

On 12/31/2017 at 2:59 PM, fraurosena said:

What I don't get is this. If there is an incident where a police officer believes the situation to be extremely dangerous, and they believe a perceived perpetrator may be reaching for a gun, I understand that they would want to prevent that person from doing (more) violence. But why is it always a 'kill shot'? Why can't they incapacitate the perceived perpetrator by shooting them in the leg, or arm or wherever, without it having to be deadly? Because in a hell of a lot of cases, it turns out that their perception was wrong, and the person shot was innocent. 

I think if they (meaning law enforcement) stop immediately shooting to kill, and start with a shoot to incapacitate, a lot of unnecessary deaths will be prevented. It won't mean that innocent people won't be shot, it won't even mean that they won't be killed (aiming your gun in a stressful situation is not that easy), but it will save many, many peoples' lives that are now lost because deadly force is the only go to action law enforcement uses.

I think this is a gun sentiment that is well meaning, but logistically nearly impossible.  In this specific case it sounds like the victim had walked out onto their porch, meaning there was likely a door, perhaps still open, behind him, maybe a few windows as well, and the building material of the home may have been thin, lacking in much insulation, etc (it also could have been solid concrete, but how would an officer know?).  If an officer shot towards the legs there is a greater chance of missing because legs are smaller, pants can be deceptive, and legs can move more quickly and easily than moving your entire body.  This is why all law enforcement and military are trained to shoot at the chest/main body area.  Just imagine if a police officer shot at his legs only, but missed because the individual moved their legs, or the bullet went through their pants, or they just didn't have sufficient marksmanship to hit such a  small area under stress, and instead someone within the home was shot/killed.  I think your point about aiming a gun in a stressful situation really explains why they shoot at the largest part of a body, it gives them a wide area to aim at, it's the best chance to protect any innocent bystanders, and although it certainly can result in an immediate kill shot, much of that area can result in a shot that is very survivable. 

The police may very well have shot prematurely in this situation, I'm not at all disputing that possibility.  However, there is a very logical and realistic reason that police and military shoot at the main body cavity that should not be overlooked.  Hopefully this shooting is properly investigated and regardless of whether the shooting turns out to be justified or not, they learn from this tragedy and seek more ways to communicate and understand confusing and escalated situations before they resort to firing their guns.  

[onekidanddone]

Another shooting today. Hey Mitch, Paul and Dumpy.  Save your breath. Nobody wants to hear your hollow 'thoughts and prayers'. And SHS, I'm sure this is no time to talk about gun safety.